Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Page 38
  2. Protecting Yourself Against Yourself
     … When you’re in concentration, you’re focused on one thing. Now, right concentration has the qualities of discernment built right into it, with that directed thought and evaluation. You’re looking at the breath, evaluating how the breath is going, and then figuring out how to breathe in a way that’s more comfortable, that allows the mind to settle down. When you … 
  3. Concentration that Bears Great Fruit
     … After all, if you don’t like what you’re focused on, it’s hard to get the desire going and it’s hard to get concentrated on it regardless of whether you want to be persistent or intent or whatever. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha offers so many different topics for concentration, so that you can find one that … 
  4. Prerequisites for the Practice
     … Here, specifically, the Buddha’s focusing on the causes of suffering inside. There may be external causes for pain and misery in the world, but, as he said, you don’t solve those problems without solving the problem of why the mind is making itself suffer inside. You want to see when suffering comes, how it comes; when it goes, how it goes. This … 
  5. Refuge
     … You’re the one trying to stay focused here. As for other becomings that you might create right now about the past or about the future, just let them go. You don’t have to get involved. Many of our becomings are created by the mind running around. It’s like taking a picture while you’re running: It’s bound to be blurry … 
  6. Meditate to Win
     … When did the mind settle down really well? What was the best spot during the hour’s meditation? Where were you focused? What was the breath like? What had you been doing leading up to that? If you’re really mindful and alert, you should be able to remember. Then take what you’ve managed to observe—however well you’ve observed your mind … 
  7. A Valuable Gift
    Here you are focusing on your breath with your eyes closed. What are you doing for other people? You’re actually doing a lot. You’re bringing your mind under control. The extent to which you can get rid of greed, aversion, and delusion inside yourself means that there’s less greed, aversion, and delusion to inflict on other people. And you’re setting … 
  8. Whole-body Consciousness
     … If you’re focused too much on one spot and then something else comes in and distracts you a little bit, you’ve lost your concentration. But if you have the whole body as your framework, then things can come in, things can go out, and it’s like people coming in and out of a building. They don’t destroy the building. They … 
  9. In Training
     … That’s the point he focuses on a lot: that your actions, instead of accounting for nothing, actually are the prime force shaping your experience of the universe. Your skillful actions based on skillful intentions will lead to good consequences. Unskillful actions based on unskillful intentions will lead to bad consequences. It’s a simple-sounding principle, but it gets pretty complex in the … 
  10. Dimensions of Right Effort
     … The skillful desires are focused on the path for the sake of the goal. To make another analogy, it’s like driving to a mountain on the horizon. If you spend all your time looking at the mountain while you’re driving, what happens? You drive off the road. You have to focus your attention on the road. And even though the road doesn … 
  11. So Little Time
     … Notice that after the Buddha’s awakening the issue that he focused on was one that all of us have in common, which is that we want happiness and yet our actions lead to suffering. And unlike some teachers who try to make us embarrassed about our desire for happiness or denounce it as selfish, he said that there’s nothing wrong with the … 
  12. The Human Condition
     … You work with it by focusing your efforts on following the path. This is why this kind of grief is a useful grief. It keeps you on the path of practice. Often you hear people saying, “Don’t try to push too hard in the practice; don’t have any sense of goal, because you’ll get frustrated over the fact that you haven … 
  13. A Sense of Yourself
     … not focusing on how hard it is but focusing instead on where you’ve got strengths, what you can build on, so that you can be true to what you’ve decided to do—so that when the times comes that you have to relinquish something you really like, you can do it with a sense of calm, confident that you’re making a … 
  14. The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness
     … After you’ve surveyed the body for a while, choose one spot in the body to focus your awareness, wherever the breath is clear, wherever it seems easy or natural to be focused. Then let your awareness spread out from that spot to fill the whole body, so that you’re aware of the whole body all the way through the in-breath and … 
  15. A Memorial to Your Life
     … So you want to know what to do, so that your desire then gets focused on what you have to do. Try to do this well. You’re sitting here, watching the breath. What does it mean to watch the breath well? You stay continually with it, as best you can. If you wander off, you come back as quickly as possible, firmly, but … 
  16. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … At first, you’re focused on your image of the body. But then there comes the question, “What makes you want to give rise to, say, a perception of the body as unattractive, and what makes you want to develop a perception of it as attractive? What’s the instigator? And what is this thing, this perception of attractive and not attractive?” You learn … 
  17. Goodwill Plus
     … The Buddha says you can make it a basis for concentration, what they call the immeasurable concentrations, where you’re focused less on the body and more on the whole world, thinking of goodwill in all directions. The image the Buddha gives is of a man blowing a conch trumpet. As soon as he blows it, the sound goes in all directions at once … 
  18. Living Forward, Understanding Backward
     … So instead of focusing forward or backward, we learn something from looking back and then focusing back on Now as much as possible, because everything comes together right here and now. Everything comes out of right here. So as you go through life, try to bring as much attention as possible to the quality of mind that underlies your decisions right here, right now … 
  19. A World Apart
     … We start out by focusing on the breath. As the Buddha said, you focus on the body in and of itself. In the case of the breath, this means simply being with the sensation of the breathing as it comes in and as it goes out. As for how that connects with the world outside, you try to cut all those connections. When the … 
  20. Tranquility & Insight with the Breath
     … You may be focusing on one spot in the picture, but you see the whole picture. Your vision isn’t limited just to that one little laser-small beam of your focus. So you want to focus, but you want the range of your awareness to cover the body so that you can have a sense of whether the breath is flowing well or … 
  21. Changing Your Default Settings
     … That means you’re going to be focusing on the feeling that you’re trying to create here. And then you hold to a perception of the breath: a mental image. It can be either a picture in the mind, or just a word or whatever, of how you conceive the breath, and how you hold the concept of breath in mind. You hold … 
  22. Load next page...