Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. Concentration
     … Don’t let them get in the way of your focusing on the breath, watching the breath as it comes in, as it goes out, being intent to stay right here with the breath. The talk is here to encourage you. It’s not meant to distract you. Of course, to stay right here you need motivation. You have to understand that this is … 
  4. Your One Responsibility
     … You get an idea of how you have to keep your attention focused right here if you want to see what you’re doing, and catch what you’re doing in time. Mindfulness helps, in that it helps you remember what’s going to lead to suffering and what’s not. Alertness is what keeps you right here in the present moment: the direct … 
  5. Befriending the Breath
    To stay focused on the breath, you have to regard it as your friend and look at meditation as a way of developing a friendship. It’s going to take some time, and you have to be observant to see what your friend likes, to show your friend that you can be trustworthy—because sometimes the body reacts negatively to all the attention you … 
  6. The Buddha’s Qualities
     … The three ones he focused on are being ardent, resolute, and heedful. Ardent means really giving yourself to what you’re doing. In other words, right now you’re with the breath. You’re not holding anything back. Don’t let your memories of past meditations come in and clutter up the mind in any unnecessary way. Sometimes those memories do give pointers. You … 
  7. Potentials
     … And keep an eye out for the mind when it starts focusing on unskillful intentions. The Buddha calls these areas of exploration. If we think in terms of karma, your past karma is serving up a buffet of potential dishes that you could choose from. And you can explore, “What does this dish taste like? What does that dish taste like?” You begin to … 
  8. The Prison Break
     … If you couldn’t do this, there’d be no point in focusing on the present moment in the meditation. We focus here because this is where the action is. And we remind ourselves that we’re doing this because we do want to get out. This is the preliminary groundwork. So, we’ve got some instructions from the Buddha, but there are also … 
  9. The Return of Chickens from Hell
     … Because we’re focused so much on anticipating the food we want, we’re not paying very careful attention as to what the raw material is and sometimes we’re not paying careful attention to how we fashion things. So the food we end up with can make us sick. And on top of that, as I’ve said before, these chickens are the … 
  10. The Brightness of Life
     … He doesn’t spend a lot of time focusing on issues that are beside the point. His very first sermon went straight to the point: “This is going to all be about suffering and the end of suffering.” His first noble truth, which is often misrepresented as, “Life is suffering,” actually says simply, “There is suffering” and identifies what it is: the act of … 
  11. Single-minded
     … As long as you stay focused on the post and hold on tight, you don’t get dizzy, you don’t lose your balance. In the same way, when you’re focused on the breath, you’ve simply got two activities centered on one object. And the activities are an essential part of getting the mind to even deeper states of oneness, more solid … 
  12. The Power of Intention
     … All the qualities that are to be brought to bear on getting the mind into concentration—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—are focused on your actions, your intentional actions. Mindfulness keeps things in mind so that you can recognize when something comes up: Is this something to be developed or something to be abandoned? Alertness watches what’s actually coming up—again not just what’s … 
  13. Blessings
     … He found it by beginning with right concentration, getting the mind still, getting it focused on one thing. You begin by talking to yourself about what would be a good topic to focus on. He recommended the breath. That was the topic on which he was focused the night of his awakening. When he taught meditation, this was the topic he taught more than … 
  14. Good at Thinking
     … In other words, you really are focused on what you’re doing. All your thinking relates to the breath, and then you evaluate with more and more skill what really feels best right now—not only in terms of the breath, but also in terms of the pressure of your focus. Ssometimes you can bear down too heavily on the breath, so that everything … 
  15. The Right Touch
     … When you’re focused on stopping the cause, that’s how you give rise to the cessation of suffering. That’s the positive part. That’s the brightness. But the brightness isn’t only in the third noble truth; it’s also in the fourth, that the way to put an end to suffering involves nothing but good activities. We chant that again and … 
  16. Samsara
     … In other words, when the mind gets focused in on the body like this, it wakes up the nerves of the body. As you’re aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, allowing all the sense of tension to relax, the energy starts flowing. Ajaan Lee compares it to putting an electric current through a wire, through the wires … 
  17. A Good Place to Stay
     … Are you ready to settle down? Try focusing on the breath for a while as it comes in and goes out, and see if you find it easy to stay here. If there’s some discomfort in the body, there are two ways you can treat it. One is to think of the breath energy going through that part of the body and loosening … 
  18. Four Bases of Success
     … It’s simply a matter of, one, focusing the desire properly on the right goal; and then two, after you’ve chosen the goal, focusing on the path that leads there. If you spend all your time thinking about the goal, you’re never going to get there. You need to have a desire to follow the path: developing right view, right resolve, all … 
  19. Only One Person
     … Alertness focuses not just on anything coming up in the present moment. It focuses on your actions and the results you’re getting from your actions. And then ardency is what wants to get good results out of your actions, which means that if you’re doing something that’s not getting good results, you turn around and look very carefully at what you … 
  20. Inner Refuge Through Inner Strength
     … You stay consistently focused with the breath. To define concentration, the Buddha uses the word ekaggata, which can be translated as being one-pointed, but also can mean having one gathering place. In other places, he describes concentration as whole body awareness, so it’s more likely that in this case it means that everything in the mind is gathered around one topic—the … 
  21. Metta Meditation
     … One of the things that you have to watch out for is the mind’s tendency to tense up the spot where it’s focused. So find a spot that feels good and think about keeping it relaxed, keeping it relaxed, keeping it relaxed as you keep tabs on it. If you slip off, be good-natured about coming back. As with any skill … 
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