Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Choose Your Battles
     … He said, “Oh, you’re focusing on the earth element. Focus on space.” As he said that, as I focused on space, and that sense of oppression immediately lifted. In that case, the problem was something that I was doing. The problem was also my inability to think outside the box, to look for areas where there was some strength that I could fall … 
  3. Determination
     … So determination, even though it focuses primarily on getting the mind to settle down, involves discernment as well. And it develops your discernment, too. Your willingness to stick with things is what enables you to see them from the beginning to the end. That’s how you come to understand cause and effect. The Buddha offers these tools for dealing with all kinds of … 
  4. The Perfection of Freedom
     … Concentration keeps you focused here. Not only that, but given the fact that the mind is always feeding, concentration gives you something good to feed on, a sense of well-being that comes from within, that doesn’t depend on people outside or anything outside, doesn’t take anything away from anyone. When the mind is well fed, it’s more willing to look … 
  5. Where the Brightness Is
     … I was once leading retreat where one of the main themes of the retreat was focusing on the issue of what you’re doing that’s skillful and what you’re doing that’s unskillful, in terms of what you do, say, and think. In other words, you look at your actions and see where they cause harm, realizing that you have a choice … 
  6. Three Parts of Right View
     … Like right now, we’re focusing on the breath. That’s part of developing the path. When it starts seeming fruitless or strange, you remember the motivation—this is why we’re doing this. Those ignoble paths the Buddha talked about—devotion to sensual pleasure, devotion to self-torment: We’ve been down those paths many times before. This one is something different. This … 
  7. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … You’d begin to realize that the space you were focusing on had no limitations. When you’re focused on the body, things go out to the skin, or maybe just a little bit beyond the skin, to include the energy cocoon around the body. But with space, there are no limits. After you were used to staying with that perception of space, Ajaan … 
  8. Raise Your Standards
     … These movements of attention, now focusing here, now focusing there: Ask yourself, what caused you to change focus? When you frame things to yourself, what are the terms you use to frame them? You encounter this immediately when you’re working with the breath. You start out with the assumption that the breath is the air coming in through the nose, but as you … 
  9. Present-Moment Intelligence
     … This is why it’s so important that the meditation focuses on the present moment—so that you get more sensitive to what you’re doing, and particularly so that you learn how to see where you’re adding unnecessary stress and suffering. For the most part, we tend to take it for granted: a certain level of stress, a certain level of dis … 
  10. The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites
     … So just focusing on the three characteristics without having a basis of concentration to underlie it and without having mastered the concentration to fight against the characteristics to see exactly how far they go, you can end up becoming very fatalistic. You’ve learned helplessness. Actually, as we’re sitting here, focusing on the breath, we’re fighting against the three characteristics. This is … 
  11. Exploring Possibilities
     … You suddenly see the world in a new way: “The world is perfect as it is.” Or, “The world is illusory.” Those aren’t the insights the Buddha focused on. He focused more on what it’s possible for the mind to do. Can it operate in a way that it doesn’t create suffering for itself? As you meditate you begin to catch … 
  12. The World Is Swept Away
     … We need desire to be focused on this one issue: What can we do that gives rise to long-lasting happiness, and ultimately, a happiness that doesn’t give rise to change at all? That’s what we’re working on here. Wherever we may be in the practice right now, that’s the general direction we’re heading. That’s the question that … 
  13. Strong Through Mindfulness
     … Of those three qualities—mindfulness, alertness, ardency—Ajaan Lee focuses on ardency as being the wisdom factor. We have this knowledge, we’ve memorized these things, and the wise response is to want to use them well to do this well. It requires effort, but it’s effort well spent. Again, to make that kind of effort, you have to remind yourself of why … 
  14. Questioning Your Conviction
     … In other words, you take this mind, which is so quick to change, and you try to keep it focused on one thing continually. You take this body, which has its aches and pains, which, when you sit for long periods of time, usually can get very stiff, and you learn how to sit for a long period of time with a sense of … 
  15. Anapanasati Day
     … You may be focusing on the body or focusing on feelings but it’s hard to be exclusively focused on them. After all, there are connections among these things. An important part of seeing these things as dhammas is to see the connections. So it’s simply matter of which frame of reference is primary, the one that you hold to as your basic … 
  16. Things as They Function
     … Where are they coming from? Where are they going? How do we do it? We learn not by focusing directly on the mind to begin with. We give the mind something else to focus on and then we watch the mind as it’s focused. This is why we have the training in the precepts, training in concentration, training in discernment. The Buddha’s … 
  17. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way
     … When the power of the mind is focused, it has a lot of strength. Like the light of the sun: It shines down on a piece of paper and it doesn’t burn the paper. But if you take a magnifying glass and get the focal point just right, you can focus the light of the sun and burn the paper up. It’s … 
  18. Your Higher Power
    When we meditate on the breath, we’re focusing not only on the in-and-out breath, but also on the flow of breath energies in different parts of the body. You try to get the in-and-out breath comfortable. Ask yourself what kind of rhythm would feel good right now. And experiment for a while until you find something that does feel … 
  19. Ultimate Reality
     … That’s what we’re focusing on here as we meditate. We’re focusing on our karma, our intentions. As he said, “Karma is the intention.” For the moment, we’re trying to make our intentions one: Stay with the breath. You learn best about your intentions if you try to hold on to one intention. Then you see what other intentions come in … 
  20. To Comprehend Pain
     … So yes, we’re trying to get the mind past the pain, and we’re focusing on what we can do to help in that direction. In some cases, you work with the elements in the body: the breath, the warmth, the liquid, the solid parts of the body. Bring them into balance, especially using the breath. It’s going to be the main … 
  21. Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest
     … You extend equanimity to everything that’s not related to what you’re trying to accomplish right now, but keep your desire for change focused on what you’re doing. When you understand this point, you avoid a lot of the misunderstandings that come up around equanimity. As the Buddha said, equanimity is not always appropriate. If you simply develop equanimity while you’re … 
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