Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Own Your Actions
     … It helps keep you focused on the issue of action. Because that’s what the Buddha’s teachings are all about. The word dhamma can also mean action. It’s not a common usage of the word, but it’s there in the language. And for the Buddha, it’s always in the back of the mind. When he gave his list of important … 
  3. Dependent Co-arising Right Now
     … For instance, while you’re focused on the breath right here, you’ve got all three forms of fabrication. You can choose to approach them with ignorance, or you can choose to approach them with knowledge. With ignorance, you’re saying, “Here I am trying to meditate,” and you judge how good a person you are by how well the meditation is going. It … 
  4. Patterns to Happiness
     … For instance, when you’re focused on the breath, you can play with the breath in different ways: long in, long out, short in, short out, long in, short out, short in, long out. Try to see what rhythm feels best for the body right now. You can focus in different spots in the body. Then you can explore the way the breath energy … 
  5. Pain Is a Noble Truth
     … You’re not there focused on the pain and you learn to let it have part of the body. Ajaan Lee’s image is of a house with floorboards, some of which are rotten, and you’re going to lie down on the floor. You don’t choose the rotten spots. You choose the good spots. And as I say you’re lying on … 
  6. Facing Pain Straight On
    When you give the mind an exercise to do—like focusing on the breath, contemplating the virtues of the Buddha, developing goodwill, or even some of practices that are said to be vipassana practice—they’re all actually concentration practices. You tell the mind to do something, you will the mind to do something—that’s the concentration—and then you observe it. That … 
  7. Respect
     … As you’re focusing on the breath, you want to pay attention to how the feelings in the body and the feelings in the mind relate to the breath. What way of breathing is comfortable? What way of breathing is good for the mind? You’ve got three of the frames of reference right there. You’ve got the body and the breath, the … 
  8. Flexibility
     … But if you understand that you keep the mind focused on the breath in a particular way, the continuity with which you do it, the right amount of pressure, and the breath is not too heavy, not too light: You focus on doing that properly, and the rapture just keeps coming and coming and coming until you have enough. Then you can focus in … 
  9. Seeing the Stillness
     … But instead of focusing on the bands of tension, look at the broader sense of ease surrounding them. It’s like looking at the blank spaces on a map. We tend to look at the roads and the cities and the words, but the blank spaces serve a function, too. Otherwise the placement of the roads and cities wouldn’t bear any relation to … 
  10. Questioning Everything
     … As you’re focusing on the breath, the only thoughts that are really relevant are the ones that help you stay focused on the breath, the thoughts that ask questions about: How is this breath? What’s going on with that breath? How’s the mind right now? Is it staying with the breath? What do I need to do in order to help … 
  11. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … The formula says to keep focused, say, on the body in and of itself, ardent, alert, and mindful. Then there’s something you put aside: unskillful things, your greed and distress with reference to the world. Mindfulness is very dualistic—a point that a lot of people miss. The Buddha illustrates this with his simile about monkeys. He said there’s a safe territory … 
  12. Not-selfing Your Selves
     … A sense of self is there inside, focused on the breath, at ease with the breath, having a sense of belonging, a sense of solidity from which it can look at other senses of self and ask the question, “Are they really necessary? Are they really worth the effort that goes into them?” This is also helped by being around people who’ve managed … 
  13. All About Change
     … So as you’re focusing here, notice how the mind wanders off and try to be quick in catching it. The Buddha’s instructions on mindfulness talk about two activities. One is to put aside greed and distress with reference to the world and the other is to stay focused, keeping track of, say, the body in and of itself, or the breath. So … 
  14. Making an Effort
     … And as the formula also says, you “uphold your intent.” In other words, you keep focused on the issue of what’s going on in the mind, whether it’s skillful or not. Those three qualities—desire, persistence, and intent—are also involved in three of the bases for success. And the ability to distinguish between what’s skillful in the mind and what … 
  15. Generating Energy
     … Do you have any room for that kind of breath energy in your concept of the way you breathe? Or do you squash it? Or when you’re feeling tired, which parts of the body are you focusing on as feeling tired? Then check to see which parts are actually okay. Switch your perception around to the parts that are okay. See what that … 
  16. Appropriate Attention
     … So the Buddha’s focusing your attention inside. The same with the cause and the same with the suffering itself: It’s all happening inside here. As it turns out, the solution is also found inside. You take those same five things that, when you cling to them, constitute suffering, and you can turn them into the path. Like right now as we’re … 
  17. Terror & Revulsion
     … All that energy, all that effort focused on things that are not going to help you to find true happiness at all, and in many ways set you up for major disappointments. That’s what the terror’s all about: You see how complacent you’ve been, focusing on things that are of no substance, no real worth, and then doing things that actually … 
  18. Cook Your Mind
     … So that’s what we’re focusing on right now, which is why we call the practice bhāvanā, which means to develop. As you get the mind on the path, you start with right view. Right view is the Buddha’s way of describing what the problem is, how it can be solved. The remaining factors of the path are there to help you … 
  19. The Wear & Tear of Life
     … As the Buddha said, our craving, our desires, are focused on the wrong place. It’s not bad to want happiness. It’s not bad to want well-being. It’s simply something that you have to approach wisely. There are basically three steps: generosity, virtue, and meditation. These are ways of looking for happiness that cause no harm to anybody and actually spread … 
  20. On the Path of the Breath
     … Some people find that focusing on one spot at a time is not enough to keep them really transfixed, so give yourself two spots. I knew an old woman in Thailand when I was first getting involved in meditation. She was a retired schoolteacher and she said that one of the quickest ways of getting the mind to settle down and stay really focused … 
  21. Analyzing the Breath
     … So think about this as you’re focusing on the breath. One way of approaching the body is thinking of it as primarily breath sensations. Ajaan Lee lists a whole series of them: the breath that moves up the body; the breath that moves down the body; the breath that goes out through all the blood vessels, tensing and relaxing the muscles in the … 
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