Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Truth in Action… We’re here shaping our present moment by focusing on the breath. Simply the fact that we’re deciding to stay with the breath is shaping things right there. To shape them skillfully, though, you really have to notice what you’re doing. That’s what the alertness does: It keeps you honest, it keeps you from going into denial. You stay with this …
- Questions of Skill… You learn about craving and desire by focusing on skillful desires and putting aside unskillful desires. So you don’t have to look anywhere else. Sometimes we think that you get the mind still at the breath, and then you have to go out and do vipassanā someplace else. What is vipassanā? It’s insight: seeing things clearly; where they come from; where they …
- Wise Endurance… What this means in practical terms is that if you’re in a bad situation—say, at work or in the family—you can look at what you’re focusing on. Try to focus on the areas where there’s a potential for well-being, where there’s a potential for strength. Don’t focus on the things that make you weak. Don’t …
- Balanced Meditation… It focuses on certain details and blocks out all kinds of other things. If it were fair and would let in all the information, lust wouldn’t have a toehold. But it’s because we like the lust that we give it a toehold. What do you like about lust? Look at that. Exactly where is a lustful mind an attractive thing? When you …
- Working Hypotheses… It simply means you’re not focused on it. You stay focused on the breath, and you try to stay focused on a level of energy in the body that’s more refined. It’s like tuning a radio into a more peaceful station. The radio waves are always there for all the stations, it’s just a question of which ones you’re …
- Skills for Dying Well… Look what you’re doing as you’re focusing on the breath: You want to settle down—that’s the desire around which this becoming is going to form. And here you’ve got your sense of the body as you feel it from within—that’s the world you’re going to be focusing on. Then you’re the meditator in that world …
- At Ease with the Breath… What’s a skillful way of breathing, what’s a skillful way of thinking, what’s a skillful way of focusing on the breath? What ways of breathing, thinking, and focusing are not skillful? From the issues of skillfulness, you move on to the four noble truths: What causes suffering? What is a path to the end of suffering? You can explain this in …
- Endurance… Hold that image in mind and you’ll find that what you’re actually doing is focusing on one spot of your awareness that you can tolerate, where things are going well. This is why it’s so important when you meditate that you get a sense of ease, at least one spot in the body where you can stay at home, stay at …
- Preparing for Death… So as you’re focused here on the breath, the pleasure that comes when the breath flows well doesn’t count as a sensual pleasure. It’s a pleasure of form. It’s a higher level of pleasure. It doesn’t have all the drawbacks of sensuality. It has a few drawbacks: It is, after all, something fabricated. But it’s fabricated with skill …
- Nobility Through Inner Strength… You can apply them not only when you’re focusing on your breath, but also when you’re focusing on any task that needs to be done. These are the qualities that keep you strong in protecting your most important possession, which is that state of your mind. Even though there may be slips and falls as you try to stay on the breath …
- Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life… There’s a background awareness and then there’s the more focused intentional awareness. You want to bring the two of those together. The background awareness is already filling your body. Your intentional awareness has a tendency to feel like it’s in one spot. So when you tell yourself to focus on the breath, that intentional energy in one spot feels like it …
- Creativity & Play… For example, when you’re focusing on your breath, you want to learn how to play with your breath. To understand why, look at what you do when you’re playing. You’re trying out new things, you’re enjoying the fact that the mind can create something and can think of new ways of doing things. Look also at the different approaches to …
- Mindfulness… You’re relentless and mindful in being focused on putting out the fire, and nothing else. So all of these passages show that mindfulness is not just a broad, open, accepting, state of mind. It serves a particular purpose, and it can be narrowly focused: keeping in mind what you know about what’s skillful and what’s not, and reminding yourself that you …
- Play with the Breath… Here again, think of your focused awareness as focused on dissolving those lines away. Think of the breath going right through them. Deep into them. In other words, there’s a lot to play here, both with the breath and with your perceptions of the breath. And in playing, you get skilled. It’s like playing a musical instrument. Say you’ve got a …
- Analysis of Qualities… But before he focused on the present moment in his third knowledge, he went through the second knowledge, where he thought of all beings. He pictured the cosmos as a whole. He saw everybody passing away and then being reborn in line with their actions. It was because he saw the larger picture that he was able to see an important pattern that he …
- A Special Time… When you’re focused, when you’re paying attention, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breath feels. This way, you develop two other qualities that are important for concentration. The first is directed thought. You keep thinking about what you’re doing. You’re actively engaged. The other is evaluation: You judge how things are going. This is how …
- Centered… that you’re not focused on a spot outside of your center of who you think you are. The center’s supposed to be right inside where you think you are—like a lens whose focal point is zero, inside the lens itself. It’s a different kind of concentration. Just think of it as being centered. And the quality that the Buddha recommends …
- Right View & Right Resolve… We start with the breath, get the mind focused on the breath, and get used to being here. Notice what way of breathing feels really good. Notice where you feel the breathing in the body, and what kind of breathing the body needs right now: energizing if you’re tired, calming if you’re wired. As the mind gets more and more focused, then …
- Survival Tactics… The steps we have here – focusing on the breath, making it comfortable, spreading it throughout the body, allowing it to grow calm to the point where there’s a sense of ease and rapture – the beginning stages of breath meditation: these are useful not only on the cushion or your meditation seat, but also in daily life. In other words, by focusing on the …
- Compassion for People on Fire… In the Pali Canon, they often highlight the drawbacks of lay life by focusing on the people who have possibly the best position, the kings. Yet even they suffer. In the case of King Koravya, he was suffering from things that were inconstant, stressful, not-self. Inconstancy relates to aging. Stress, of course, relates to illness. Death relates to not-self, whatever you have …
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