Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 45
  2. Beyond Inter-eating
     … The stronger your mindfulness, the more you get into good solid states of concentration. Again this is a skillful kind of feeding. You’re feeding on the sense of ease, on the sense of rapture and refreshment that can come in the concentration. It’s good food and relatively harmless. Blameless. There’s nothing unskillful about it. If you can feed on this, that … 
  3. Chew Your Food Well
     … This is why we spend so much time practicing the concentration—because it’s the centerpiece of the path. Only by holding onto a good state of concentration can you get across the river. So, where’s your concentration right now? How do you develop it? You give the mind something good to focus on, like the breath. If the breath isn’t enough … 
  4. Mindfulness over Time
     … So first you create a sense of feeling at home here where you can settle in and be concentrated. Then, once there’s concentration, you can look at whatever else comes up as a process, to see how you’re creating unnecessary suffering out of it—and how you can trace things back to the cause. Try to develop this ability to send useful … 
  5. Strong Through Mindfulness
     … That island becomes the island of concentration. There’s a school of thought that says mindfulness practice is one thing, concentration practice is something else. But the Buddha didn’t belong to that school. To him, mindfulness, when it’s really done well, leads straight to concentration. And mindfulness is something you do—you’re not just passively sitting here watching things go by … 
  6. Cut the Currents
    When you practice concentration, you have to gather the mind around one object—all the various strands, all the various wanderings around, trying to bring them together right here. The good thing when you’re focusing on the breath is that the breath is quite large. It has space for all the movements of your mind because it’s a whole-body process. When … 
  7. Question & Probe
     … It’s only in developing concentration, and in learning how to ask the right questions about where there’s pain in the body and pain in the mind, what’s causing it, and what can be done to let it go: It’s only through those questions supported by concentration that you’re going to develop the discernment that takes you to release. Discernment … 
  8. Determined to Make a Difference
     … As the Buddha said, a stingy person can’t get into the stages of right concentration. As for virtue, it is possible for unvirtuous persons to get their minds concentrated, but there’s an element of dishonesty in that concentration, which means it can’t be trusted. If, however, you’re used to recognizing your own unskillful intentions—and learn how to say No … 
  9. Taking Apart Suffering
     … You find this even as you just get started in the practice of concentration: Often we think that you get the mind concentrated and then you work on discernment, but it doesn’t always work that way. In order to get the mind to settle down, you have to understand what the obstacles are, and learn how to take them apart. This means you … 
  10. Wilderness Wealth
     … For him the nimitta of right concentration is the four establishings of mindfulness, the four satipatthana : body, feelings, mind states, mental qualities, in and of themselves. Yet there’s even a state of concentration that doesn’t focus on those themes at all. It’s totally independent: No object whatsoever, but awareness is concentrated. But even that, he says, is fabricated. When you realize … 
  11. A Refuge from Karma
     … As you enlarge your mind through the concentration, you make it unlimited through the practice of the brahmaviharas: goodwill for everybody, compassion for everybody, empathetic joy for everybody, equanimity for everybody when it’s needed. That enlarges your mind, and the enlarged mind suffers a lot less than the narrow, constricted mind that’s constantly worried about this, worried about that, overcome by pain … 
  12. The Joy of Renunciation
     … One, you give more space to the mind to actually get into concentration. And two, you give yourself more motivation to get into concentration. If you can’t find immediate pleasures through the senses in these ways, you turn your desire for pleasure, your desire for happiness, into the concentration itself. So you develop the space. You develop the right attitudes. You develop the … 
  13. Wisdom, Compassion, Purity
     … being able to use that concentration to see what’s going on in the mind—where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering; what you’re doing that’s getting in the way of finding the happiness whose potential lies within. The Buddha wasn’t operating from the position that we’re all basically good or that we’re all basically bad. As you notice … 
  14. Warrior Knowledge
     … That’s why the Buddha said that there’s no jhana without discernment; no discernment without jhana; no solid concentration without understanding; no understanding without solid concentration. The two have to go together. In other words you’ve got to have at least some understanding of the workings of the mind before you can really settle down. Otherwise you’ll fall for all the … 
  15. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … When you have concentration, for instance, even though it may not be perfect, if you’ve got it as an internal resource, as a source of nourishment inside, then when things go bad outside, at least you’ve got something to turn to. When you have your virtue, when you have your endurance, when you develop the quality of determination, all these perfections are … 
  16. Concentration Food
     … But both the gatekeeper and the soldiers need to be fed, and that’s what concentration is for. Concentration is compared to the food stores: grass for the horses; honey and ghee for the soldiers and the gatekeeper. So, nourish your mind well with stillness, so that the other aspects of the path can have strength.
  17. The Limits of Control
     … What is helpful is that you begin to gain a healthier sense of wellbeing, a greater insight into what’s going on in the mind, by pushing it in the direction of concentration. Ultimately you find that things push back. The mind can be made only so constant through concentration. After all, the element of intention that keeps it going is something you have … 
  18. Intelligent about Change
     … how to get the mind to settle down, how to get the mind to stay there, and how to keep your guard up for whatever is going to come along and destroy your concentration. And ultimately you even begin to see what in the concentration is still an unnecessary burden, and you can let that go, too. This is a lot of the strength … 
  19. The Third Frame of Reference
     … It can mean releasing the mind from unskillful mental qualities so that you can bring it into basic concentration. In other words, you release it from hindrances, from whatever worries or concerns it may have. Then as you get into concentration, how do you release it from the grosser levels of concentration to bring it to more refined ones? This is where you begin … 
  20. In the Context of the Deathless
     … What does the Buddha say? You try to get the mind in a state of concentration with a sense of ease and rapture or refreshment. In fact, the ease, pleasure, and refreshment are one of the main points of getting the mind into concentration. So the path may have its difficulties, but it has its rewards. And it doesn’t save its rewards for … 
  21. Refuge
     … This is why we practice concentration, to give the mind a good place to take a stance where it feels secure. You see some people saying that it’s unnecessary to get into a good strong concentration, that you can just start developing insight, but the insight is going to be very unstable if it doesn’t have a good solid foundation. This is … 
  22. Load next page...