Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Anapanasati Day
     … But you can’t help but spend some time in the fourth, which means looking at things as dhammas and then noticing how inconstant they are, regardless of how steady or glad you can make the mind or how, through the practice of concentration, you can release the mind from, say, a factor of a lower level of concentration or the things that keep … 
  3. No-Tech Meditation
     … I was teaching in Malaysia once to a group of people who had seen many teachers coming through, and I talked about doing concentration, doing mindfulness practice. One of the questions after the talk was, “You talk about meditation as if it’s something you do, but we’ve been told that you don’t do anything. Mindfulness is just allowing things to arise … 
  4. A Matter of Life & Death
     … Sometimes it can be a difficult place, conducive in the sense that it’s helping to test the meditation, helping to test your concentration, helping to test your insight. The texts often talk about how important it is when your concentration is still weak that you find a good place to meditate that’s very quiet, very conducive, very comfortable. But then when it … 
  5. Remembering Ajaan Suwat
     … The same with concentration: The Buddha sets out the pattern for right concentration, and it’s amazing that, of all the factors of the path, this is the one that’s most often cut out. People say, well, we really don’t want jhana. Or maybe, we can do with just the first seven factors of the path. Yet this was the factor of … 
  6. Seeing Danger in Birth
     … heedful in our virtue, heedful in our concentration, heedful in our discernment. Heedful in virtue means realizing that whatever we might gain by even the slightest infraction of the precepts isn’t worth it. Those little gains get washed away, and then you’re left with the kamma. Heedful in your concentration means trying to be as careful as possible in your efforts to … 
  7. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration. We try to learn how to sit through pain and maintain our concentration because we’re going to need the concentration when the body and mind are in pain, so that we’re not pained along with them, so that we’re not driven by desperation to jump for whatever appears. But at the … 
  8. The Second Noble Truth
     … This image applies both to mindfulness and to concentration. The Buddha doesn’t make a clear distinction between mindfulness practice and concentration practice. In fact, the establishings of mindfulness are, in and of themselves, the themes of right concentration. You stay, for instance, with the body, in and of itself, as you’re ardent, alert, mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to … 
  9. Success Through Maturity
    Success Through Maturity November 2, 2017 There are four qualities that the Buddha said can bring about success in the practice of meditation, and in particular, success in concentration: desire; persistence, or effort; intentness; and using your powers of judgment wisely. Of those four, three are omitted in modern instructions in meditation. In fact, the three are said to be bad in modern meditation … 
  10. Where Your Mind Gravitates
     … So we get the mind into concentration, give a few karate chops to the things that would pull it out of concentration—in other words, deal with these issues in a way that gets you past them quickly, so you get the mind in a position of strength—and then you’re going to have to turn around and look more carefully at its … 
  11. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … When you’re starting out, he talks about virtue, concentration, and discernment. In doing so, he’s actually getting you to loop things back through name and form, right past attention and intention. So, without giving you the terms or giving you the whole picture, he’s getting you started on the right approach—how to use these functions in the mind. With virtue … 
  12. Your Main Foundation
     … This analysis of mind states works its way up to more subtle things, like a mind that’s concentrated or not, or a mind that has reached a state beyond which it has ever been before or not. Those deal with more refined states of concentration. And then finally there are mental qualities, things that get in the way of your concentration like the … 
  13. Dhamma in Vinaya
     … All of them can be conducive to getting the mind into concentration. Then you can bring the same analysis to your concentration practice. You have the intention to stay with the breath. And you’ve got the object, which is the breath. Then there’s your perception. What perceptions are useful? You can perceive the breath as a whole-body process. You can perceive … 
  14. Commit & Reflect
     … As you work on getting the mind more and more at ease in the concentration, more and more inclined to want to get into concentration, more skilled at it, you begin to see where there’s the craving that causes the suffering, where there’s the ignorance that causes suffering. You see where you’re putting unnecessary burdens on the mind through your lack … 
  15. Using Right Resolve Rightly
     … In other words, you’re focused on the directed thought and evaluation of concentration: “How do I get to understand my breath? How do I get to understand whatever it is that I’m going to take as my object for concentration and adjust it in a way, adjust the mind in a way, so that the object and the mind fit together, and … 
  16. Unraveling the Present
     … When you’re dealing with concentration, it morphs into questions like: Is your mind really still? Is it really solid? Is it really centered? Then, when you start looking at the rest of your life from the point of view of that concentrated mind, look for the stress, look for the impermanence, look for the extent to which these things are not under your … 
  17. Comparing Mind
     … so that you can begin to have a range of comparisons as to what kind of concentration is skillful concentration, what kind of concentration is a little foggy; when you’re putting too much pressure on it, when you’re not putting enough. You need things to compare. And this is a skillful use of the comparing mind. The Buddha calls this “analysis of … 
  18. A Poker Mind
     … For instance, your main duty right now is to develop concentration because that’s part of the path. So in the beginning, we take the first three frames of reference—body, feeling, mind—and we try to bring them together. They may not fit quite together at first, which is why we have to do a lot of directed thought and evaluation: figuring out … 
  19. Forest Bathing
     … So he watched the fear in his mind, and got deep into concentration as the fear fell away. He just stood there in concentration. He came out, and the moon had moved quite a bit. He must have been in concentration for a couple of hours. The tiger was gone. As a result of this experience, Ajaan Khao learned an important lesson about fear … 
  20. Chickens from Hell
     … One of the purposes of getting the mind into concentration is to step back from the whole process and learn to see it as it’s happening. At the same time, we practice concentration to give the mind an alternative place to feed. Otherwise, we’ll just keep feeding on whatever the chickens produce. When the Buddha provides analogies for different parts of the … 
  21. The Whole Elephant
     … the development of concentration, the development of some of the psychic powers that come from concentration. But the vision of the deathless: That’s the whole elephant. And it’s something human beings can see. I was talking with a scholar recently who was saying that he didn’t think that any conditioned human being could see the deathless. As far as he was … 
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