Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Stretch Your Mind
     … And then you can focus it, and you’ve got the right attitude to bring to your focus, because there will still be a commentary going on in the mind as you’re trying to get the mind to settle down. When things are going well, you remind yourself, “Don’t get excited, because you’ve botched it many times in the past.” Usually … 
  3. The Brahmavihāras Aren’t Enough
     … So the brahmavihāras are a good focus for concentration. Some people find them more congenial than the breath. And if you’re one of those people, go ahead: Develop thoughts of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity in all directions for all beings. But remember: Those practices can take you only so far. There comes a point where you have to start analyzing what … 
  4. Chanting Before Meditation
     … You want to be with this one topic, but think of it as a broad focus. You’re aware of the whole body. The breath may be more prominent in one part than the other, but you’re aware of the fact that it can be related to other parts as well. The other function of right mindfulness is what the Buddha calls putting … 
  5. A Recipe for Jhana
     … You don’t focus on the mango. You focus on the roots of the tree. You water them. You give them fertilizer. The mango will take care of itself. This way, you learn an important lesson: Things happen according to causes. Get the causes right, and the effects will have to come. At the same time, the Buddha’s instructions get you developing both … 
  6. The Buddha Aimed High
     … So that’s the focus of the teachings. It’s the kernel of the four noble truths. You solve the problem of suffering not by solving suffering, but by solving the cause. You’ve got to abandon the cause. We want to abandon the suffering, we want to push it away, but it doesn’t work. You’ve got to find the cause. It … 
  7. A Better Place to Feed
     … If there’s a pain in any part of the body, you don’t make that your primary focus. Try to focus on the parts of the body you can make comfortable by the way you breathe and by the way you perceive how the breath is moving through the body. Then you can use that sense of comfort to spread through those patterns … 
  8. What You Bring to the Meditation
     … Even though the desire starts by focusing on the results you want, you have to learn how to change the focus slightly by learning how to desire the causes—whatever is required to get things right. That requires persistence. That’s the second of what the Buddha calls the four bases of success, or the four bases of power. Here we’re talking about … 
  9. Songkran
     … You focus on what needs to be done right here, right now, because you don’t know how much time you have left. There’s a lot that needs to be done to straighten out the mind so that we can live well and, when the time comes to die, we die well. The question is, have you done that work yet? For almost … 
  10. Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog
     … Because you’re trying to learn to be more sensitive to your own mind, and the technique is simply a way of developing that process of sensitivity, giving you something to focus on to develop your sensitivities. After all, the things we’re trying to find here, the things we’re trying to learn here are already happening. They’re already here. They’ve … 
  11. Immersed in the Body
     … When we say to focus on the breath, it’s an unfortunate image. It gives the impression that your mind is like a camera, and you’re going to focus the lens of the camera on something outside of the camera. It’d be better to say, “Wear the breath. Put it on, wear it. Think of it being all around you.” And you … 
  12. Doing
     … Your focus is out someplace else. Think of the mind as like the lens of a camera whose focal point is way far away. You want to bring the focal point in, bring it in, bring it in until it’s actually inside the lens. You can watch what the mind is doing, and this is strategically important, because everything that we know about … 
  13. To Be Trustworthy
     … You focus on them in and of themselves—for example, the body in and of itself. If you think about the body in terms of the world, as your tool for getting things out of the world, and then all of a sudden the tool’s being taken away from you—it grows ill, it ages, it dies—you can start doing some very … 
  14. Not-self for the Sake of Happiness
     … Your sense of yourself meditating right here comes at least from the fact that you know you can focus here or you could focus someplace else. You have the choice—and you’re choosing to stay here. You can change the way you breathe. You can change the perceptions you have around the breath and how you’re relating to the body. Whatever sense … 
  15. To Know the Buddha
     … You really want to do it, so you learn how to focus your desires in such a way that they don’t get in the way. All too often it’s easy to focus so much on what we want out of this that we forget to pay careful attention to really wanting to do it right. It’s a meticulous job, like those … 
  16. Feeding Off the Future
     … Rather than allowing the different members of the band to focus on how hungry they were, they kept laughing and joking. And that made the hunger a lot easier to take. So you’ve got to figure out some way to encourage yourself, to keep the mind in a good mood. This is why gladdening the mind is an important step in the meditation … 
  17. Some Assembly Required
     … This is why we focus on the present moment to begin with. If the present moment were already determined, there’d be nothing you could do, there’d be no reason to focus here; you might as well wander around in whatever thought comes into the mind. But it’s because you can make a difference here—and it’s going to make a … 
  18. Breathing Easy
     … Of course, another way of breathing easy is what we’re doing right now, breathing easy as we focus on the breath. He says once you’re aware of the way the long breath feels the body, the short breath feels in the body, and you’ve become aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out … 
  19. Intelligent about Change
     … Well, what makes the breath strong is your focus. The focus strengthens the breath, and then as the breath gets more consistently comfortable, you find that it gets easier to stay focused. The two qualities help each other along—strength of focus and strength of body—but the preliminary strength comes from your concentration. So remember that strength of mind is what matters most … 
  20. The Third Frame of Reference
     … So focus on that space and think of it spreading throughout the body, out beyond the body. She maintained that perception. Then later, as she withdrew from that, she found that everything in her body was back to normal. She didn’t die. But she had learned something important: When things get really bad in the body, you can go to space and just … 
  21. Stay Centered
     … The center that you focused on during the sit—or, if you find there’s a center that’s better to focus on while you’re moving around: Go there and don’t let go. Even as you do work around the monastery, work around the house, work around wherever you are, try to maintain this sense of a center. Take the energy that … 
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