Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Mindfulness of Death
     … You engage in skillful mental fabrication, i.e., you choose the right feelings to focus on, to whatever extent you can create a sense of well-being. If not in the body, try to create it in the mind. Focus there. Whatever perceptions are going to be helpful, you focus there. Keep in mind the perception that you’re making some important choices, so … 
  3. Potentials for Refuge
     … The number-one principle of developing the potentials of the breath is that you focus on the comfortable breath. That refers both to the rhythm of the breath and to the parts of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe. Do your best not to focus directly on the pains, directly on the patterns of tension. Focus around them … 
  4. Focus on One Thing
     … Choose one thing to focus on: the breath. Keep your attention at one spot, and watch the breath as it’s coming in, as it’s going out. The one spot can be anywhere: your nose, the throat, the chest, anyplace where you have a sense, a clear sensation that tells you, “Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out … 
  5. What to Tolerate, What Not
     … Again, this is why we focus on the breath, this bodily fabrication. You can play a role in shaping how you experience your body. You can focus on the pains and magnify them and just sit in misery here for the hour. Or you can focus on the areas in the body where there’s pleasure, a sense of ease, a sense of well … 
  6. No Resistance
    Sometimes it seems that when you try to focus on the breath, the distracting sounds around you, other distracting things around you, impinge even more on the mind. But that’s simply because when you’re with the breath, there are not a lot of complications. When you’re thinking a complex thought, you have to block things out. The mind is very good … 
  7. Eight Principles
     … Just focus on them very gently and develop a sense of just how much pressure of your focus is appropriate, and how much is too much. As you get sensitive to this issue, your focus can become a healing focus—mindfulness combined with breath—that dissolves the tension away. It’s in this way that being crazy about the meditation is a good way … 
  8. The Six Properties
     … Really keep your focus right there, and think “water, water” or “cool, cool.” You’ll find that other cool sensations in the body will appear to your awareness. The potential for them was waiting, simply that they needed the element of present intention to highlight them. When you’re feeling cold, focus in on warmth. There will be some part of the body that … 
  9. The Joy of Monotasking
     … So what are the tasks you’re engaged in? From the very simple things like cleaning the place up to the practice of meditation, focus on what you’re doing. Focus on doing it well, because these activities have a purpose, and one of the purposes is to cultivate a sense of joy that’s conducive to getting the mind to settle down. We … 
  10. Focus on Your Skill
     … That was the focus he brought into the present moment. Here again, he said that, in the present moment, questions of, “Do I exist? Do I not exist? Do I have a self? Do I not have a self?”: Those get in the way. Instead, you focus simply on what’s happening: what you’re doing, what your intentions are, the various steps by … 
  11. Wise Endurance
     … Try to focus on the areas where there’s a potential for well-being, where there’s a potential for strength. Don’t focus on the things that make you weak. Don’t keep telling yourself that you can’t stand something, because you’re not totally on the receiving end of things. That’s the other lesson of kamma: Some of the things … 
  12. The Six Properties
     … You realize, as you feel the space around the body, that you could focus on the body, but here you’re going to totally ignore any perceptions or sensations of the body. You’re going to focus on whatever feels like space. When you do that, things begin to connect up. It’s as if space permeates the body. I would hold in mind … 
  13. Friends with The Breath
     … So wherever the breathing is most obvious, focus your attention there. As I said last night, when you think of focus, think of a soft focus, one that doesn’t put too much pressure on the breath. Then notice how it feels. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you’re free to change. Try shorter breathing, more shallow, heavier, lighter … 
  14. The Importance of Being Focused
    As you focus on the breath, it often helps to keep reminding yourself of how important the breath is, and why it’s important to be able to train the mind to stay with one thing. The breath is important, because after all it is the force of life. It’s what keeps the mind and the body together. And the quality of the … 
  15. Ekaggata
     … You focus your thoughts on something, and then you observe it, you evaluate it. This is how alertness moves inside the mind. When you think of the breath in a particular way, when you focus on it in a particular way, what happens? Look carefully at this. The more time you spend looking at this, the more you begin to realize that some aspects … 
  16. Meditation as a Skill
     … Try to have that kind of focus. That doesn’t mean though that the focus is one-pointed. You will have one point that’s more prominent than the others, but you want to have a sense of openness in the body. If you make your focus too one-pointed, it gets oppressive to the breath. So you want to think of openness as … 
  17. The Web of Pain
     … And focus on the comfortable sensations related to the breath. These can be anywhere in the body at all. When you emphasize the comfort like this, you find it easier to stay in the present moment. This is to combat a tendency the mind has, which is to focus on the pains. You may have noticed that sitting here meditating for an hour, a … 
  18. Engaging the Whole Mind
     … One is where you’re going to focus your attention, and here we focus on the breath. When the breath comes in, know that it’s coming in. When it goes out, know it’s going out. Focus wherever you have a sense of the process of breathing. It may not necessarily be the movement of air coming in and out of the nose … 
  19. Cheerfully Ardent
     … Its duty is to grow; your duty is to create the causes—so that’s where you want to focus your desire. In the same way, we want peace of mind, but peace of mind doesn’t happen just by doing peace of mind. We have to create the causes, and focus our desires on the causes. Now, whether peace of mind comes quickly … 
  20. Right Resolve
     … It’s not just that you focus on your mind, but you focus in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease, a sense of rapture. In this way you satisfy your immediate need for pleasure at the same time that you’re developing clarity in the mind. When our pleasure depends on harming other beings, we tend to have big blind … 
  21. Cut Through the Narratives
     … The Buddha wants you to focus on what you can do with these things so that you can develop skillful qualities of mind and abandon unskillful ones. Some pleasures, he said, are actually good for you; other pleasures are not. You want to notice that when you focus on this issue. As when your meditation is going well: You can focus on the fact … 
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