Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Choosing & Watching Your Choices
    Focus your attention on the breath. Take a couple of good, long in-and-out breaths and notice where you feel the sensation of breathing most clearly. When we talk of the breath, it’s not necessarily the air, although that may be the prime thing you notice first. It’s more the energy in the body, the process of breathing itself. What is … 
  3. Asking the Right Questions
     … And see if you can ask the right questions—because it’s that combination of careful looking and knowing how to ask the right questions that counts as appropriate attention. That’s how the Buddha defines appropriate attention: learning how to focus on the right questions and put irrelevant questions aside. That’s when you see things you didn’t see before. Everything you … 
  4. Alertness: What Are You Doing?
     … It’s very focused in placing most of its attention on your actions. You see this aspect of alertness all the way through the practice. When the Buddha was introducing the practice to his son, Rahula, he started out by saying that you’ve got to be truthful, and then told him how to be observant—specifically, how to be observant of his intentions … 
  5. Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself
     … And give a lot of attention to the Buddha’s shoulds. You should try to comprehend suffering, you should try to abandon its cause, you should try to realize the cessation of suffering by doing what you really should do, which is to develop the path. That’s where you want to urge, rouse, and encourage yourself. Now again, the Buddha sets out those … 
  6. Training in Commitment & Reflection
     … Wherever it feels most prominent, focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. “Comfortable” can depend on the state of your body and mind right now. If you’re feeling tense, you’ll want to breathe in a way that’s more relaxing. If your energy level is low, you’ll want to breathe in a way that gives you more … 
  7. The Path Requires Effort
     … First, while you’re practicing with the breath, focus your attention on where the breath seems most obvious, so that you know: Now the breath is going in; now the breath is going out. And stick with it. It’s the sticking-with-it that makes all the difference. Sometimes you hear people say, “I’ve done a little concentration. I know what it … 
  8. Inner Poise
     … If you’re paying attention to your concentration, you’re also helping other people by not interfering with theirs. It’s interesting to think about how the preliminary basic factors of concentration are also the basic factors of speech: directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you bring a topic to mind and then you evaluate it. That’s the process by which the … 
  9. Clearing Your Space
     … There will be some members who just keep talking, and they’re not going to stop, but the reason why they don’t stop is because you’re paying attention to them. So, let them chatter, let them speak as much as they want. You just don’t focus there. You focus on some other part in the mind. Your attention to these thoughts … 
  10. A Meditator is a Good Friend to Have
     … It’s simply that we’re not paying attention. Thoughts go flitting through the mind and then leave an imprint on the body. Or events in the body can have an impact on the mind. All too often, if we’re not aware of this, the tension builds up and results in a sense of being burdened, being weighed down. The Buddha’s essential … 
  11. What Is One
     … So pay attention to what it needs. And then, when you’ve satisfied that part of the body, look for other parts of the body that are especially sensitive, and see if you can satisfy them, too. The more you can hit your sensitivities like this, the more satisfying the food of concentration will be. Then you can use it to deal with other … 
  12. High Level Metta
     … Even the way we breathe sometimes contributes to our suffering if we don’t pay attention to it. So you’ve got this time now. Pay attention to these things. What are you doing right now? How are you breathing? What are you thinking about? What are the perceptions that shape both how you breathe and how you think? What can you do to … 
  13. A Doctor’s Strategies
     … And in the beginning, it’s best to focus your attention on the shortest, simplest statements. Gradually, you begin to learn how to read your own mind and see what it needs, realizing like any good doctor that sometimes you have to use strategies. For instance, with the breath: You want the mind to stay with the breath so that it can settle down … 
  14. All Dhamma, All the Time
     … Because if you’re running around, not paying attention to things, or running around paying attention to things to the exclusion of what’s actually going on, you’re not going to be able to remember what happened because you saw it just in passing—if you saw it at all. So you make the mind still. That’s the first condition for listening … 
  15. Mind Your Own Business
     … This is where the Buddha pays careful attention to what he calls directed thought and evaluation: This is how you talk to yourself. Sometimes you break into speech based on your directed thought and evaluation. In fact, without directed thought and evaluation, there wouldn’t be any speech at all. Our problem is that often there’s not much of a filter. We have … 
  16. Restraint
     … What are you doing with them? Are you paying attention or are you not? If you are paying attention, why? And when you do, what are the results when you bring these things into the mind? In other words, take some responsibility for how you use your senses. They’re not just a playground. They’re openings out into a dangerous world—a world … 
  17. Contemplating the World You Create
    We focus the mind first at the breath because as you get to know the breath, you begin to realize that the mind opens itself up there, right at its attention to the breath. And that’s what we’re trying to understand. Our primary task here is not trying to understand the world outside. It’s trying to understand the worlds of our … 
  18. Grounded in the Elements
     … It’s just that there’s part of your awareness that tends to be the focal part, the part where you’re paying closest attention. That tends to be in one spot or you can make it in several spots at once or you can train it to be fully throughout the body—which is one of the things we’re trying to do … 
  19. But Not Sick in Mind
     … One is intentness, that you give it your full intention and your full attention. As the Thais say, you put your heart into it. When you’re watching the breath, you’re not just counting how many more hours, how many more minutes before the session is over. You’re thinking: “How can I really see this breath, how can I really see this … 
  20. Ignorance
     … You’re practicing what’s called appropriate attention: looking at the really important issues of what’s happening in the present moment and what you need to do in response. It’s not the case that you see suffering once and comprehend it and that’s all you need to do. Your powers of comprehension grow stronger as you develop the path, and you … 
  21. 1. The Entertaining Breath
     … You can give your full attention to the breath, total attention to the way the mind relates to the breath, and then you can play. And through playing around like this, you learn important lessons. So it’s not just idle play. It’s an exercise in developing intelligence—in particular, the intelligence that can see the connections between your intentions and the pleasure … 
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