Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. The Desire to Do Well
     … focused on paying full attention to what you’re doing and to the results you’re getting, so that you can judge them properly. The fine-tuning comes in the fourth iddhipāda, because raw desire on its own is not going to cut it. To make it part of the path, you have to have a sense of how it’s best applied. But … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Ready for the Truth
     … He wants to point your attention here. You’re going to have to be in the right mood to stay right here; you have to have the right focus to stay right here. That’s what the step-by-step discourse is for: to bring the mind to concentration. As you stay right here and you’re succeeding in getting the mind to stay … 
  15. Discernment Is in the Details
     … But you actually exercise your own discernment each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, figuring out where to place your attention, how long the breath is going to be, how deep it’s going to be—and all the other elements in the meditation that require balance. Whether this is a time to stay with one spot, whether it works better … 
  16. Self-reliance
     … They point your attention to something else. But the Buddha’s focus is right here, and his analysis comes down to the fact that you can do something about suffering because you’re causing it. So you have to look inside. And the reason you’re causing it is not because you want to. It’s because you’re ignorant. The word for ignorance … 
  17. Respect for the Training
     … As a result, we tend to miss a lot of the really good lessons that can be learned from paying attention to the basics, giving them a lot of respect. Like the precepts: There are a lot of people who don’t like rules, who feel that rules make you a very small-minded person: that they make you think that by abiding by … 
  18. Suffering is an Addiction
     … But you keep subjecting the mind to new ways of thinking, new ways of paying attention, to drive home the point that you do have a choice. Then you have to argue with the voice that says, “Well, the choice isn’t better.” Or even more with the voice that says, “You can’t do it.” You know those voices, especially that last one … 
  19. A Full Life
     … The Buddha says also to delight in seclusion—the opportunity you have to focus direct attention on your mind with a minimum of distractions. That, too, is part of the skill of a good life. Then there’s the meaningful life: The last two objects of delight, the Buddha said, are delighting in the unafflicted and delighting in non-objectification. These are two names … 
  20. Breathaholic
     … But to get the mind settled down, you focus your attention completely on the breath to begin with. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about meditation if you want to do it well.” You really have to be addicted to it; you want to cling to it for a while. They say that alcoholics, when they walk into a … 
  21. Karma Storms
     … The next one is simply to say, “Okay, those things are there, but I’m not going to pay attention to them.” That requires that you have some little corner where you can go to hide out and wait till the storm blows over. This principle applies in meditation; it applies in life in general. You’re minding your own business living a perfectly … 
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