Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 29
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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.
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Intro to Breath Meditation
     … It’s because we’re not watching, we’re not attentive. This is one of the reasons why we want to settle down in the present moment, so that we can actually see what’s going on, see the subtle ways in which we’re causing unnecessary stress and suffering for ourselves and for the people around us, and to see that we don … 
  11. Cultivate a Limitless Heart
     … Paying attention to little things like this makes life a lot easier for everybody else around. Little things you can do for people, behind their backs, the nice things: Those really make the life at the monastery a lot more pleasant for everyone. Many of us think that the atmosphere is friendly when we sit around and chat a lot. But that doesn’t … 
  12. A Skillful Attitude
     … Wherever you sense the breath or the process of breathing, focus your attention there. And allow yourself to think of the concept of breathing in a wide way. It’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole energy flow in the body. And wherever in the body you sense the energy that brings the breath in, the … 
  13. Trading Up
     … If you get bored with the meditation, it’s a sign that you’re not really looking, and you’re not really asking the right questions—you’re not paying attention. If you pay attention, you begin to realize that even though the goal may not seem very nearby, there’s a lot to learn about your body, a lot to learn about your … 
  14. Take an Interest
     … For the most part, we just throw it away, don’t pay it any attention, and look for other medicine outside. But the way you breathe has a huge impact on the body and a huge impact on the mind. So it’s good to explore it. Take some time to experiment. What does short breathing do to the body? What about longer breathing … 
  15. Willing & Observing
     … One is simply the truth of how things work, which is true regardless of whether you watch them or not, whether you pay attention or not, whether you understand them or not. This is the way things work. When the Buddha said he discovered the Dhamma, this is the kind of Dhamma he discovered: the Dhamma of how things work. But he didn’t … 
  16. Skill
     … It’s called appropriate attention. The Buddha once said that he didn’t see any other factor in the mind that was more important for awakening than this factor of appropriate attention, looking at things in terms of skill and lack of skill, cause and effect, starting with something very simple like the breath. As you get more acquainted with the breath, you begin … 
  17. Fabricating Around Pain
     … And, for the time being, you don’t want to give them your attention. You want to give your attention to the breath. You’re trying to establish a good, solid foundation for observing events in the body, events in the mind, and particularly events in the mind. All too often we have a tendency to think that we’re simply on the receiving … 
  18. Disenchantment
     … There are all these attitudes, these intentions, ways of paying attention, and all the different forms of fabrication: These already color the way you’re going to approach sensory contact. And these are the factors that make all the difference between whether it’s going to cause stress and suffering or whether it’s not. So normally we bring this huge parcel of attitudes … 
  19. Pulling Out of the Narratives
     … This is how we solve problems in general, through the quality of attention: what you attend to, what you don’t. We have to watch out for patterns of attending to things that are not really helpful, such as the narratives we bring, the world views we bring, to the meditation. Sometimes these things can really get in the way. This concerns not only … 
  20. Exercising the Mind
     … And if you haven’t been trained, you’ll notice that you jump.” There’s a moment of attention and then there’s a jump and then there’s another moment and then another jump. The problem is that, in those jumps, we’re not really carefully observant of what’s happening. It’s the same with the breath. You watch the breath for … 
  21. Strength of Concentration
     … At the very least, this realization helps take your attention away from the object of the lust and turns around to the lust itself. Because you’ll find many times that the allure of lust is not so much in the object. It’s in the narratives you build around it. So if you can analyze the object until you can put it aside … 
  22. Load next page...