Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. An Auspicious Day
     … It’s focused. It’s focused on your actions, focused on events as they’re happening in the mind, and seeing their results. And then you want to be ardent. In other words, you put your whole heart in doing your duties, as mindfulness reminds you, in the context of the different frameworks it provides. Take those lists of feelings in the Satipatthana Sutta … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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