Search results for: "Attention"
- Page 39
- Safe Haven… We have a lot of tender spots inside that need care and attention. And although it may sound brave and courageous to say we’re going to do this work in the midst of our everyday lives, it’s awfully hard. Even warriors know when they have to retreat, when they have to recover from their wounds—not because they’re cowards but because …
- Mature Happiness… You might say that that requires an awful lot of attention. Well, if anything in the world is worthy of a lot of attention, it’s your actions. You’re the one responsible and you’re the one who’s going to be reaping the results, so you want to be very careful about what you do and say and think. And learn from …
- Skills for Dying Well… There will be something that follows on death, so you want to be heedful where you focus your attention, where you focus your desires at that point.** This quality of heedfulness is something that we try to develop in the meditation. As the Buddha said, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness. It’s when you realize that your actions really will make a …
- Three Perceptions… Ultimately, as your attachments to things outside of the concentration drop away, you turn your attention more to applying these three perceptions to contemplating the concentration itself. As this contemplation gets more refined, you see that even the most stable level of concentration you can attain — the one that has formed your highest experience of pleasure and ease — is composed of five aggregates on …
- Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out… The best interior help is developing appropriate attention. The two go together. Start with admirable friendship. The Buddha says to look for people who have four qualities: They have conviction in the principle of kamma, they’re virtuous, they’re generous, and they’re discerning. You try to become a friend with people like that, and you try to emulate their qualities. You ask …
- Encouragement… So you had to be very patient and very steady in your attentiveness. If you stopped being attentive, something bad would happen to the blade. The same with making a pot, and with all kinds of skills people used to have to master just in order to function on a daily basis, in order to live comfortably. Nowadays most us have lost those skills …
- To See What You’re Doing… So you want to pay careful attention to your actions, having a strong sense that you do have the choice as to what you’re going to do or say or think. And those choices will have consequences. So you want to learn what the pattern is. Basically, if you’re acting under the power of greed, aversion, or delusion, suffering will follow. If …
- Strength Training… You’ve been doing things half aware that you’re doing them, but not really giving them your full attention. Often those are lessons you don’t want to hear. But if the mind has a sense of inner well-being, it’s in a much better mood to see where you’re causing yourself unnecessary stress, where you’re placing unnecessary burdens on …
- Listening to the Practice… The thinking here is designed to keep your attention focused, to keep reminding yourself that this is where you want to be, right with the sensation of the breathing. That’s the function of mindfulness or sati. The awareness can also be translated as being self-aware, being alert— that’s called sampajañña. It actually involves two things: One is noticing how the breath …
- The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis… After all, so many different desires are clamoring for our attention. We have to decide which ones are worth following, which ones are not. So subconsciously we do a kind of cost-benefit analysis: Is this desire worth the effort? The problem is that some of the considerations that go into that cost-benefit analysis are pretty stupid. A lot of them have to …
- Stepping Out of Truth Games… You’re trying to make that the center of your attention, and that’s the center of your desire right now: to get the mind stay here. The problem is that the mind has lots of other worlds at its disposal, because it has lots of other desires. This is the process the Buddha calls becoming, where, based on a particular desire, you take …
- Developed in Body & Mind… What we’re trying to do here is to give rise to a sense of pleasure, let it spread through the body, nourish the body, benefit the body, but keep our attention anchored with the breath. The pleasure will do its work. The sense of fullness will do its work. You don’t have to go wallowing in them to get the most out …
- Attachment to the Body… Focus your attention there, rather than on the tactile sensation of the air coming in and out through the nose. When the Buddha talks about the in-and-out breath, he classifies it as part of the wind-property in the body and not as a tactile sensation. So get to know how the energy is flowing through the body: where you feel it …
- Friends… Yet if you take time to get to know it, really listen to it, really pay attention to it, you find there’s a lot more to it than just in and out: all kinds of qualities to the breath. They create all kinds of feeling tones in the body, some of which are useful, some of which are not. Learning how to sort …
- Stand Your Ground… It’s just that we haven’t paid attention to our breathing. That gets us irritated, and the irritation spreads out from there. So if you can maintain a sense of having a comfortable center inside, your sensitive point inside, then you’re cared for regardless of whatever else is going on. You find that that sensitive point actually becomes a position of strength …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
