Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Urgency & Contentment
     … When you’re focused on the breath, thinking about the breath, and evaluating the breath, the thinking and evaluation are called verbal fabrication. The breath itself is bodily fabrication. The perceptions and feelings that you develop working with the breath: Those are mental fabrications. Everything you need to understand for the sake of awakening is right here. So think about this in a way … 
  3. Rooted in Desire
     … That’s what the questions focusing on stress do, because otherwise you just go flowing through the various causal links in the chain without paying much attention to what you’re doing. It’s become so natural that you don’t see the extent to which you’re fabricating things. Only when you ask questions do you begin to notice, “Oh, there was something … 
  4. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … When it goes up a bit, ask yourself, “What did I do just now? What perception did I hold on to? What feeling was I focusing on? How was I focusing?” If the mind can’t settle down, you tell yourself, “How can I be patient with this, so that my irritation about the disturbances in my mind doesn’t add more disturbance?” In … 
  5. Determined on Goodwill
     … There’s the determination that focuses mainly on a particular goal you want to attain, and there are those that are focused on the practices that lead you there, trying to become more consistent in those practices, to put more energy into them. They’re connected, of course. You might decide in the course of the coming year that you want to attain a … 
  6. A Well-thatched Roof
     … When it’s well gathered, then you can think of the good energy you have where you’re focused and spread it through the pain. If the pain is in the knee, think of it going down the leg, through the knee, and out the foot. If it’s in the head, think of it coming up to the neck and going out through … 
  7. The Desire to End All Desires
     … And so your desire should be focused on the persistence—in other words, focused on doing things. All too often, one of the reasons we don’t get where we want in the meditation is because we focus our thoughts too much on where we want to go, and not on what we have to do to get there. We sit here thinking about … 
  8. The Mind Comes First
     … It can be focused right here at the present moment, and very quickly get focused years away, miles away. It all has to do with what you’re talking to yourself about. A sensation comes in the body, and something in the mind says, “Oh, this is a thought about x.” And then it runs with it. Well, change what you say. Just say … 
  9. Breathing through Daily Life
     … The practice as a whole is a way of cutting down on the jobs, and the meditation gives you a place to stand and do your more focused work. So instead of making the breath a job, you make it the place where the mind stands. It’s good to get practice in this. This is why you need to have time away from … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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