Search results for: "Focusing"
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- 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 …
- Friends Inside & Out… You’re not really focused on “What am I doing right now? What can I change? What’s the actual path that will lead to the results.” It’s like seeing a city on the horizon that you want to go to and focusing all your attention on that as you’re driving there. Of course, you’re going to run into people or …
- Specifics… If you find yourself, say, focusing on a particular part of somebody’s body, well, focus on the area around it inside the body. You begin to see that it’s not so much lust in general, it’s your habit of focusing on certain things and blocking other things out, then bring in other information to counteract it, bring in the real facts …
- All Your Old Baggage… noticing what you’re doing with the breath; how you’re focusing on it and which ways of focusing, which ways of conceiving of the breath, are helpful and which ones are not. And then just sticking with it. That’s really all you have to carry right now. All your other baggage you can put aside. If it really has useful things it …
- “My Way”… Keep your attention focused there more than outside. Our media nowadays tend to focus on everything outside. We almost live in the screens of our hand-held devices or our computers or whatever. And the important people seem to be the ones who are in the screens. But they’re not. The important person is the person holding the screen. What is this person …
- As They’ve Come to Be… You’ve got a sense of “you” right here, where you’re focused. The world in which you’re focused at the moment is the world of your awareness of the body. That particular becoming is going to be really useful for stepping out of other becomings. Because, you know, in the Buddha’s descriptions of establishing mindfulness there are two activities. One is …
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