Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. A Room of Your Own
     … But if you can learn how to be gentle and perceptive with the comfortable spots, then the uncomfortable spots will feel less threatened by your attention and they can begin to open up. They, too, can be brought into the compass of the sense of ease, feeling at home in the body. Some of your inner barriers begin to break down. One of the … 
  3. Working with Nature
     … Sometimes it may, by a fluke, get into concentration, but if you’re not paying careful attention, you’ll fluke out of it as well. So it’s a combination of knowing what to do and what not to do. The things to do are the causes. As Ajaan Lee points out, when you’re trying to get the mind into concentration, directed thought … 
  4. Expand Your Expectations
     … One of the basic principles of appropriate attention is that you put aside any questions about “Who am I? What am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?” And there’s another sutta (I’ve forgotten the number now, it’s in the Anguttara) where the Buddha says you put aside the assumption that you’re good, you put aside the assumption that … 
  5. Respect for Concentration
     … They’re not much, but they have a lot of potential if you pay attention, if you learn how to appreciate them. Don’t be in too great a hurry to push through the steps, because some of them take time. It’s like seeing little tiny fruits on your tree. You say, “Ah, the fruits are here,” so you pick them all. It … 
  6. Dhamma Opportunism
     … Many Thai ajaans are told by their lay students, “I don’t have the time to practice,” and the ajaans’ response is always the same: “Do you have time to breathe?” Well, yes. “Okay, you can practice with the breath.” You may not be able to give your full attention to the breath, but it is possible, as you go through your activities, to … 
  7. Mind Control
     … You’ll find that, after a while, as long as you stay with the breath, that thinking will just gradually drop away, drop away, because it was feeding on your attention. If you don’t give it any attention, it starves and fades away. If that doesn’t work, then when you’re in touch with the breath, you can begin to notice that … 
  8. The Arrow in the Heart
     … Then you apply appropriate attention to cultivate or appreciate that potential and make the most of it. Even though it isn’t your ultimate refuge, it is your resting spot along the way. You can rest, gain nourishment, renew your strength, so that you can continue in the right direction. Otherwise, life is just a wandering on: lost in the forest. Wounded and lost … 
  9. Staying Grounded
     … the stress? And what can be done to put an end to that cause?” Think in those terms, and you’re on the path, engaged in what the Buddha calls appropriate attention. You’re asking the right questions, and you’re framing them in the right way, so that you can get some useful answers. But if you’re not sure about your thinking … 
  10. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … Heedfulness November 16, 2019 Bring your attention to the breath. Try to breathe in a way that feels good. And try to stay with the breath all the way in, all the way out, each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out. What often happens, though, is that you stay with the breath a couple of times, and then another thought comes … 
  11. Heedful of Ruts in the Mind
     … So you have to pay extra careful attention to your actions. One of the main lessons of the forest is that you don’t take any unnecessary risks. There’s a story of Ishi, the last wild Indian in North America. When he finally left his home territory and went to live in a city, one of the first things they did was to … 
  12. The Veils of Delusion
     … Whatever vagrant thoughts may come wandering into the mind, you don’t have to pay them any attention at all. Just let them pass. And don’t get involved in them, even to the point of trying to chase them away. They’ll go away on their own. You’ve got work to do here. Just try to keep your gaze as steady and … 
  13. Rapture
     … Now, developing this sense of fullness, this sense of well-being, requires that you pay very careful attention to the breath and that you be very meticulous in how you evaluate the breath. How is it feeling right now? When you breathe in, does the breath energy spread smoothly or does it feel like you’re pushing or pulling it too much? What we … 
  14. Defilements with Their Bambi Eyes
     … So develop the firmness with your concentration and you’ll find you can be nourished simply by being fully attentive to the breath. And you don’t need those old friends anymore. I found in my own case, getting away from my family when I went to Thailand, was a good thing. I got a sense of who I was, who they were. I … 
  15. Mindful & Discerning 24/7
     … The teacher is in the room, we pay attention, we do our work. But then when the teacher leaves the room, or we leave the schoolhouse, we don’t do any work anymore. One hour, two hours of meditation out of a day of twenty-four: It’s a big loss if that’s all our practice is. We should try to be mindful … 
  16. The Uses of Pleasure
     … It’s usually good, once you’ve developed a sense of well-being that comes from the breath, that you spread it around to be very active in moving your attention around the body, knowing whether there’s tension here, tension there, releasing it here, releasing it there. That way, you learn how to relate to pleasure in a new way. Usually we relate … 
  17. A Pure Happiness
    Meditating is a big job that requires all your attention and willpower to resist your typical ways of doing things, and it requires you to question a lot of things that you’ve left unquestioned in your life. When you think about how big it is, it can get intimidating. When you think about the obstacles you’re going to have to overcome, sometimes … 
  18. Peace of Mind
     … That’s going to be the focus of our attention for the rest of the hour. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths, and notice how that feels—because if you stay with the breath, you’re staying with the part of the body that’s closest to the mind. Without the breath, we wouldn’t know about the body … 
  19. The Analytical Mind
     … But then she thought of the space element, so she went there, keeping the perception of “space, space, space” in mind, without paying any attention to any sensation of the body. When she came out of that meditation, everything in the body had gone back to normal. She didn’t die—that’s why we know the story—but she learned an important lesson … 
  20. Samvega vs. Dispassion
     … This allows you to put all your energy and pay all your attention to following the path. Now one thing that can get in the way, though, is when we confuse samvega with dispassion. We’re developing this path all the way to what? Dispassion? The mind asks that and it recoils a little bit, because it keeps confusing the idea of dispassion with … 
  21. The Power of Your Actions
     … He focuses particular attention on your actions in the present moment. Even though your actions from the past can influence the way things are coming into your senses right now, you don’t just sit there and receive these things. Your mind processes them. Its ability to process and filter and shape things is what makes the difference between suffering and not suffering. Not … 
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