Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 41
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. True to the Practice
     … So give this practice your full attention. The more fully you attend to it, the more you can see what its potentials are. The more you’re true in doing the practice, the more it’s going to take you to that truth, the truth of the happiness the Buddha talked about. So you’ve got a whole hour here, and this is all … 
  7. Inner Voice Lessons
     … If you start paying attention to what you say in the course of the day and try to make it more skillful, you begin to see that it does have an effect on how you relate to other people, how other people relate to you. The whole context of your life is strongly affected by your speech. As you work on that fact, the … 
  8. Ways to Think
     … It’s a useful strategy for focusing your attention on what really needs to be done. But at the same time, the Buddha wants you to develop transcendent right view. Look at things simply in terms of cause and effect: skillful cause leading to the end of suffering, unskillful cause leading to suffering. This way of looking at things doesn’t require a sense … 
  9. Mindfulness as Refuge
     … If they do come in, you don’t pay them any attention. Or if you pay them attention, you’ve got to let them go. You put them aside again and again and again until you can stay with the breath more continually without having to worry about wandering off. And how do you do that? You try to make the breath as interesting … 
  10. Twigs & Branches
     … There’s the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to create through the way you pay attention to the breath. There’s the perception, the image you hold in mind of how the breath flows into and through the body. There are the fabrications of directed thought and evaluation, as you direct your thinking to the breath and then evaluate how it’s going … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...