Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 30
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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.
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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