Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. The Energy You Broadcast
     … So give all your attention to this inner experience of the body, this inner experience of the breath. Listen to its ins and outs and you’ll find they have a lot of good things to tell you—if you’re sensitive to what they want to say. If you have a lot of preconceived notions about what they should be saying or what … 
  3. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
     … How does it pass away? What’s the allure? Why do you go for it? What are the drawbacks? This involves a fair amount of thinking and observation, and focuses attention again inside, just as the precepts focus attention inside. They may be dealing with your external actions, but the big issue in the precepts, of course, is your intention. What was your intention … 
  4. The Practice of Right View
    The Practice of Right View April 22, 2009 When there’s a talk during meditation, don’t focus your attention on the talk. Focus on your breath. The purpose of the talk is to act like a fence, to catch you when you wander away from the breath, to keep pointing you back to the breath. Because it’s right at this spot—where … 
  5. Victory over Death
     … I’ve known a lot of people who’ve said, “That’s an awful lot of attention to pay to your actions.” But the proper response is, “What else are you going to pay attention to?” You learn from acting. You learn by doing. You especially learn by trying to do your best and, when you see that your best is not good enough … 
  6. The Constancy of the Body
     … Whether you pay attention to it or not, that’s what it’s doing. It’s not looking for your approval. It’s just doing what it does, with a certain constancy. So at the very least, try to make your mind as constant as the breath. Stick with it all the way in, all the way out. And then all the way in … 
  7. The Pursuit of True Happiness
     … It’s just that we’re not paying attention. We don’t usually think that there’s anything there to pay attention to. Yet the energy of the breath is our basic energy in life. It stands to reason that if the breath energy is good, the body will be healthier, the mind will be more at ease. It will have a better place … 
  8. New Feeding Habits
     … So, given that nobody’s forcing you to breathe in an uncomfortable way, why do you let yourself breathe in an uncomfortable way? Largely because you haven’t been paying attention. So give the breath full attention. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? Other parts of the body that feel restricted as you breathe in: Can you loosen up those restrictions … 
  9. Duties in the Present
     … You can focus your attention in any part of the body where it’s easy to see that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, and the mind feels comfortable being centered there. These are your resources. Try to keep them together: Keep your thoughts with the breath, keep thinking about the breath each time it comes in, each … 
  10. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … how you visualize the breath to yourself, how you pay attention to the different parts of the body, how you react to the parts of the body where there are patterns of tension. Can you focus on them in a way that begins to disperse the tension? Can you spread your awareness around so that it envelops the body and dissolves away any bits … 
  11. Hindrances to the Heightened Mind
     … In fact, when your eyes are closed and there’s nothing much else to distract your attention, they’ll come on in full force. So your first lesson in dealing with the hindrances is: Don’t wait until you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. As you go through the day, watch over how you look at things, how you listen to things … 
  12. Understanding Through Developing
     … So pay attention to what you’re doing right here. Because in the act of paying attention to your actions—that’s where the real discernment lies. And not just any actions—the actions of following the path, developing the path, taking it as far as it can go.
  13. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … The fact that they’ve been causing suffering in the mind is simply because you haven’t been paying them any attention. When you pay them attention, you see, “I don’t really want to go there. Why am I doing this?” You stop. But there are other unskillful states that are not like that. They require what the Buddha calls exerting a fabrication … 
  14. Strong Through Commitment
     … You label the red as “red.” In the next step, part of you asks, “What does it mean?” “It means ‘Stop!’” The next question is, “Is it worth listening to?” And the voice that says, “Yes, listen to this, pay attention”—that’s also perception. We go through life, applying perceptions to things. We have to remember that these perceptions are only partial. They … 
  15. Inner Wealth
     … So pay careful attention to how you’re breathing. Take a couple of good long and deep in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the process of breathing in the body, that sense of energy flow. That’s what you’re actually focusing on when you focus on the breath—not so much the air coming in and out of the lungs … 
  16. Self-Correct
     … When you breathe in, where do you feel it? Focus your attention there. And be alert to the fact that this may not be where you ordinarily might think you should be feeling the breath. We know the air comes in through the nose, goes down through the throat, into the lungs. But when the Buddha talks about breath, he’s talking about the … 
  17. Good Heart, Good Mind
     … Find a spot in the body that’s especially sensitive to the in-and-out breathing, and keep your attention right there. Be very careful to breathe in such a way that it feels open, relaxed. And then from that spot, think of that sense of openness spreading through the different parts of the body, so that it’s more and more pleasant to … 
  18. Training the Mind to Train the Mind
     … Such a large part of our culture points us away from paying attention to these things. They say, “Well, you can’t do much about these things anyhow. So you might as well not even think about them.” But these are the big facts in life, the big things that cause us to suffer. And the Buddha’s message, of course, is that you … 
  19. Generosity & Gratitude
     … People tend to get very defensive when you bring it to their attention that their happiness depends on other people’s suffering, and they do everything they can to justify it. They say, “Those people don’t matter,” or, “They’re not really suffering,” or, “That’s just got to be the way it is.” Well, it doesn’t. You have the choice to … 
  20. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … When you shift your attention to feelings, it’s very much connected with the idea that you want to breathe in a way that feels refreshing, feels full, so that you’re not squeezing the breath energy out as you breathe out, and you’re not dragging things in as you breathe in. You allow the breath energy to have its fullness, to have … 
  21. Ingenuity
     … If lights appear in your meditation, basically don’t pay them any attention, unless there’s a white light, and you can control it. In other words, you can make it appear, make it disappear, make it go far away, bring it close, make it large, make it small, so that you know that you’re totally in control of it. Then you can … 
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