Search results for: "Focus"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Tranquility & Insight with the Breath… Your vision isn’t limited just to that one little laser-small beam of your focus. So you want to focus, but you want the range of your awareness to cover the body so that you can have a sense of whether the breath is flowing well or not. If the attention is too narrow, you can build up a lot of tension in …
- The Good We Already Have… But if you focus your attention on it steadily as you tune into the breath, you find that the sense of ease grows greater and greater and greater. It’s like the sun shining on a seed. If the seed is left in the dark, it won’t sprout. But as the sun shines on it, things come out. It sprouts leaves, roots, turns …
- Happiness Without Conflict… What are the images the mind paints for itself of those pleasures? As you’re working on concentration, you don’t focus only on the concentration. You also focus on understanding the things that would pull you away. This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration to begin with: to give the mind a good place to stay where it can look …
- Issues of Control… Which feelings you can focus on are most calming? In the beginning, there might be some intense feelings of pleasure that you just want to drink up, drink up, drink up. Well, drink them up. As the Buddha said, when you gain some pleasure in the meditation, indulge in it, but not to the point of losing your focus on the breath. By “breath …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… They’re helpful only to the extent of enabling you to remember things you did in the past or anticipate in the future that help focus you back on the present. In other words, you can remember the times when you were mindless, not very alert, and you can reflect on the damage it caused. Or you can reflect on the dangers that await …
- Conserving Your Strength… So the practice of the Dhamma is not just learning to focus your mind or learning to be mindful or seeing things in terms of the three characteristics or whatever. An important part of the practice is getting a sense of priorities: which things are really important in life, which things are less important, which types of happiness are worth the pursuit, which ones …
- Admirable Friendship… But sometimes when we do, the focus on the mind is indirect. But when you’re meditating, you’re directly focusing on the mind in and of itself. You start first by focusing on something right next to the mind: the breath in the body, how you sense it right here in and of itself, right here in the present moment. This is something …
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