Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Homage Through the Practice
     … So you can focus on any part of the body where you notice: Now it feels comfortable with the breath coming in, now it feels comfortable with the breath going out, and where you can gauge whether the breath is too long or too short. All of this comes under the quality of alertness. And then finally the third quality the Buddha recommended applying … 
  10. To Be Your Own Teacher
     … Note, though, that if you find the little details still set you off, just learn not to focus on those details. Focus on something else, something that might be neutral or actually counteracts the response you have to the original details. But as you work more and more with this principle of restraint of the senses, you come to see how the little details … 
  11. Heedfulness Is Auspicious
     … As the Buddha says, you don’t want to focus on those; you want to have something better to focus on. Of course, the building of the chedi was, as Ajaan Fuang used to say, heavy merit, whereas meditation is light merit. Light merit you can take with you wherever you go. The heavy merit has good memories, but those memories can get obscured … 
  12. Recovering Your Balance
     … You try to focus in on that, just to be aware of what’s going on, seeing what’s going on, so that you can understand it. If you don’t understand it, watch it. Have some patience. Whatever comes up, just watch, watch, watch until you see something that interests you. Then focus in on that. In other words, watch the mind in … 
  13. It’s All in What You’re Doing
     … So why are we looking at our breaths? It’s because we need to focus the mind. We need to bring it into the present moment. The breath is the guarantee that we’re right here. There’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. So, at the very least, you’ve got some part of your mind focused … 
  14. Time to Heal
     … When you’re feeling tense, what kind of breathing feels relaxing? When you’re feeling tired, what kind of breathing lifts your energy? When there are pains in different parts of the body, where do you focus the breath energy to help deal with those pains? For instance, sometimes there’s a pain in your back. A good place to start is to focus … 
  15. Delight & Beyond Delight
     … Yet we want it to be attractive, so we focus on certain details and ignore other details that are right next to the details that we like, just millimeters away. We don’t like being reminded of the fact that there are these other unattractive features to the body. ** So this is delight. This is allure. The mind is basically lying to itself. As … 
  16. From Darkness to Light
     … So you want that to be your focus. The problem is, when you leave meditation, you go out to deal with other people. All of a sudden, it’s the question of “you” and “them” again. The priorities get changed, the duties get changed again. We drop the framework we’ve been using while we meditate and pick up our old framework. It’s … 
  17. Freedom Undefined
     … It’s not an easy skill, but when you realize that all of the alternatives out there are difficult, then you realize that it doesn’t make much sense to focus on the difficulties of the path, for at the very least this is a path that leads to a way out. Three years ago, when I sensed that Ajaan Suwat was about to … 
  18. Goodwill First & Last
     … And it was only after seeing the larger pattern that he was ready to focus on the present moment with in the proper terms—events in the mind viewed as causes and effects—and with the proper question: How do view and intention operate in the present moment? Is there some way that this knowledge can be used to put an end to suffering … 
  19. Allowing the Breath to Spread
     … You focus on the breath and, as Ajaan Fuang used to say, the comfortable breath just explodes throughout the body, and there you are. Other times, though, you have to build up to it, because there may be parts of the body that don’t go the way you want them to. They may be painful no matter how you breathe. So in the … 
  20. Technique & Attitudes
     … You can focus on any part of the body where there are sensations that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. In other words, you don’t have to focus on the feeling of the air coming in and out the nostrils. You can also focus on the movement of the body that brings the air in … 
  21. The Rivers of Karma
     … You learn how to take that ability to focus and ignore, and use it deliberately for the purpose of keeping the mind from suffering. This is a skill we learn as we meditate. At the same time, we learn how not to be overcome by pleasure. First there are sensual pleasures, which we tend to go running to as our main escape from pain … 
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