Search results for: "Focusing"
- Page 24
- 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 …
- Body & Mind from Within… He focused not on interdependence outside—our relationships with one another, our relationships with the world—but on the relationship of events inside our experience. He said that dependent co-arising was based on a principle of causality that he called idappaccayatā, which we translate as this/that conditionality. More literally, it’d be just “this conditionality,” the conditionality of things that you can …
- 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 …
- How to Leave Meditation… What was the breath like? Where was the mind focused? What had you done leading up to that point where the mind began to settle down? In other words, look for what worked, and then make a mental note to try the same steps again the next time. As you’re meditating, if you have a sense of where you want to go, you …
- Relate Everything to the Breath… This also means learning how to focus on it in a way that feels good while you’re focused. If your focus is too intense, that constricts the blood in that area, and you create another spot of tension, which you don’t want. So think of the blood flowing fully to that area as you’re focused on it—all the way through …
- Past & Future in the Present… And your attention, the quality of focusing on the present: That’s important as well. You want to be really sensitive to how the breathing feels. So you put those two together. If you notice that the breath isn’t feeling good, you realize that in a short time you’re going to be wandering off someplace. So try to make it feel as …
- The Triple Training… That’s where you have to keep your attention focused. At the same time, in addition to being not grasped at, your virtues should be conducive to concentration. In other words, you don’t get yourself tied up in knots around the minutia of the virtue, even as you stick with the little details. As Ajaan Mun once told Ajaan Fuang, very few people …
- Right View: Feeding Instructions… That may sound selfish, focusing on your own suffering, but look at the people in the world. The fact that we’re making one another suffer so much is because we start by making ourselves suffer, and we don’t understand what we’re doing. If we knew how to take care of our own suffering, we wouldn’t be a burden on others …
- Training Your Moods… So when a mood begins to take over the mind, begins to take charge of things inside, ask yourself, “Who are you? What are you made of?” Can you go back and create a different mood by breathing in a different way, talking to yourself in a different way, focusing on different perceptions, focusing on different feelings, the sense of well-being that comes …
- To See What You’re Doing… what the breath was like, where you were focused. That makes it easier to create those conditions again the next time you meditate, so that you can get quicker and quicker at settling down, noticing where in the body is your spot. When the mind does settle down, where are you focused? Even though we talk about developing a full-body awareness here thinking …
- The Power of Present Karma… I knew a woman one time who said that no matter where she focused in her body to be aware of the breath, it seemed like she would mess up the breath energy, except for one spot, which was the base of the spine. So find a spot that’s still—there’s the potential there—and then bring what the Buddha calls appropriate …
- Listening to the Practice… The thinking here is designed to keep your attention focused, to keep reminding yourself that this is where you want to be, right with the sensation of the breathing. That’s the function of mindfulness or sati. The awareness can also be translated as being self-aware, being alert— that’s called sampajañña. It actually involves two things: One is noticing how the breath …
- Shelter… If you’re focusing in one way, try focusing in another. If you’re looking at one level of the breath, maybe it’s a good idea to look at another one. For all the talk we have about the breath energy in the body, I am always mystified by people who just stay with the in-and-out breath, and try to make …
- A Cure for the Sluggish Mind… What topics are you choosing? Where do you focus your thinking? What have you been focusing it on? If the object of your directed thinking pulls you down, focus it someplace else. There are many levels of truth going on right now, and part of the mind will say, “What I’m focusing on is the real truth out there.” Well, there is the …
- Load next page...
