Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Seclusion
     … Right now is some time for some quiet inside.” Even though there may be something to think about in terms of the breath, and you may have a lot to think about as you survey the feelings of the breath energy in the body, you’re still focused on one thing, and that’s much more restful than thinking about your responsibilities outside. And … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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