Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Strength of Discernment… I was talking with someone this morning who was concerned that she was too focused on her work. She has a job where she actually can continue working, and she wasn’t thinking too much about all the people out there in the world who are suffering from the quarantine right now, so she wondered if she was in denial. So I asked her …
- Giving Weight… You try to be very clear about where your awareness is focused. You make that focal point the really important issue. Normally, you focus on one thing but then something pulls you away, and you run after it. Your mind becomes a slave, like a dog running after whatever captures its attention. It’s under the power of all the things around you. As …
- Karma-ism… What does it mean for things to be *going on? *How do things *go on? *And in particular, what are we contributing to the going on of things? This is why meditation focuses on the mind. Not just to get the mind into pleasant states: You attain the pleasant states so that you can understand, “Exactly what is the mind doing? How does it …
- The World Does Not Endure… One is to keep focused on what he calls the body in and of itself: the body as you have it right here, and not the body in the world. You’re not concerned with how it looks. You’re not concerned with how strong it is, how young it is. You’re concerned just with, “What is it like having a body right …
- The Forerunner of All Things… This is why we’re focused on the breath, because the breath is right near the mind. I’ve heard sometimes people say “What are you going to do when you die? You’ve been focusing on your breath all your whole life, but the breath is going to leave you.” The reason we focus on the breath is not to get the breath …
- Rhythms of the Mind… keep focused on the body in and of itself—in this case, the breath—ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Just do that again and again and again. And focus on two things. One, try to be as sensitive as you can to what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. And two, try to …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… In breath meditation, you’re focusing on the breath element, which is one of those elements. So what’s going on here? If it’s not your self, then why focus on it?” You’re focusing on it because simply being told that it’s not your self is not enough to make you get rid of your attachments to it. You’ve got …
- Evaluation… That’s when you have real singleness of preoccupation, where the one thing you’re focused on fills your awareness. And your awareness is broad. All the analogies the Buddha gives for right concentration have to do with full-body awareness: the bathman kneading water into his entire lump of bath dough; the spring filling the all waters of the lake with cool water …
- Nuclear Thinking… Get used to having this enlarged frame, for otherwise, if your mind is totally one-pointed, focused on being aware of only one little point of the body, it gets easily knocked over. One thought can come in and totally overwhelm that one little point without much effort at all. You suddenly find yourself with your concentration destroyed, and your mind splashing all over …
- Respect Your Center… the place in the body where the breath feels good, and the mind feels at home when it’s focused there. You want to know that spot and learn how to work with it, learn how to come back to it as quickly as you can if you’ve lost it. This will take some exploration, experimenting with different spots and noticing where your …
- The Big Picture… You realize that even though you’re going to be focusing on the present moment, it’s not just for the sake of the present moment. It’s also for the sake of the future. We hear so much about the wisdom of just being in the present, but the Buddha didn’t define wisdom or discernment that way. He said that wisdom or …
- Respect for Tranquility & Insight… We hear so much about putting what’s in the Pali Canon aside and just focusing on your practice. It also means putting what we’ve learned from the different ajaans aside as well and just focusing on what we’re doing right now. Have some basic concepts of what has to be done and then just do it. Then learn from what you …
- A Refuge in Mindfulness… like we’re practicing right now, focused on the body in and of itself—in other words, focused on the breath as you’re feeling it right now—the body in and of itself, as opposed to the body in the world. The body in the world is when you’re thinking about whether the body’s up to the work you have to …
- Disenchantment… You get more and more focused on the path. Once you get all of your desires for food focused in the path and then can see that it, too, is not really worthy of contentment, that’s when the mind will finally be really inclined toward the unfabricated, going against its old habits of wanting to feed here and feed there. But again, this …
- Antidotes for Clinging… That’s precisely the stress the Buddha is focusing on. That’s the important one to notice. Always try to be clear about this distinction. The real problem isn’t the aggregates, it’s the clinging. And the word clinging has a double meaning. It can also mean the act of feeding on something. Where we cling is where we look to feed for …
- Looking for Happiness Inside… You put it together by focusing on some feelings here or focusing on perceptions there or thinking about this, evaluating that, noticing this, noticing that. The things you notice, the things you pay attention to are going to shape your experience. What you try to do is to deconstruct these things so that you can see subtler and subtler layers of stillness inside, and …
- The Power of the Will… It has to be turned into the will of right effort, the chanda of right effort, the chanda of the bases for success, focused on the causes. The causes for samsara are inside, and the causes for getting out of samsara are inside as well. So we have to look in here to straighten things out. It’s not a matter of simply watching …
- Your Inner Ally… Then when the breath starts getting comfortable, what do you do then? We talked earlier this morning about delusion concentration, where things get comfortable and you leave the breath and start focusing on the sense of pleasure. You don’t want to destroy the sense of pleasure. You just stay with the breath. You know the pleasure is right there, but that’s not …
- To Begin the Day… So, stay focused on the breath. Think of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. You may want to build up to this section by section, and a good place to start is down around the navel. Locate that part of the body in your awareness. Watch it for a while as you breathe in and breathe out to see what …
- Abandoning & Developing… If you find that your sensual desire is being aggravated, you have to ask yourself, “What am I focusing on in the wrong way?” Usually you find that it’s something you really want. All you can think about is how much you want it and all of its good characteristics, without looking at the drawbacks of actually having whatever that is. You have …
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