Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Changing Your Default Settings
     … For the sake of the meditation, the questions are: “Where are you focused? How is the focus going? Could it be stronger? Is it too strong? How is the breath? Is it a good place to stay? What adjustments would be useful to get it to be nicer? What’s the feeling tone you’re getting out of this? And how about your perceptions … 
  3. Categorical Truths
     … There are other topics you can choose, but the breath is the topic that’s most universally accessible, so we’ll focus on that for right now. You try to focus on the breath in a way that works—in other words, gets the mind into concentration, where you feel centered, clear, alert, and your different thinkings don’t lead you around by the … 
  4. Owning Your Actions
     … But we don’t want to focus on that. We want to focus on the power we have to change things now with our actions. This is why, of the ajaans’ Dhamma talks, I’d say eighty percent are basically pep talks. The people they were teaching in Thailand, especially back in the time of Ajaan Mun, were all children of peasants. They were … 
  5. The Power of Human Effort
     … You focus on one aspect of the breath and then you evaluate how things are going. Is the breath comfortable? Is it not? Is your focus solid, or is it not? Is it too light? Too heavy? Could you be focusing some place else? Could the breath be doing something else, going in a different direction? These are things you have some control over … 
  6. Appropriate Attention
     … For the Buddha, attention is a matter of which questions you focus on trying to answer. Here the questions you want to answer are: “What is suffering? Why is there suffering? What can I do to put an end to it?” Those questions are worth answering. As for other questions, the Buddha said, don’t worry. They’re not important. Most people believe, with … 
  7. Peace of Mind
     … When you’re meditating, you really want to focus on this issue: What kind of breathing feels good, what kind of breathing is soothing to a tired mind, a tired body, what kind of breathing is energizing when you need energy, what kind of breathing is healing when the mind and the body need to be healed? The breath energy has lots of facets … 
  8. Reclaiming the Breath
    We focus on the breath while we meditate as a way of reclaiming the breath for ourselves, because all too often it’s taken over by anger or fear, and the breath becomes our enemy. It’s uncomfortable when you’re angry. It’s uncomfortable when you’re afraid. Any unskillful quality coming up in the mind that moves into the body does so … 
  9. Expand Your Expectations
     … It’s very easy to focus on the breath for a while and then go off for a bit then come back for a while and then go off for a bit. There are these little bumps in the breath that tend to knock us off. See if you can ride right through the bumps. Some people, when they start watching the mind, realize … 
  10. A Path of Aggregates
     … It’s purely an internal matter through the way that you breathe and focus on the breath. Breathe in a way that feels refreshing: energizing if you need to be energized, relaxing if you need to be relaxed. Try to gain a sense of what kind of breathing is just right. That, of course, will deal with perception: how you perceive the flow of … 
  11. Big Desire, Detailed Focus
     … What that means is that we take these qualities of desire and discontent and a sense of lack, and we focus them in the right direction. Here it’s getting the mind to settle down. When you’re out in the world, it’s also a matter of getting yourself to stick with the precepts, trying to be as skillful as possible in how … 
  12. Hindrances to the Heightened Mind
     … One way is simply changing the topic, changing the focus. If you see that looking at a certain thing gives rise to lust or gives rise to anger, ask yourself: Do you really have to look at it? In a lot of cases, no, you went looking for it: something to aggravate the desire for anger, the desire for lust. That’s an important … 
  13. A Path Under the Trees
     … Can you sense any distinction between the way the body feels as you breathe in, and the way it feels as you breathe out? Wherever it’s clearest, focus your attention there. But try to keep this full body awareness going at the same time. So you focus simply on the breath right here, right now. Any thoughts of the world, you just let … 
  14. Equanimity & Karma
     … You have to learn, instead, to let the ease do its work, whereas you continue doing your work with the breath, i.e., you focus on the breath; stay steadily with the breath, and then let the ease do its soothing in the body. You focus on the causes; the effects will take care of themselves. In this way, you learn how not to … 
  15. Patience
     … So the focus should always be on the causes, and you should apply yourself to the causes with as much commitment and resolution as you can muster. Let go of your thoughts about how long you’ve been practicing, what the results used to be in the past. Focus on what you’re doing, totally on what you’re doing, right now.
  16. Between You and Your Eyes
     … So even though we are doing the meditation to gain results, you can’t keep your focus on the results down the line. You’ve got to keep the focus right here, right now. Each breath. How you’re shaping each breath right now: Be sensitive to that, so that each breath becomes your goal, in and of itself. And try to find the … 
  17. In the Present
     … That’s where you want to focus. And then two, you do your duty with regard to what’s coming up in the mind. So there’s something you actually do. And when the Buddha talks about being in the present, it’s always in the context of heedfulness: If you don’t do your duties now, you don’t know how much longer … 
  18. Patience
     … Don’t focus on the hardships, focus on the opportunity you’ve got to develop skillful qualities here, because that opportunity is not that widely available. So patience is not so much gritting your teeth and just bearing with difficult situations. It’s learning how not to pile difficulty on top of what’s there—either thinking about how long you’ve had to … 
  19. Determination
     … And when we focus on what we want, we don’t usually think about what the long-term consequences will be, so often the long term turns out bad. One of the ways of solving this problem is to learn how to develop the right kind of determination. In other words, focus your desires on the things that really are important. Learn to train … 
  20. Delight in Persistence
     … As Ajaan Lee liked to say, the goodness of the world isn’t true, and the truth of the world isn’t good—the point being that you need to focus your attention in another direction to find happiness. You need to focus on developing good qualities inside. We have potentials inside that can accomplish a lot, but we tend not to develop them … 
  21. Break Things Down
     … He says to focus on qualities—mental qualities. That’s where he says you’re going to find the solution to the problem of suffering. As he said, if skillful mental qualities couldn’t be developed, he wouldn’t have taught people to develop skillful qualities. And if developing skillful mental qualities led to suffering, he wouldn’t have taught them to do that … 
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