Search results for: "Focusing"

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2. Play AudioPositive Capability
    … That’s precisely what he’s focusing on: Where are your cravings focused? Why do you crave these things? Think of that passage we chanted just now: the four Dhamma summaries. It was given to a king. He had asked a monk, “Why did you ordain?” because he was under the impression that people ordained because they’d lost family, they’d lost wealth … 
3. Play AudioThe Sport of Wise People
    … You can be focused on the breath at any time at all. Also, have respect for other people’s concentration. That chant we recited just now about respect for concentration means two things: respecting other people’s efforts at concentration, and respecting your own center that you work hard to create and then all too often just throw away. It’s as if it … 
4. Play AudioA Pervasive Well-being
    … If you’re focused on the back of the neck, think of the breath energy going down the spine. This broadens your range of awareness. If you start at the navel, be aware of that area for a while, then move over to the right, over to the left, then up to the solar plexus; right flank, left flank, then to the middle of … 
5. Play AudioFeeding While You Work
    … You could be focusing on the unattractiveness of the body as your theme, and the questions would be: What is the perception? What is it that makes one perception attractive and another unattractive? Where does this idea of attractive and unattractive come from? It’s not from the body. It’s from the mind. When you’re thinking about death, death itself is not … 
6. Play AudioGoodwill for the Breath
    … Well, focusing on the breath is a way of opening up that block. As we do, we begin to realize that there are other areas of awareness that tended to get blocked off as well. As we’re more open to them, we begin to see them more clearly. They’re less subconscious. They’re more brought into the light of day. Subtle little … 
7. Play AudioSafety
    … That’s where the Buddha focused. You can’t go back and undo what you did in the past, but you can develop skills right here, right now, that you can depend on, skills that provide you with safety. It starts, he said, with having a sense of shame and compunction: shame in the healthy sense, the shame of not wanting to do anything … 
8. Play AudioLooking for Trouble
    … We have to unlearn a lot of deeply ingrained habits, which requires focused attention. Intentness is the quality they call citta in the texts. You’re really intent on what you’re doing. You pay a lot of attention to how this area of your awareness feels. The more fully intent you are, the more you notice; the more you notice, the better the … 
9. Play AudioAntidotes for Narcissism
    … When you’re focusing on the breath, you’re mindful of the breath, which means you keep the breath in mind. The actual awareness of the mind comes under sampajañña, alertness.And even that is more focused that simple awareness: You’re alert to what the mind is *doing, *and the results that coming from its doings. So when you reflect on your body … 
10. Play AudioVictory
     … Simply focusing on that question of why there’s suffering and how you can put an end to it—that in and of itself is motivated by goodwill. The two factors help each other along, so try to cultivate them as much as you can. This is how you make yourself your governing principle—in other words, the principle that keeps you on the … 
11. Play AudioDelusion Concentration
     … Your job is to stay as mindful and alert as possible, focused on the breath. It sounds like work, and it is a kind of work, but it’s work in pleasure, work in stillness, an effort that you put into pleasure, an effort that you put into the stillness. It’s good work. So you keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath … 
12. Play AudioEnlightenment is Not a Hot Dog
     … So it’s not just a question of whether the technique is right for you, it’s what are you giving to the technique? Here, we’re focusing on the breath, being with the breath as it comes in, as it goes out, noticing where you feel the breathing in the body, not just at the nose, but anyplace in the body where the … 
13. Play AudioAn Auspicious Day
     … So get used to focusing here. As you find a place where the breath is especially clear, stay there. And then ask yourself, “Is it comfortable?” If you’re not sure, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing: longer, shorter; deeper, more shallow; heavier, lighter; faster, slower. See what feels best for the body right now. And when you find a rhythm that … 
14. Play AudioLooking Off to the Side
     … This means that, in focusing on the breath, we’re not distracting ourselves from the real point of the meditation. It’s by focusing here that you get more and more sensitive to what’s here. At the same time, you’re avoiding one of the big quandaries the Buddha found when he was analyzing the causes of suffering, which is that if you … 
15. Play AudioA Matter of Life & Death
     … When the Buddha said he teaches suffering and the end of suffering, he focuses mainly on the suffering that we cause unnecessarily. The word suffering, dukkha, or stress, as he uses it, has two basic meanings. There’s the stress of the three characteristics, which is everywhere in the conditioned realm. Then there’s stress in the context of the four noble truths, stress … 
16. Play AudioSkillful Thinking
     … These truths give you a way of looking at experience that focuses directly on the issue of skillfulness. In other words, you look at your experience in terms of four variables: cause and effect on the one hand, and skillful and unskillful on the other. The first noble truth, the truth of suffering and stress, is an unskillful result. The unskillful cause is craving … 
17. Play AudioFear of Death
     … They will manifest themselves outside — in your thoughts, words, and deeds — but they come from within, so that’s where the main effort is focused. This is why the section of the noble eightfold path that deals with concentration starts with right effort: the effort to give rise to skillful qualities, like mindfulness, alertness, discernment. These are the things that are really going to … 
18. Play AudioRiding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers
     … What you do is what you know best, and all too often for us that’s an area totally obscured because we’re focused someplace else. We clean out the mind so that we can watch it. Nothing much may be happening, but that means that when something little does happen, you’re going to see it, if you keep your proper frame of … 
19. Play AudioThe Skills of Stillness
     … Then, having gained that larger perspective, he then focused on his intentions in the present moment. That’s where he found awakening. So you can focus on the present moment here. Focus on your intentions right here. Set up the intention that you want to stay right here with the breath, all the way in, all the way out—each breath as it comes … 
20. Play AudioGuardian Meditations
     … They’re focused mainly on bodily fabrication, how you breathe, giving you different ideas about breathing long or short, training yourself to breathe aware of the whole body, training yourself to calm bodily fabrication. How do you do that without stifling the breath? How do you get the mind quiet? That involves mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings. How do you perceive the breath … 
21. Play AudioDrowsiness
     … Or you can think about the Buddha—anything that helps keep the mind focused on a Dhamma topic that energizes you. These are the things you do in preparation. There are also things you can do when you find yourself drifting off in spite of your first efforts. This is where you have to be firmly on the side of not drifting off and … 
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