Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Dichotomies
     … The two really important name factors are intention and attention. This is where the issue of skillful and unskillful plays itself out most clearly in dependent co-arising. With attention, it’s the way you look at things. There are skillful ways of looking at things and unskillful ways. The skillful ways have to do with looking at things in terms of cause and … 
  17. When Things Regress
     … Try to remember what’s important to remember right now and what’s important to forget right now, where you pay your attention. Alertness is not all about being alert to whatever is coming up in the present moment. It’s focused precisely on: What are you doing in the present moment? The other people in the room may be running around, but what … 
  18. An Issue of Control
     … There’s attention, the things you pay attention to; perception, how you label things; the intention itself; and then the contact among all these things. This contact is what spurs you to act. You see things in a particular way. You’re focusing on a particular issue, and you’re going to act in line with that. Now, the Buddha says the most useful … 
  19. What We’re Here to See
     … Focus your attention there and try to keep it there. The fact that you’re trying to keep it there gives you something to measure its movements against—because it will move. That’s been its habit for who knows how long. But all too often it moves without really being clear about which direction it’s going, and where it’s been. It … 
  20. The Heart of the Teachings
     … At first you pay attention to what’s inconstant about what’s burdening the mind. In seeing its inconstancy, you also see where it’s stressful, where it’s not-self, where it’s not worth holding onto, not worth identifying with. And so you develop dispassion for it. From dispassion, there’s the cessation of that particular problem. And then you abandon the … 
  21. Patterns to Happiness
     … One is directed thought., when you direct your thoughts, you direct your attention, to a particular object. The second is evaluation. You evaluate the object to see what’s working in the sense of getting the mind to settle down. For instance, when you’re focused on the breath, you can play with the breath in different ways: long in, long out, short in … 
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