Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. An Examined Life
     … Even if you can’t keep all of your awareness or all your attention on the breath, at least have some of it with the breath. That helps keep you anchored in the present moment. And be very honest with yourself about these thoughts. Where are they really going to go? Suppose you’re very successful in business, very successful in art, very successful … 
  3. Dissolving Narratives
     … Are there little places where you can straighten it out even more—or allow it to straighten itself out even more? Just give it some steady attention and see what that does for the breathing there. You might start at the navel, come up the front of the torso, up through the head, then down the back, out to the legs and out to … 
  4. Start the Year Right Here
     … Yo pay attention here, then there’s a big blank space, and you pay attention to something else over there, and then there’s another big blank space. If you were to draw this down as a chart or a map, there’d be little dots and little bits and pieces here and there, and then you’d try to sketch in what’s … 
  5. Understanding Happiness
     … We have so many other issues going on that we don’t pay attention to this one question: “What am I doing? What are the results?” If you pay attention here, you begin to find things opening up. You can learn new ways of acting and speaking and thinking. So in this way, as you come to understand the sources of suffering inside, you … 
  6. Trust in the Power of the Mind
     … But the fact that you can direct your intentions, direct your acts of attention, in a way that can bring stillness, a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, a sense of rapture, clarity to the mind: That’s because the mind is not just on the receiving end of things. Mano-pubbangama dhamma mano-settha mano-maya: The mind is the forerunner … 
  7. Fabrication Theory
     … Focus your attention on the breath. Know when the breath is coming in; know when it’s going out. You can focus on the sensation of breathing in any part of the body where it’s easy to follow. It might be the tip of the nose, at the rise and fall of the chest, the expansion and contraction in the abdomen, anyplace where … 
  8. The Challenge of Right View
     … The other is appropriate attention. That’s your internal factor. But even if you get good advice from somebody else, it can’t make you skillful. You have to use your own ability to attend to things appropriately, which is basically asking the right questions, asking questions in terms of these four noble truths: What right now is the suffering or stress that you … 
  9. The Lessons of Equanimity
     … There are potentials coming up from your past actions, and you get to choose what you pay attention to, what you take an interest in. It’s like watering seeds in a field. The ones you water are the ones that’ll sprout. If you’ve got some good seeds in your field, you can get them to sprout a little earlier. If you … 
  10. Inner Wealth Management
     … You have to remember that the sense of pleasure associated with the breath comes from the fact that you’re alert to the breath, that you’re paying careful attention to the breath. Ajaan Lee’s image is of someone who’s working and gaining a wage at the same time. If you work for a while, get your wages, and then quit the … 
  11. Sort Things Out
     … As for the different voices chattering in the mind, don’t pay them any attention. They’ll say things and do things to pull you away, but you don’t want to go anywhere else. You want to get the mind really, really still so that it can see things clearly. What usually happens is that you find yourself off someplace else and you … 
  12. Teachings to Rahula
     … You don’t know the power of your intentions or the way you pay attention until you’ve tested these things. These are the things that are going to shape your experience here, so you want to have a clear sense of what leads to what. Then you can further refine your good intention to sit here and meditate. Make it an actual skillful … 
  13. Strong-hearted
    When you focus your attention on the breath, you’re focusing on something that only you can know—how you feel the breathing from inside, how you feel your awareness from inside—because this is where the problem is, and this is where the solution will be found. The problem is that we act in unskillful ways. We let greed, aversion, and delusion take … 
  14. Focus on One Thing
     … Keep your attention at one spot, and watch the breath as it’s coming in, as it’s going out. The one spot can be anywhere: your nose, the throat, the chest, anyplace where you have a sense, a clear sensation that tells you, “Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out.” And watch that sensation. Is it comfortable? If … 
  15. The Airplane Mechanic
     … But I’m simply not going to pay it any attention.” Doing this allows you to get in touch with the breath, and realize that even though the thought may be there, you don’t have to get sucked into it. This is a really important skill, because for most of us, as soon as a thought arises, we have to get into it … 
  16. What to Tolerate, What Not
     … So it’s a good place to focus your attention, because it’s right where the body and the mind meet, and where the mind actually has an impact on the body, something you can explore while you’re sitting here. It teaches you some important lessons. One is that what you experience is not just a given. Each present moment has lots of … 
  17. The Stages of Meditation
     … And yet because we pay so little attention to the breathing, we usually leave it to its own devices. As a result, the breath gets shaped not by our awareness, but by other emotions that come through the mind. It gets shaped by our unexamined thoughts about how breathing happens. And so the breath gets constricted, parts of the body don’t seem to … 
  18. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … He’s simply asking you to focus on what’s really worthy of your full attention and to be careful that you don’t latch onto things that could make you behave in unskillful ways. We fight so much for our survival, we fight for maintaining relationships, and often we do very unskillful things that set bad conditions into motion. So you want to … 
  19. Subduing Greed & Distress
     … It waits until your attention is turned someplace else, or your alertness lapses, and then it it’s off. You black out for a bit, and you find yourself someplace else. You want to watch out for that so that you don’t black out. You’ll come to see: These are the stages in how the mind wanders off. You learn them by … 
  20. The Five Hindrances
     … As the Buddha pointed out, the way we feed our hindrances is to apply inappropriate attention to them. In other words, we don’t look at them in terms of the four noble truths. We don’t see what suffering they’re causing. We just ride with them. The way to starve them is to develop appropriate attention. Look at these mind states simply … 
  21. Skills for Living & Dying
     … And then you can focus all your attention on what’s going on in the mind. At that point, there shouldn’t be much going on in the mind—just awareness of the stillness of the body. And you begin to sense that the body is turning into a mist of sensations, and the sense of where the surface or the boundary of the … 
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