Search results for: "Attention"
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- Happy About Kamma… As the causal factors are ordered in dependent co-arising, your present acts of attention and acts of intention actually come prior to your experience of whatever the results of past kamma may be coming in. Intention and attention come under name and form. Based on name and form, there are the six senses, and with the six senses there’s contact. And it …
- Doubt… The cure for doubt, he says, is to look into the mind and apply appropriate attention to the question of which events in the mind are skillful and which are not. This means watching what’s going on in the mind when you give rein to certain states of mind. Or if you think in terms of the committee of the mind, what happens …
- Motivation… Which are the issues that are really worth paying attention to and which are the ones you have to put aside?” That’s a huge part of the Buddha’s teachings on discernment and wisdom. You probably know the story of the man shot by the arrow. There was a monk who once came to see the Buddha and demanded the answers to some …
- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… But you don’t have to give your full attention to the Dhamma talk. In fact, the more attention you give to the breath, the better. In this way, you learn how to deal with all those inner children. The whole point of dealing with your inner children is that you don’t leave them as inner children. You help them grow up. Meditation …
- Nourishing & Interesting… So they were paying very careful attention to the ballgame. It turned out that someone in a gorilla suit walked behind the people playing the game. Most of the people watching the video didn’t see the gorilla because they were so intent on the game. Think about that: That’s how we lead our lives. We’re focused on certain things, and other …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… He’s got a whole list in Majjhima 2 of questions not worth paying attention to: “What am I? Who am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist? What was I in the past? What will I be in the future?” People have noted that those last questions call into question the whole idea of wanting to look into your past lives. But …
- Capture Your Imagination… desire, persistence, and the careful attention of holding, and then evaluation. These are all important aspects of the concentration. You’re creating a world of the mind here. And as in any story—if you’re telling, say, a story about a magical universe—you don’t want something really incongruous coming in, unless that’s the kind of story you want to tell …
- Training Your Intentions… We choose the ones we want to focus on and pay attention to, and we turn them into the actual experience of an aggregate. So we’re playing a very intentional and purposeful role in our engagement with these things—in fact, with our engagement of all our senses. It’s not the case that we’re just sitting here passively being bombarded by …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… Right now it may not be all that evident, but the more you pay attention to how the body feels from within, the more you feel that there are levels of energy in the body. You may want to go through the body section-by-section to see how the breathing feels, say, first at the navel, then at the solar plexus right in …
- Cooking the Mind… And the advantage of this is that you’re paying very close attention to what you’re doing right here and you’re not constantly comparing it to some idea you picked up someplace else. That’s how your discernment grows. There was a Zen master, Dogen, who had an interesting point. He said that the development of the path is no different from …
- Learning Through Healing… Directing your attention to the breath: That’s directed thought. Judging whether it does or doesn’t feel good, and figuring out and what you can do to make it feel better: That’s the evaluation. And when the breath feels better, you think of it spreading out to fill the body. Think of the breath coming in and out all the pores of …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… You give it your whole attention. You give it your whole mind, your whole heart. The confidence, here, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re confident that it’s always going to go well every time we meditate but we are confident that we’re doing something good and that regardless of the immediate results, the long-term results will have to be good. And …
- How to Look, How to Listen… And you know that the ajaans say that when you listen to a Dhamma talk as you’re meditating, ninety percent of your attention should be to the meditation and only a small percentage to the talk. Still, if the talk is relevant, if it’s pertinent to you, take it in. If it’s not, let it go by. One important principle is …
- Genuine Happiness… Focus your attention there. Often it’ll be in someplace you might not expect. Because the breath is not just air coming in and out of the lungs, it’s a flow of energy in the body. It exists on many levels, and the most obvious is the one that allows air to come in and out of the nose. So wherever it seems …
- Bases of Power… You may find that some spots in the body require more attention than others. All of us have some old wounds, either psychological or physical, that we’re carrying around. Even the psychological wounds have some physical counterpart. They left traces in the body where the breath energy doesn’t flow very well, or it’s flowing in a strange direction, or it doesn …
- In Charge of Your Moods… Where do you feel the breathing in your body? Especially when the breath is long, you feel it down in the chest, in the torso, in the stomach… but wherever it’s clearest, focus your attention right there. Then ask yourself if long breathing is comfortable. If it feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. You can …
- Proactive with Pain… Focus your attention there. Now, there is a tendency to go immediately back to the pain because you’re worried about it, you’re concerned about it, you want to keep it under your control. But you have to realize that pain is not under your control. So you want to establish yourself in a place where you have a greater sense of belonging …
- Focus on the Doing… It’s in paying full attention to what you’re doing: That’s when you start seeing the subtler things of the mind. This is why intentness is one of what they call bases of power or the bases of success in the practice: You give yourself totally to what you’re doing. The other factors in the list work around this. In other …
- Agreements to Perceive… The way you label the breath, the way you label states of mind as they happen, the way you label what’s important and what’s not important to pay attention to: These are all major issues in the meditation. I remember, when I was studying with Ajaan Fuang, that things would happen in my meditation that I’d get all excited about: “This …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… You really want to pay close attention to what you’re doing. If the meditation starts getting mechanical or automatic, pretty soon you’re going to be off someplace else, and you won’t know how you got there. You want to pay very careful attention to how things are going. Then again, there’s your ability to analyze to see what’s working …
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