Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Licking Yourself Clean
     … You also have to be intent, to pay very careful attention to what you’re doing, what the results are. Finally, you need to use your intelligence, which means using ingenuity and being discerning in what works, what doesn’t, and how you might try to improve on both. These four qualities are called the bases for success. They’re essential to any skill … 
  3. An Auspicious Day
     … We think of the breath as being the air coming in and out through the nose, but if you pay attention to how the body feels as it breathes, you begin to realize there’s a flow of energy, or many flows of energy, going through the body—as you breathe in, as you breathe out—and those are going to be where you … 
  4. Focus on Your Skill
     … He said, “If you think about the past, and ask, “What was I? Did I exist? Did I not exist? If I did exist, what was I? How was I?” those are questions of inappropriate attention. Similarly with questions of the future: “Will I exist? Will I not exist? What will I be?” A lot of people, reading this passage, have asked, “But wasn … 
  5. Metta
     … One of the problems with most people is that they neglect what they’re doing, pay no attention to what they’re doing, and pay a lot of attention to what other people are doing and want to straighten it out. But that doesn’t work. So these are some areas where you have to have some equanimity. That’s what brings some wisdom … 
  6. Faith as a Virtue
     … Anything influenced by those factors—your intentions, your perceptions, your acts of attention—can always be called into question. But he was somebody who stepped out of space and time entirely, gained knowledge that was not subject to those things. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to believe in that or not. So in some cases, our conviction in what … 
  7. Meditate Because You Have To
     … But it’s going to appear right at this point where you’re paying full attention to the path, where you’re putting together all the right causes, being mindful to stay with the breath, being alert to how the breath feels all the way in, all the way out, this breath and then this breath and then this breath. Each breath. Treat each … 
  8. Steps in Concentration
     … You pay attention to the breath; you look at the mind. Is the mind staying with the breath? Is it happy with the breath? If it’s not, turn around and look at the breath again. What can you do to make it better? This desire to make it better: That’s the ardency. That’s what turns ordinary mindfulness and ordinary alertness into … 
  9. Drowsiness
     … Sometimes drowsiness comes on because an important insight is about to come to the surface, and there’s a part of the mind that doesn’t want to deal with it, doesn’t want to see it, and it’ll divert your attention by making you drift off. So as signs of sleepiness or drowsiness come on, remember that you can’t always trust … 
  10. Look after Your Baby
     … In the beginning, it’ll require lots and lots of attention. We’d like to think that once we hook onto the breath, we can put everything on automatic pilot and just coast through the hour. But concentration, especially the kind that fosters discernment, doesn’t have automatic pilot. It requires alertness. It requires mindfulness. Just as when you drive, you have to be … 
  11. Selves with Skills
     … You really want to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. It is possible to follow the Buddha’s instructions without really paying careful attention, but you’re not going to learn much. The Buddha never said that you can gain awakening simply by following steps A, B, C, D. The path requires that you put in your own willingness to really observe … 
  12. Trust in Heedfulness
     … In other words, if your actions did not make a difference, then it wouldn’t matter how careful you were or how careless you were; how much you paid attention or how much you didn’t pay attention. Everything would just happen in accordance with some outside force. So your basic trust is your trust in the power of action; your trust that through … 
  13. Potentials for Awakening
     … to find where they are and then to apply what’s called “appropriate attention” to them—in other words, seeing them in terms of what you can do with them that’s skillful, what you can do with them that would not be skillful, and particularly, how you can use them to help put an end to suffering. The Buddha talks about the potentials … 
  14. How & Why We Meditate
     … Allow your attention to settle there and keep it there all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out, and even in the moments between the breaths. As you breathe in, notice if there’s any unnecessary tension in that part of the body. It may be that the breath is too long, so that as you get toward the … 
  15. Truthful & Observant
     … But pay attention. Because it’s through developing your own powers of observation that you see not only things outside, but things inside yourself.” Everything you need to know is already displaying itself all the time. Your greed is displaying itself. Your anger. Your delusion is displaying itself. You just don’t notice. You don’t see these things for what they are. There … 
  16. The Alternative of Concentration
     … You adjust it so that you don’t go off into the other extreme of getting so loosened up that you get really drowsy or your attention drifts. You want to be right here, watching the breath coming in, working with the rhythm of the breath, working with the texture of the breath, the whole quality of the breath energy. It’s useful when … 
  17. When This Is, That Is
     … So pay attention right here. If you pay attention to what you’re doing, the things you want to see will eventually appear right here, right at the spot where you’re aware of your intentions and their effects.
  18. Proactive Mindfulness
     … But if you pay careful attention, you’ll see it. Now, in the course of doing this you’ll find that some of what they call the breath channels in the body—where the energy flows in the body—get opened up. When the energy flow throughout the body gets opened up, then the need for heavy breathing gets reduced. This takes you to … 
  19. Focus on the Precepts
     … When you take a precept, you can break it only intentionally, so that’s where your attention has to be focused. What is your intention in acting? At the same time, you have to keep the precept in mind. You have to be alert to what you’re doing and fight off any desires that would break the precepts. That’s developing three important … 
  20. Think Your Way to Stillness
    Try to gather all your attention around the breath. Where do you feel it right now? If you’re going to talk to yourself, talk to yourself about the breath. It’s good training in how to think. We tend to think that meditation is a matter of not thinking at all. Many times we’re tired of hearing ourselves chattering away inside. But … 
  21. Weathering Karma Storms
     … If you’re able to sit here without too much of an invasion from past actions, you can give all your attention to what you’re doing right now—focusing on the breath, talking to yourself about the breath, holding in mind a perception of the breath that makes it easy for feelings of well-being to spread through the body. There are other … 
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