Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … Right concentration is where you get to use pleasure in a skillful way, a pleasure you gain while staying focused on the breath. But at the same time, you learn an important lesson about pleasure: that if you go running after the pleasure, you’re going to lose the cause. So you stick with the cause and enable the pleasure to develop on its … 
  3. The Science of Meditation
     … You’re sitting here with your eyes closed, focused on the breath. Well, the mind’s going to do a lot of different things even while you’re focused just on the breath. You have the choice to decide what to do. You can change the way you breathe; you can change the way you focus. Which aspect of the process are you going … 
  4. Remember This
     … Simply focusing on the breath, you’re changing the feelings in the body. If you learn how to apply your attention to the breath in the proper way, you can create what the Buddha calls “pleasure not-of-the-flesh.” This doesn’t happen on its own. There may be moments when it comes and goes, but you’re not here just watching the … 
  5. Succeeding at Happiness
     … Where’s your desire focused? Are you really putting in the effort to do this well? Are you paying full attention to what you’re doing? Are you reflecting on it in a wise way, in a way that can take the results of the reflection and then adjust what you’re doing so that you can get better and better results? That’s … 
  6. Concentration & Insight
     … But as long as you’re very clear about where you are, where you’re focused, allow the mind just to burrow on into the breath, to burrow on into the present moment, letting go of anything that might smack of either the moment just passed or the next moment coming up. Totally give yourself to the breath right here, right now. Allow the … 
  7. Training Your Inner Critic
     … When we meditate, we’re focusing on these seeds: how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the perceptions and feelings you encourage and cultivate. You can look at the Buddha’s teachings as advice on how to fabricate all these three kinds of fabrication in skillful ways. He even gives you instructions on how to breathe: Breathe in a way that makes you … 
  8. Antidotes
     … These are diseases, these are wounds in the mind.” So in every case, you have to develop a perception that’s an antidote focused right in on the area where you like to feed on a particular emotion, a particular way of behaving, to show you that it’s not what you thought it was, that it’s not worth it. Sometimes you hear … 
  9. Dependable Friends
     … It’s not just focused on one point. You have one point that’s more prominent than other parts of the body, but all the images in the Canon for concentration are full-body. When there’s a sense of ease in any one spot, focus there. And learn how to focus on ease in a way that doesn’t destroy it. In other … 
  10. The Path of Adventure
     … One very simple way is to create a little space in the body where you stay focused, keeping that space in the body relaxed at all times no matter what happens. It might be in the hands, it might be in the feet, or in the area around the heart. Focus your awareness there, and just think: relax, relax, relax—so that when the … 
  11. Strong-hearted
    When you focus your attention on the breath, you’re focusing on something that only you can know—how you feel the breathing from inside, how you feel your awareness from inside—because this is where the problem is, and this is where the solution will be found. The problem is that we act in unskillful ways. We let greed, aversion, and delusion take … 
  12. Encouragement
     … So this reflection focuses your attention on your actions. Your actions are going to make the difference between whether you suffer or not. Then when the Buddha recommends that you extend the reflection out to all beings everywhere, he said that it gives rise to the path. In other words, you develop a sense of what’s called samvega, a strong sense of dismay … 
  13. Two Guardian Meditations
     … If the Buddha hadn’t mentioned focusing on the breath as a useful way of training your mind, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to a lot of us. And the fact that he was able to recognize that concentration itself was not enough, that needed more discernment—that was a strength, too. The fact that he’s found these strengths, used them, and … 
  14. You Are Not a Textbook
     … So he focused it down, down, down, down, down. Then he found that it became very uncomfortable, very heavy and restricted. He realized, “This can’t be right.” So he brought it up, up, up, up, up. But that got too giddy. Finally, though, he found a point of balance by figuring things out for himself. And it’s an important principle. Even though … 
  15. Oneness
     … It means being focused on one thing, like the breath. You stay steadily focused on it, at the same time making it the one thing filling your range of awareness. So you start out trying to do that. But in the beginning, there are two ones. There’s the mind aware of the breath, evaluating the breath, commenting on the breath. That’s one … 
  16. Coming into the Present
     … They may seem like a foreign way of thinking about the body, but this way of thinking has its uses, particularly when you’re focusing on the breath. If you think of all the energy sensations in the body or the energy facet of every sensation of the body as being part of one large continuum—in other words, filling the whole body—and … 
  17. Actualizing Your Potentials
     … You find that by focusing on doing fewer things, you actually get more accomplished. Years back when my brother was in graduate business school, at the start of the first semester he realized that the amount of work he was assigned to do is humanly impossible. It would require that he stay up to weird hours of the night, and of course in forcing … 
  18. Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas
     … So don’t keep casting your eyes down the path, asking, “When is insight going to come?” or “When’s the next step going to come?” Keep your eyes focused on what you’re doing right here, right now, and whatever ways the mind is going to develop, it will come from focusing right here, right now. There’s no such thing as right … 
  19. Multi-Dimensional Dhamma
     … It starts with two principles focusing primarily on the goal: being dispassionate and unfettered. It also includes two principles concerning inner attitudes that help you reach the goal—persistence and contentment—as well as four principles governing the way you interact with other people: being modest, shedding your pride, finding seclusion, and being unburdensome. When you gauge any teaching, action, or quality that arises … 
  20. Locate Your Craving
     … You’re focused on your breath, not because you want the breath, but because you’d like the pleasure. You have to be frank with yourself about that, but at the same time, if you focus on the pleasure once it comes, you lose your foundation. Then you’ve lost them both—the breath and the pleasure. So, you have to remind yourself the … 
  21. One Thing Clear Through
     … One of the ways of developing right concentration is not just focusing on the breath, but also focusing on goodwill for all beings. This is something we need, especially now. You look at the difficulties the world is going through. A lot of people are desperate. We’ve had a healthy economy and it’s crashed. People have been used to feeding well. They … 
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