Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Safety in Awareness
     … If things are too warm in the body, focus on water to cool you down. Too cool? Focus on fire to warm you up. If you’re feeling too lightheaded, think of earth. Feeling too heavy? Think of the breath. Or you can start thinking about space, because the whole purpose of getting these four elements into balance is that from there it’s … 
  3. A Happiness Based Inside
     … So even though there may be pains in the body, you can focus on the breath in such a way that the energy in the body can help either alleviate the pain or at least provide you an alternative place to focus your attention. Now, once you’ve learned how to master this kind of pleasure, it’s not automatic that you’ll suddenly … 
  4. At Home with the Breath
     … Thoughts of equanimity, when you realize there are certain things that are beyond your control and you accept that so you can focus on what you can change, what you can control: Thinking about that can often lift a lot of burdens off your mind. That’s one level of well-being. The next takes more work, which is to get the mind really … 
  5. Learning How to Talk to Yourself
     … That’s what the focus is—how to shape the present moment in a skillful way—to focus on the role that your present moment actions have in determining whether or not you’re going to suffer right now. So let’s come back to, “what are you doing right now?” You could focus on restrictions and problems you have that seem to be … 
  6. Strong Through Commitment
     … As for the source inside, where does it originate? You might focus on one spot. Say, you have a pain in the back. Don’t focus on the back. Focus on the front of your body. Then, see if the pain is actually caused by some weird breath movement in the front of the body—that happens, you know. The same with left and … 
  7. Skillfully Shaping Your Life
     … And as with any skill, it takes time and it takes your powers of observation, along with some ingenuity to figure out what kind of breathing feels best, what spot in the body is a good place to focus. Get to know how you conceive the breathing process. You have a mental picture of the breath that you carry in mind. When the Buddha … 
  8. Seven Facets of Discernment
     … What you do with your mind right now? What skills can you learn about how to keep your mind focused—how to keep it observant, where to focus it—so that when aging comes you don’t focus on the things that deplete your strength? So that when illness comes, you don’t focus on the things that make the mind upset. The same … 
  9. Meaning & Purpose
     … As he focuses our attention to meditate, he wants us to focus attention on that first kind of contact, our immediate sense of the body as we feel it, unmediated. The breath is the most obvious of the different elements, so focus there. It’s the element you can most easily control. You can make it longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow. So … 
  10. Perfections as Priorities
     … You’ve got to focus on what’s really worthwhile in life, which means resisting a lot of the currents in our culture, because our culture seems to be all about distraction in all directions—or as someone once put it, “discursive noise.” You’re the one who has to focus your mind to keep it calmly centered and on-course in the midst … 
  11. All for the Sake of Freedom
     … He says that when you focus on the fact that these things do carry stress and suffering, and you understand them to the point of comprehension, that leads you to freedom. This means that when the Buddha teaches us to focus on how the aggregates or the sense media—sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas—are all inconstant, stressful, and not self, it … 
  12. Thinking About Your Fears
     … When it’s cold outside, you can focus on the warmth in your body. When it’s hot outside, you can focus on the coolness in the body. If you maintain a steady focus, you can emphasize those properties and bring things into balance. Even though this is a pleasure that depends on the experience of the body, it’s not a sensual pleasure … 
  13. Established in Full
     … For some people the word concentration seems to evoke images of getting the mind in a very narrow focus. This is a different kind of concentration, though. The mind is centered, which is why we call it concentration, but your awareness fills the body the same way as when you look at a painting: You focus on one spot that may be the most … 
  14. Strong & Heedful
     … For instance, when anger arises, instead of focusing on the object of the anger, focus on the anger in and of itself. When skillful states arise, focus on them, too. As you do this, you begin to see that there are times in the mind when things are at peace, when the mind has a certain level of intelligence. You want to foster those … 
  15. Samatha, Vipassanā, Jhāna
     … After all, we’re not here to think about those activities, we’re here to think about the breath, focus on the breath, perceive the breath, feel the breath. The breath is the focus. As you focus on the breath, all these other activities will gather around. If something’s getting in the way, then you can scratch here, scratch there, analyze it, ask … 
  16. Ready for the Truth
     … So the Buddha would focus on the drawbacks of the pleasures that could come from just generosity and virtue. The purpose, of course, was to get you to look for something better. That would be the next step: learning to see renunciation as safety, as peace. As I’ve noted many times before, renunciation doesn’t mean just giving things up. It means looking … 
  17. Working from the Inside
     … If there are areas of tightness in your throat and your chest, don’t focus straight in on them. Focus off to the side a bit. Let the breath energy gradually, gradually, gradually work around them. That’s evaluation. Then your alertness, when it’s really steady, develops into singleness of preoccupation. You’re with one thing and you watch that one thing. This … 
  18. Body & Food
     … Sometimes you hear people saying you don’t have to focus on that, focus on the sense of I, or your ego whatever. Let go of attachment to that, and that’ll care of everything else. But again, that’s focusing on abstraction, and the work at hand never really gets done. It gets swept under the carpet. It’s easy then to say … 
  19. Nobody’s Servant
     … developing the qualities we need right here, right now, food for the mind, the sense of well-being that comes when you focus on the breath. Allow the breath to become comfortable, think of the sensitive parts in your body and how the breath might nourish them. Sometimes just thinking of that as a possibility changes the way you breathe, changes the way you … 
  20. The Kamma of Concentration
     … You sit here and you choose to focus on the breath. That’s an intention right there. And the next question is: How do you maintain that intention? How do you keep supporting it with other skillful intentions? This is where you have to deal with the different techniques of how you get the mind to settle down, how you focus on the breath … 
  21. Escape Routes in the Present
     … And as you focus on the skill, the difficulties of the outside conditions don’t weigh on you at all. Or if they do, their weight is very minor. You know they’re there, but it’s no big deal, because you’ve got this whole other realm, this whole other dimension that you can focus on. I’m frequently asked about the time … 
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