Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Endurance & Contentment
     … Ask yourself: “Can you breathe? Can you focus on your breath? Do the circumstances around you allow for that?” If they allow for that, then the problem is inside, so you turn and look inside, because remember what the limits of contentment are: You content yourself with outside circumstances that are good enough to practice, so you can focus on being discontent with the … 
  3. What Right Mindfulness Remembers
     … Your focus does make a difference: where you focus, how you focus, and what you do with the sensations that arise. Try to focus in a way that gives rise to a sense of well-being, refreshment. The factors of jhana include pleasure and rapture. Rapture is one of those words that can cover all kinds of phenomena, from very gentle to very intense … 
  4. The Desire to End All Desires
     … This is why, when we meditate, we focus on the mind in the present moment. Now, you can’t focus directly on the mind as you start out, so you focus on something that’s really close: the breath. You do what you can to get the mind to stay with the breath. Sometimes you need to use a meditation word; sometimes you use … 
  5. Facing Pain
     … The techniques of tranquility basically come down to realizing that you don’t have to focus on the pain, any of the pains in life. You have a better place to focus. This is why you focus on the breath: to create a sense of well-being, to create a sense of your refuge inside, a place where you can go when the pain … 
  6. Past Intentions, Present Intentions
     … So focus on that, focus on what you can do rather than on the things you can’t do. This is where equanimity is important in the meditation. Whatever’s going to come up from past intentions, you’ve got to have a lot of equanimity toward it. You don’t get excited about it, you don’t get depressed about it, you just … 
  7. Freedom through Restraint
     … As you focus in, though, you find that things open up in the mind as you get to know the present moment a lot better. With the mind focused in the present moment, you see the mind a lot more clearly than you would if you just followed it as it wandered around. This is why even though the focus may be a little … 
  8. A World Apart
     … Yet the body’s going to leave us at death, so why focus on the breath?” Well, the answer is that when you focus on the breath, you’re not with just the breath. You also get to see the mind more and more clearly. By giving it something nearby to focus on like this, it’s easier to see it clearly in action … 
  9. A Positive-Sum Game
    Okay, focus on your breath. And as for thoughts that go in any other direction, just put them aside. This is a game where there are no losers. Each time you can put aside a thought, you win. As for the thought, it doesn’t lose. It just goes away. There’s no person there losing. So just keep coming back to the breath … 
  10. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … As you focus on the steps and make sure you’re doing each step correctly, they’ll lead you there. Just focus on doing them well. After all, that’s how the Buddha himself gained awakening. He tried different paths. He looked carefully at what he was doing and he gave each path a fair amount of time. Then he stopped to reflect, “This … 
  11. The Breathing Game
     … At the same time, your focus gets a lot more solid because it’s not dependent on staying with one little point. If your focus is too one-pointed, the slightest little thing can knock you off that point, and that destroys your concentration. But if your focus is broad, things can come into the range of your focus, and they don’t knock … 
  12. Count Your Blessings
     … Even in the meditation monasteries you find some people coming who try to get in the way of your practice—all kinds of things, but you don’t focus on them. You focus on where your strengths are, you focus on where the support is, and try to make the most of that. When you do that, you find you have a lot more … 
  13. Focus on the Precepts
     … They focus on specific actions that you just don’t do. You also don’t get other people to do them or, if someone does do them, you don’t condone the action. As they get you to focus specifically on your actions, that’s training in discernment. After all, discernment is focused on: What exactly are you doing? You’re doing the causes … 
  14. Determined to Make a Difference
     … But it is possible to take a magnifying glass and focus the sun’s rays on things and actually set fire to them. In the same way, it is possible to focus your desires on good things and make a genuine difference in your life. That’s what the perfection of determination is all about. The Pali word for determination, adhiṭṭhāna, can also mean … 
  15. Play with the Breath
    When you focus on the breath, you want to be on good terms with it. Don’t force it too much. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and see if it feels good. If a long breathing does feel good, keep it up. If it gets tiresome after a while, you can change. Longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more … 
  16. Training Wheels
    Usually when we start the instructions for breath meditation, we start by saying, “Focus on one spot in the body where the breath is most obvious. Allow the breath to become comfortable at that spot.” In some cases, this involves allowing. In other cases, it involves experimenting to see what kind of breathing feels good there. Then, once that spot has become comfortable, you … 
  17. Breath Meditation: Four Sets of Tools
     … In particular, if you can focus on some subtle sensations in the body, don’t focus on the intense sensations of movement in the body. Subtler sensations are what you want to focus on, and that can get you past the sense that there’s pressure in the body. You can ask yourself, “If there’s a sense of pressure, what’s pushing against … 
  18. Intelligent Equanimity
     … Where are you going to focus your energies to get the best results? The reflection connecting the principle of karma with equanimity is meant to clear the decks so that you can focus right there, on your present actions. That’s where the true issue is. That’s what underlies the basic structure of reality. When you can focus here, you don’t get … 
  19. A Gift of Strength
     … They point to you why you need to meditate and where you have to focus. You focus on your intentions, and that leads to persistence, the next strength. The focus of your persistence is trying to develop skillful intentions, to let go of unskillful ones. Learn to look for the mind states that cause unskillful intentions: greed, anger, and delusion. You want to do … 
  20. Levels of Truth
    Levels of Truth October 7, 2010 Close your eyes, focus on the breath, notice where you feel the breathing. You might start off with a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths to emphasize where in the body you sense the breathing process. Then ask yourself: Is it comfortable? If it feels too long, too heavy, too whatever, you can change. Adjust … 
  21. Pleasure & Pain
     … You’ll find sometimes that your level of focus is not steady enough. When that happens, you’re just getting entangled in the pain again. That’s a sign that it’s not time yet to focus on the pain. It’s time to focus back again on the breath, on that sense of comfort wherever it is. In other words, you have to … 
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