Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Get Real
     … You’re going to stay focused right here on the breath, focused right here on the immediate sensation of the body no matter what else happens. Try to elaborate that as little as possible. Stay just with the direct sensation: the breath coming in, the breath going out. You feel it right here, and you feel the different sensations in the body that let … 
  12. Right Mindfulness
     … To begin with, you try to remain focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the process we’re working on here as we focus on the breath. It’s the first of the establishings. To remain focused is called anupassana. It means you choose something to watch … 
  13. Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals
     … the one focused on the breath, and the other focused on the relationship between the two. You want to keep them together. Adjust the breath so that it feels good. If any thoughts come up in the mind that would pull you away from the breath, just let them go. If you find that they’ve already pulled you away before you realized what … 
  14. Healing Awareness
     … Choose a spot in the body where it’s easiest to stay focused. Try to focus on it in a way that allows the energy there to flow. Don’t squeeze up around on it at the end of the in-breath. And don’t squeeze up around it at the end of the out-breath. You may call this “soft focus” to begin … 
  15. The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice
     … So, goodwill is a preliminary practice for getting the mind into concentration focused on the breath. But there are also passages where the Buddha talks about it as a topic of concentration in and of itself. He doesn’t say how you do it. You simply develop the thought, “May all these beings look after themselves with ease,” an interesting way of expressing goodwill … 
  16. Developing Discernment
     … That principle of focusing on your actions, trying to make them as skillful as you can: That will carry you through.
  17. Work on Your Mind
     … Those are the things that go into creating any emotion, which means that when a strong emotion comes up, you can ask yourself, “How am I breathing? How am I talking to myself? What images am I holding in mind? What feelings am I focusing on?” If the emotion is the sort that would lead you to do something unskillful, you say, “I’ve … 
  18. You Can’t Clone Awakening
    It may seem incongruous or ironic that here we are, hoping for total release from suffering, stress—the freedom of nibbana—and on the way there, we’re hoping for states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, bliss, rapture, and yet what are we doing? We’re focusing on our breath. We’re sitting here in a posture that may or may not be comfortable … 
  19. Modest, Unentangled, Unburdensome
     … It’s going to involve developing external qualities that place some restraint on us, but that simply focuses our attention where it should be focused: If there’s restraint on how you behave outside, you have to turn your eyes around. If you’re going to find true happiness, you’ve got to look inside. So these restraints are for the sake of freedom … 
  20. Sensitive to the Mind
     … The path sometimes does have its paradoxical nature, where you develop something and then have to abandon it, or you’re focused on one thing and then you realize you have to turn around and look at your mind as it’s focused. So it is a subtle path, but again, the Buddha pointed out that this is how you develop subtlety in the … 
  21. The Kamma of Self & Not-self
     … Once he had set his sights on awakening, on finding the answer to the question of whether there’s a true happiness, a happiness that’s not dependent on conditions, he focused all of his efforts in that direction. That was the question to which he gave top priority in his life. After he gained awakening, that was the question he had his followers … 
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