Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Bases of Success
     … Notice where the breath is easiest to observe and focus your attention there. Allow the quality of the breath to be comfortable. Try not to squeeze it or push it too much. Let it come in freely, go out freely. You can either let it find its own rhythm or you can nudge it a little bit, to see if longer breathing would feel … 
  3. Breathing Skillfully
     … Where do you feel that? Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if you like the way you’re breathing. You can breathe in lots of different ways. You can do long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow, or in long, out short; in short, out long; heavy, light. The breath is yours to play with. Find a way of breathing that feels good, that … 
  4. A Frame of Reference
     … Notice which spot your attention naturally gravitates to and allow it to stay right there. But as you’re focused on that spot, don’t tighten up around it. Don’t put too much pressure on it, just enough pressure to allow you to stay with that one spot and not lose it. As for any other issues that may come through the mind … 
  5. Many Desires, Many Selves
     … There are acts of attention: What are you going to pay attention to? What are you going to ignore? You learn to look at your mind in impersonal terms. The problem is that a sense of self can move in here as well, and it can be either helpful or not helpful. A helpful sense of self is one that says, “I can do … 
  6. On Not Twisting the Cow’s Horn
     … That’s where you have to pay attention to the other parts of the description of jhana, which is that you put aside unskillful qualities and you put aside sensuality. In other words, any thoughts about how you’d like things to be a particular way in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations: You’ve got to learn how to drop them … 
  7. The Skill of Restraint
     … Does your attention go flowing out? Do you lose your sense of the body? If you do, it’s a sign that your looking isn’t all that skillful. You want to be able to stay in the body as you look, as you listen, to maintain your sense of the breath energy throughout the body. If you can’t, that’s a sign … 
  8. Right Learning
     … He comes up and he’ll say all kinds of outrageous things to get your attention, but you just act as if he’s not there. You know he’s there, but you don’t have to get involved. After a while he’ll go away. Or you can think of it as a beggar coming to get something out of you. Again, if … 
  9. The Return of Chickens from Hell
     … Because we’re focused so much on anticipating the food we want, we’re not paying very careful attention as to what the raw material is and sometimes we’re not paying careful attention to how we fashion things. So the food we end up with can make us sick. And on top of that, as I’ve said before, these chickens are the … 
  10. The Dhamma Wheel
     … But it’s by focusing our attention here in the present that we get to do the work that needs to be done: developing right view, right resolve, all the way down through the right concentration. So you focus on what you’re doing, and then you ask yourself, “Is it skillful?” If it’s not skillful, you do your best to make it … 
  11. Ironies
     … So our attention has to be pointed back. This is a theme that goes throughout our lives. We want happiness and yet we so often do things that cause suffering. We don’t even realize that we’re the ones who are causing the suffering, partly because we’re interested in other things, and partly because we’re not very alert, not very mindful … 
  12. Inner Negotiating Skills
     … It’s based on this that you develop a quality called compunction, along with appropriate attention. As the Buddha said, heedfulness is the root of all skillfulness. Compunction means that you really do care about the consequences of your actions. You’re not apathetic, you’re not defeatist, you realize that you can make a choice and you can make the choices well. You … 
  13. Effective Self-Discipline
     … You have to focus your attention on them and get them right. Right now the causes are being mindful of the breath, being alert to the breath, and being ardent as you stick with the breath. Those are the issues you focus on. Sometimes it seems paradoxical. On the one hand, we’re looking for big results here—the deathless, the unconditioned, nibbana. And … 
  14. Distractive Thoughts
     … If you pay any attention to the beggar, the beggar’s got you. Or a crazy person coming to talk to you: Even if you focus on the crazy person just enough to tell the crazy person to go away, the crazy person’s got you. These thoughts keep trying to pull you into their conversation, into their crazy worlds. So you have to … 
  15. Self View & Conceit
     … As for the pleasure, you don’t let the pleasure absorb all of your attention. When you’re with the breath, you don’t leave the breath. It’s a matter of learning how to be with pleasure, sometimes very intense pleasure, and yet not focus on the pleasure itself. Keep your eye on the breath. Stay with the breath. It’s like that … 
  16. Pleasure on the Path
     … All of this has to do with your intentions and your attention: how you pay attention to things, and your perception of this whole issue of potentials in the body. It’s not as if pains and pleasures are totally given. The given is the potential that come from your past karma, but there’s also what you contribute right now. The impact it … 
  17. Heedfulness
     … Sometimes you can actually make it go away, because a lot of pains come simply from the fact that you’re not paying attention to certain parts of your body, and the breath energy in those parts gets stagnant. But if you take an interest and breathe freely through those parts of the body, the pains will disband. Sometimes a pain in one part … 
  18. The Time & Place to Let Go
     … But as for other things that might come up that demand your attention, you can say, “Wait a minute, you’re not really me, you’re not really mine. I don’t need you right now. This is not the time and place.” As long as you’re going to keep changing your sense of who you are and what your responsibilities are and … 
  19. The Skill of Letting Go
     … Still, that realization should focus your attention inside. The source is here. Mano pubbangamā dhammā, mano-seṭṭhā: Phenomena are led by the mind, created by the mind, dominated by the mind. So you want to look inside. The next three steps have to do with not just the fact of fabrication but also the value of fabrication. First you want to see, “What is … 
  20. Don’t Stop with Acceptance
     … There are also acts of attention and acts of intention. What is your intention with regard to the pain? Maybe that’s aggravating the pain. Do you want it to go away? Where is it going to go? And how do you pay attention to it? Here again, there’s perception. What are the images you have around the pain that solidify the pain … 
  21. The Grass at the Gate
     … Pay attention to your feet and your hands. Where are they right now? How do they feel? Tense? If they feel tense, relax them. Go through them finger by finger, toe by toe, through the palms of the hands, the backs of the hands, the soles of the feet, the tops of the feet, relaxing all the little spots of tension you find. You … 
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