Search results for: "Focus"
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- The Skill of Renunciation… So when you’re going to focus on the breath, you can focus anywhere in the body. Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths and notice where the sensation of breathing is most prominent, where it’s clearest and easiest to see that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Focus your attention there—and …
- Doing Aggregates… You focus your mind on the breath, and then you have to watch it to make sure it stays there, make sure it doesn’t wander off. This is a quality called alertness. You combine it with mindfulness, remembering what you’re here for, and with ardency, the desire to do it right. And it’s with these three qualities that you learn. In …
- Mental Seclusion… You can focus your attention fully on the mind. In this way, we develop what the Buddha calls the heightened mind, the mind that’s not a slave to defilements, not a slave to the issues of the world, a mind that can lift itself up above. But to develop that kind of power, we first have to make the mind very small. In …
- How Completion is Found… So you focus on the step. You don’t focus on how much time you’re got left, whether it’s going to be one more day here at the monastery or five months at the monastery or however long. Try to put that thought out of your mind. Just say, “I’ve got this moment.” And what do you do with this moment …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… To begin with, you can focus your awareness at any one spot in the body where the sensation of breathing is very clear. It might be the tip of the nose, the throat, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, any spot where you know clearly: “Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out.” There’s a sense of rightness …
- In Search of What is Skillful… If you’re not evaluating the breath, you’ll be evaluating something else—outside of the meditation—and you will have lost your focus. So evaluation is part of the wall that protects your concentration, protects the singleness of your focus, part of keeping the breath in mind, keeping focused on the breath in and of itself*. *And right there, you’ve got all …
- Training the Mind to Train the Mind… This is why we don’t focus directly on the mind to begin with. We focus on the breath. And even with the breath, sometimes it requires that we do a little thinking first about why we might want to stay with it. One of the reasons is indicated in those chants at the beginning of the meditation: reflecting on aging, illness, death, and …
- Diagnosing the Mind… If you find yourself dozing off or getting very dull if you focus on the breath, move around. Two breaths in this spot, two breaths in that spot, keep chasing the breath around the body until you wake up. What this comes down to is learning how to diagnose yourself. Remember, the Buddha talked of himself as being a doctor for the diseases of …
- Mental Stirrings… He says to focus on the present moment. Watch what the thought is doing right now. And if you watch carefully enough, all the layers that get involved in creating a thought, maintaining the thought, will become clear. You start out in that process by actually not paying attention to the thought and by paying attention instead to the breath, focusing on the breath …
- Breath Energies… So when we come to focus on the breath, some people find it difficult territory to negotiate because they’ve been subconsciously using the breath energies to amplify emotions. You can get your heart to start beating a certain way; there’s a tightness in the stomach or in the chest. This is basically how the parts of the mind that want to go …
- The Karma of Pain… Notice how your focus is affecting the pain. I’ve found that if there’s a pain in the back, it’s usually good to focus first in front. If there’s a pain in the right, focus on the left. In other words, at least for the time being, you’re trying not only to get unentangled from the pain but also to …
- Limitations… That gives a sense of space to the mind, and also energy, so you don’t get tied down with the realization that we have only a limited amount of time, a limited amount of energy, to really focus on what’s important. But the even better news is that if you learn how to focus your time and energy on what’s really …
- Stay with the Breath… You don’t even have to focus on the Dhamma talk. If there’s anything relevant to what you’re doing, it’ll come right into your awareness and you’ll notice it. You’ll hear it. If it’s not relevant to what you’re doing, it’s a distraction. So let it go. It may be useful for somebody else, or for …
- Doing Meditation… Sometimes it’s simply the choice to focus on one thing rather than another. Other times, it goes further than that: coming up with perceptions, coming up with ideas, coming up with plans, deciding to do something. There’s always activity going on in the mind. It’s no wonder we feel such a lack of peace in our lives, because the mind is …
- Empathetic Joy… Which are you going to focus on? Ajaan Lee recommends trying the pleasant ones. The Buddha says to try to nurture the pleasant ones by the way you breathe. Steps five and six in the breath meditation tell you to learn how to breathe in and out with a sense of rapture, breathe in and out with a sense of pleasure. People are not …
- What We Have in Common… So the extent to which we focus on that as our priority is what brings us together regardless of our backgrounds. The Buddha did have an appreciation of diversity, but the kind of diversity he appreciated was that of diverse talents. He gave a list of his pre-eminent monk-, nun-, layman-, and laywoman- disciples, pointing out the distinctive talents or virtues of each …
- Bursting Bubbles… In other words, when the weather is feeling hot outside, you can focus on the water in the body, and it cools you down. There are cool sensations someplace in the body, and you focus on those. You’re trying to make them more prominent. Simply by paying attention to them, keeping them in mind, you can make them stronger. When you’re feeling …
- Two Kinds of Middle… So when pleasure comes up in the meditation, don’t let yourself lose focus. Don’t abandon your focus on the breath to wallow in the pleasure. Think of the pleasure as something you’re going to use as a tool. And then start using it as a tool. This way you develop the mindfulness that keeps you from getting waylaid by the pleasure …
- Your Hair Is on Fire… This is one of the reasons why we focus on the breath, to give the mind something else to do aside from its old habits. Then the Buddha also taught Rahula to think about the theme of inconstancy, that these thoughts that appear in the mind are pretty unreliable. They come and they go. And they come again, and then they go again. Or …
- Our Variegated Minds… At the same time, learn to develops some equanimity around the things you can’t change so that you can focus on the things you can change, the things you can work with. That’s why, even though we’re different, we can connect on the areas where what we have in common is good, what we have in common is helpful. It takes …
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