Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Choiceful Awareness… For instance, right now you could be staying with the breath or you could be focusing on something else. You could be breathing in one way or you could be breathing in another. You could be perceiving the breath simply as the air coming in and out of the nose or you could be perceiving it as a kind of energy. You could perceive …
- Little Decisions… Even if you just add five minutes to your meditation, or if you’re just a little more strict with yourself about getting engaged in conversations when you could be focusing more on your practice: It’s those little decisions that add up, because you’re creating habits in the mind. They’re part of an ongoing discussion inside about how serious you are …
- Suffering Starts Before Life… The Buddha’s teaching us all the time to be focused on our actions and discourages people from speculating about the world. Some people say that the idea of a Buddhist cosmology is thus a contradiction in terms: We shouldn’t be speculating about where we could be reborn or what kinds of levels of rebirth there might be. Just focus on what we …
- The Treasure of Equanimity… Einstein once theorized about why most advances in theories of physics are made by young physicists and not by old ones, and his conclusion was the old physicists see many possibilities and many issues all at once that are interesting and might lead to new insights, so that they can’t follow any one thing, whereas the younger physicists have an easier time focusing …
- Mindfulness & Effort… You’re intending to be mindful, alert, trying to get the mind focused, develop concentration. These are all good things for the mind. They’re nourishment. It feels really good. All the Buddha’s teachings are focused on this issue of intention. When you give something and you know that it was a good gift—it was given with pure motives and the person …
- How to Listen to the Dhamma… You’d sit there, focused on your breath, focused on your meditation. At some point he’d get to where you were in your path, and then he’d move on. That was what you were listening for: the part where he was talking about what’s going on in your mind right now. The rest you could leave for others. But while you …
- Appropriate Attention… His observation of inconstancy fits into a framework that’s focused primarily on actions. Which things, when you do them, will lead to very short-term results, and which things will lead to long-term results? That’s where the question of inconstancy comes in. When we’re sitting and meditating, we focus more of our attention on the four noble truths, which means …
- Respect… Then, when things have been cleared out, choose any one spot in the body where it feels natural to stay focused. It might be in the middle of the head, the chest, the abdomen. Focus your attention there and let it stay there for a while. See what kind of breathing feels good there. It could be long breathing, short breathing, fast or slow …
- Respect Opens Possibilities… One is, being single-minded as you listen, really focusing all your attention on the Dhamma. The word he uses for single-minded is ekagga. It’s sometimes translated as “one-pointed.” In fact, some people, when they talk about concentration—which is defined as cittass’ekaggata, which they translated as “one-pointed-ness of mind”—they say you have to get so one …
- Best Friends… The things it focuses on, the things it’s feeding on, are unpleasant. So you give it better food and you train the voices in your mind to be voices of genuine friends, so that this internal dialogue becomes something that’s really beneficial. Once it’s beneficial and delivered you to stillness, then you can let it go. Often we come to the …
- Getting the Most Out of Now… So even though we’re focusing on the present moment, we do have an eye to the future. We’re not here just to chill out for a while. We’re here to understand our minds, and in particular why they keep creating suffering even though we don’t want suffering. Where is the ignorance that forces us to do that? The Buddha said …
- A Gentle Touch… As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. If you’re putting pressure on the breath, it’s usually …
- Dissolving Distress… You remain focused on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That covers two activities. Keeping focused on, say, the breath, in and of itself: That’s the first activity. Putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world: That’s the second. And then you apply three qualities to …
- Honesty & Integrity… You learn what kinds of objects the mind can stay focused on and stay alert, and what kinds of objects are not conducive in that way. Sometimes you stay with one point in the body, and that point begins to disappear as the breath gets more and more refined. You suddenly find yourself with nothing to focus on. The mind goes into kind of …
- A Rare Gift… The talk simply nudged them here and nudged them there, but it was the fact that they were focused inside that enabled the talk to make a difference. So stay right here with the breath and let the talk fade into the background. If there’s something that’s really important, it’ll stand out on its own. After all, when you think about …
- Deep Understanding… You get focused on one thing and you just run with it. I noticed when I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, sometimes I’d come across something that seemed like the answer to everything, and I was just going to run with that and nothing else. And yet he’d always find jobs for me to do when I got in that state: cleaning …
- Humility… One of his reasons for focusing on this teaching was something that we tend to miss when we look at the forest tradition from an American perspective. From our perspective it’s a very Thai tradition. But Ajaan Mun got a lot of flack in his day for going against Thai customs, Laotian customs — following the dhutanga practices, eating only one meal a day …
- Caught in a Thorn Bush… learning how to disperse any tension or tightness in the spot where we’re focused. You get used to the fact that when you focus on something, it disperses. And you can use that ability to help you endure a lot of things that you couldn’t endure otherwise. As for active patience on the path: This is when you learn how to talk …
- The Basic Medicine… Keep focused on the breath. Remember: The sense of ease and comfort is a product of your focus on the breath. If you lose your focus and start focusing on the wrong things, then once the cause is gone, the result is going to have to start fading away as well. You’re left with nothing. It’s like building up scaffolding and seeing …
- Building a Home for the Mind… Right concentration is not focused on jhana; it’s focused on an object like the breath. The quality of jhana itself comes from being really settled and doing your proper concentration work, so that you can settle in even more. Because you want this quality of awareness that allows you to be steady and to watch other things that are very subtle. This connection …
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