Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. 1. The Entertaining Breath
    Okay, here’s your opportunity to focus entirely on the breath. You have no other duties right now, no other obligations. Just put the body in a posture where you don’t have to worry about it. Sit up straight, look straight ahead, close your eyes, hands on your lap, right hand on top of the left. And there you are, the breath. Look … 
  3. Informing the Whole Committee
     … Okay, the message can get through so that you can stop reading and focus attention on the pain. Which means that there’s part of the mind that’s still surveying the body to make sure nothing really painful or horrible is happening, while another part of the mind focuses on reading the book. But the walls can also be problematic. This is one … 
  4. Strategic Thinking
     … In the same way, as we go through the world, we have to focus on other people’s good points. If all you do is focus on their bad points, you start wondering, “Why should I be good? I live in this miserable world where there are nothing but greedy people fighting one another all the time.” If that’s all you see, then … 
  5. Breathing to Awakening
     … Our focus is further out. So we want to bring our focus back in and get ourselves acquainted with this breath energy in the body. Where does it flow? How does it flow? How do you promote it? I know some people who push it around a lot, but, by pushing it around, they’re not pushing the breath; they’re pushing the blood … 
  6. Seeing Through Your Defilements
     … Where is it most prominent? Focus your attention there. It may not be on the air coming in and out of the nose. It may be the movement in the chest or the movement of the stomach. But wherever it’s clearest to see, focus your attention there. And then ask yourself, “Is it comfortable?” If you’re not sure, you can try different … 
  7. A Strong Sense of Self
     … When is the perception of self conducive to true happiness, and when is perception of not-self conducive to true happiness? Right now, you’re going to take control of your acts of attention to focus in on the present moment—that’s yours for the time being—and focus on your ability to adjust the breath—that will be yours as well. As … 
  8. Take the One Seat
     … When you focus this way, what are the results? When you focus that way, what are the results? When you breathe this way, when you breathe that way, what are the results? You learn by doing and observing. If something doesn’t come out well, you turn around and do it again, changing things a little bit. You get to watch the mind in … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Self-hatred
     … If you want to solve the problem of the “I” that you don’t like, don’t focus so much on obliterating the “I.” Focus more on the things you want that this “I” to be in service of: your views about the world, what’s possible to attain out there, and also your sense of how you should go about it. You may … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. Strength for the Heat
     … And the strength of your focus is not going to be aggravating the heat. It’s a cool focus. Try to maintain that. Here’s where you bring in the strength of your persistence and mindfulness, just remembering where to stay, remembering that whatever the level of concentration, it may not be as strong as you’d like or as pleasurable as you’d … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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