Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Reading Your Meditation
     … Give 99% of your attention to the topic of your meditation, and think of the talk as a fence. When your mind wanders off, it runs into the fence. The purpose of the fence is to remind you to go back, not to go further away from the breath, further away from buddho, or whatever your topic is. Don’t let the talk get … 
  3. The Pleasure of the Middle Way
     … We spend most of our time paying attention outside, and this area inside here gets squeezed out, left behind. Its potentials for giving us a sense of well-being don’t get developed. So here’s our chance to give it some time, give it some space. If you really pay attention here, if you’re consistent in your awareness of the breath, smooth … 
  4. Guarding Against Trouble
     … There are the effluents that are dealt with by seeing, and here the Buddha means seeing what questions are worthy of your attention and which ones are not. Questions like: Who am I? What was I in the past? What am I going to be in the future? What is my true self? Those he says are not worth your attention, because if you … 
  5. Mindfulness Immersed in the Breath
     … In that case, you don’t have to pay too much attention to it, just bring the mind back to the breath. But if there’s a particular theme or particular thought that keeps pulling you away, you have to teach yourself the drawbacks of going with that thought right now. It may be really important, something you’ve got to do in your … 
  6. Alternative Conceptions
     … As for name, you’ve got feelings, perceptions, contact, intention, and attention. Those are the raw materials for gaining insight. Reducing everything in your experience just to those terms helps you to see the connections, to see how you fabricate things in such a way that leads to suffering, or in such a way that doesn’t. That’s the basic value of all … 
  7. Animals in the Mind
     … When you do this, you’re giving the body your full attention. And when you give your full attention of the body, you provide a good solid foundation for the mind. It becomes your place. When you fully inhabit your body, nobody else can invade your space. And you have a good leash for the mind. There’s an image in the texts of … 
  8. On Not Being a Victim
     … When the Buddha describes dependent co-arising, well before he starts talking about sensory data, he talks about issues of attention and intention and perception. These factors influence the way you see and hear and experience things. And they can have an influence either for suffering or for the end of suffering. So one of the functions of the path is to learn how … 
  9. To Strengthen the Path
     … In other words, the worlds you experience come from your way of paying attention to things and the views you hold about things, and then the intentions and actions that are based on that. So the conviction and the discernment here are the views, the way you pay attention to things, the things you see as important and, in contrast, the things that you … 
  10. Dependable Friends
     … Actually, you’ve been spending your whole life with your breath, but most of the time you haven’t been paying it much attention. Bur for this hour, you want to give it your full attention, which means that, since you’re going to be spending so much time on it, you want to be on good terms with it. Notice how it feels … 
  11. Self-Reliance
     … You don’t have to pay any attention to their meaning, don’t have to get involved with them. Just give as much attention as you can to the breathing. This way, you’re giving less food to those thoughts. Sometimes even paying attention to the thoughts to the extent of wanting to blot them out: That feeds them. So here you’re starving … 
  12. Encouragement
     … So this reflection focuses your attention on your actions. Your actions are going to make the difference between whether you suffer or not. Then when the Buddha recommends that you extend the reflection out to all beings everywhere, he said that it gives rise to the path. In other words, you develop a sense of what’s called samvega, a strong sense of dismay … 
  13. Hypocrisy
     … It’s interesting to notice how much attention the Buddha gives to the little things. This is why we have the Vinaya for the monks—all the rules that, at first glance, seem really obsessive. But they point to an important issue: that if the mind is really well trained, if the mind really is in a solid state of well-being, that fact … 
  14. Centered in the Body
     … Will that first man allow his attention to be distracted by the beauty queen or by the crowd? The answer, of course, is No, because he knows he would die. We should try to practice our mindfulness of the body with the same attitude: If our mindfulness slips, our goodness will die. Whatever the situation, keep yourself in the body, be in touch with … 
  15. Concentration & Renunciation
     … As the Buddha said, it’s active attention to the breath, consistent attention to the breath, that allows the breath to become more smooth. And as the breath grows smoother, then the energy that comes from the in-and-out breathing that suffuses the body gets more and more refined. The more refined it is, the more it can penetrate. Ajaan Lee’s image … 
  16. Hunker Down
     … In fact, it’s best to focus 99.44% of your attention on the breath. Leave just a little bit for the talk. If something is relevant to your situation, relevant to your meditation, it’ll come right in, without your having to send your mind out to focus on the talk. As for anything that’s not relevant to your meditation, just let … 
  17. Responsible for Your Goodness
     … Of course, one of the big causes that keeps these things going is that you’re paying attention to them. You want to get involved in them. So you learn how not to pay attention to them. You starve them. Then all these distractions and other things that pull you away from centering in on the mind don’t have a foundation. They slip … 
  18. The Right Focal Length
     … But given the normal ups and down of human life—when you’re dealing with difficult people, where you’re dealing with limitations of having a body, and the fact that you’re a human being living in a human realm—you really have to focus your primary attention inside, to see what it is in the mind that keeps complaining. What is it … 
  19. Preparing to Meditate
     … So, watch out for the mind when it’s in that state, looking for something else to do, beginning to get a little bit bored with the breath, not paying so much attention anymore. If the breath gets boring, it’s because you’re not paying careful attention. At the very least you’re missing some of the subtleties of the breath. And at … 
  20. Admit Your Stupidity
     … Of course, the discernment there becomes the internal quality, what the Buddha calls appropriate attention. It’s a matter of asking the right questions, questions that help you understand where you’re creating unnecessary suffering and how you can put an end to that. That, for the Buddha, was the big issue in life, the big issue he wanted to address after his awakening … 
  21. The Art of Right Speech
     … So the question was, how was he going to deal with that? And his approach was, after the office volleyball game, before the heart-to-heart talk, he noticed he had everybody’s attention, and so he said, “I want to comment on what fine Christians you are in not giving me a hard time about my being a Buddhist.” There was no heart … 
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