Search results for: "Attention"
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- Unfabricated Happiness… Why let yourself breathe in a way that’s creating unnecessary stress? The usual reason is because you’re not paying attention. You think other things are more important. But here again, the Buddha’s pointing your attention to how the way you breathe is going to have an impact on your mood. Your mood, of course, is going to have an impact on …
- Bring the Right Attitude… So try to bring as much attention as possible to it, as much calm attention, and you’ll find that the calmness of your attitude starts a feedback loop as the breath calms down. As the breath calms down, the mind can calm down. Stick with that sense of being nourished by the breath. This is what keeps the concentration work from getting too …
- Contentment… He’s teaching us to learn how to focus our attention where it really matters, where it really will make a difference. When you think about relationships, think about the comment he made one time that it’s hard to meet anyone who has never been your mother or your father or your brother or your sister or your son or your daughter. Our …
- Do You Want to Stop Suffering?… What you’re learning is that the mind can play a role in shaping its experience right now, and if it pays careful attention to what it’s doing, it can make a really nice experience. As the Buddha says, if you stay with this one object and evaluate it with more and more attention and more and more care so that you can …
- Feelings of Pain… Then you pay close attention to what’s actually happening, because you want to understand: If the mind leaves its object, why did it leave? When you bring it back, what’s the best way to bring it back? When you bring it back, how do you reward it? If you’re focused on the breath, give it an especially satisfying breath as a …
- Why Now… Place your attention there, and try to keep it there so you can observe: Does long breathing feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You can try shorter breathing, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best right now. You can either try specific kinds of breathing, or you can simply pose …
- Samvega… In cases like that, simply the fact that you pay attention to it is feeding it. So, starve it of attention. Like a dog that keeps coming around to your house, hoping for some food from you: You know that if you give it food, it’s going to hang around, and you don’t want the dog hanging around. So you just don …
- Equanimity as a Skill… But you have the choice of where you’re going to focus your attention right now and what you’re going to do with what you’re finding in the here and now. So when we think of equanimity in terms of kamma, it doesn’t just leave you there where you are. It focuses your attention on what you can do. When I …
- Rehab Work… If your attention skips off someplace else, you miss a lot of the signals. You’re trying to stay with the breath, but don’t stay just through force of will. Try to stay with a sense of curiosity. You’re exploring and learning new habits. You may discover that the way you’ve been breathing has not been good for the body. Some …
- The Buddha’s Map… His sketch directs your attention right there. Our problem is that we want to go off and sketch other things. Pay attention to the Buddha’s sketches, and then look inside to see what those sketches are pointing to. Sketch a path for yourself. Think of his teachings as a map, and then look at what you have inside yourself that corresponds to the …
- Cooking Skills… So why choose the constricted ways? Usually, it’s because we’re not paying attention. We’re thinking about something else. So here we’re going to think solely about the breath. That’s where we bring the verbal fabrication. Keep your attention directed to the breath, and then comment on it. Does it feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, what would …
- How Completion is Found… What heedfulness means is that you have to focus your attention on what you’re doing right now and try to do it well. That’s where and that’s how the goal is going to be attained. Now, you have no idea how long it’s going to take, whether you’re going to make it in this lifetime or some later lifetime …
- May I Look After Myself with Ease… When you pay attention to them: That’s when you feed them, you keep them going. But as you decide, “I don’t need to pay attention to these things,” they’re like stray dogs and cats that you used to feed all the time. Of course, they come and swarm all over your yard. But when there’s no more food, after a …
- Cleaning up Your Personal Environment… The problem with social-grease speech, if you’re really not paying attention to what you’re saying, is that you end up falling into other forms of wrong speech. With idle chatter, by definition, you’re not really paying much attention to your intention as to why you’re speaking. But if the intention is to put the other person at ease, to …
- Inner Baggage… There’s also the way you focus your attention on the breath and how you evaluate it. That has an impact as well. This is called verbal fabrication. You learn how to ask the right questions of the breath. Focus on it in such a way that you’re not putting too much weight on it, you’re not putting too little pressure on …
- A Home for the Mind… The more you pay attention to what’s going on, the more you pay attention to this principle of cause and effect, then the more you begin to discern suffering and its cause. The chant we had just now, about discerning suffering, sounds a little strange. You might think, “Of course we discern suffering. I can tell when I’m suffering.” Well, it’s …
- What You’re Choosing to Do Right Now… Thinking about it requires appropriate attention—in other words, making sure that you take these teachings and apply them to the real issue, which is why is it that you’re causing suffering all the time, even when you’re hoping—in fact, we’re always hoping through our actions—to bring about well-being. But why is it we create suffering? What’s …
- The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up… He said to think in terms of appropriate attention, to think in terms of the four noble truths. Ask yourself questions as to what’s skillful and what’s not. Put things to the test, evaluate them. There’s a lot of thinking in following the path. So we’re not trying to cut off our brains and just say, “Okay, well I’ll …
- Developing Absorption… Protect any thoughts that help direct your attention to the breath. Those are things to develop. So you have to pass judgment as to which things you should let go, which things you should develop. To do that, you develop three qualities of mind. One is mindfulness, just remembering why you’re here, what you’re trying to do. And also remembering to recognize …
- A Concentration Checklist… In other words, you’re paying attention to the breath and all of a sudden your mind slips off to something else. All you have to do is just reestablish attention at the breath. But then to maintain it, you may have to deal with other issues. The Buddha mentions boredom as a possible problem: You’re sitting here and nothing seems to be …
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