Search results for: "Focus"
- Page 47
- Above & Beyond Suffering… Once the mind feels ready—centered, stable—then you can focus it on the breath. It may seem strange. You might think, “After all, aren’t we trying to use the breath to make the mind stable?” Well, yes—sometimes. Often you can go straight to the breath. Other times there are things standing in the way, and you’ve got to deal with …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… This is one of the reasons why we focus our attention on the present moment in our meditation. There are meditations where you think about the qualities of the Buddha and other topics that are more discursive. But the real work is done when you reflect and try to understand what you’re doing. This is why a mirror is such a prominent image …
- Delight in Concentration… As Ajaan Lee points out, when you get to concentration, the ardency turns into evaluation, where you focus your desire to do this well on looking at what you’re actually doing and you maintain the desire to make improvements. So this element of generating desire runs like a thread through all three factors. This is where you have to be really intelligent to …
- After-work Meditation… This way, you change the focus. Remind yourself that you do have a role where you can be more proactive in life, and that it’s what you do with the situation that makes all the difference. The situation may be bad, but you can turn it into something good. It’s like being an alchemist. You take lead and other base metals and …
- A Pleasure Not to Be Feared… The focus seems to be on suffering, but notice that the truths don’t just stick with suffering. They’re also about how to find an end to it. And the end of suffering is true happiness. So those four noble truths are not all about suffering. Look in the fourth truth, which is the path to the end of suffering. You find right …
- When You’ve Played Enough With the Breath… If it needs to be energized, you focus on the factors that are energizing: analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture. If it needs to be calmed down, you focus on the more calming factors: calm, concentration, equanimity. In other cases, though, he treats the factors for awakening in a linear way. You start out mindful and alert and then you go straight for the analysis …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… There’s another passage where the Buddha says you’re trying to focus on the breath, trying to focus on the body in and of itself, or feelings in and of themselves, or any of the four establishments of mindfulness, and you find that the mind simply won’t settle down. In his terms, there’s a fever, a restlessness. So to allay that …
- Exploring Possibilities… And it’s not what the Buddha said to focus on. Focus on the fact that it’s possible for you not to be carrying this weight around continually. The next time you detect it coming up, remember that you have the choice of putting it down. Just the realization that you’ve been able to do it once: That’s liberating. It expands …
- Enlarge Your Mind… This way, even though there may be pains and aches in some parts of the body, you realize that you don’t have to focus all your attention on the pains and the aches. There are some parts of the body that may be feeling the heat. Here it’s well after sunset and it’s still hot outside. But if you look carefully …
- Attention with an Agenda… You apply different perceptions and focus on different feelings for the sake of something. Like right now: You’re trying to get the mind into concentration. So you breathe in a way that will give rise to a sense of comfort for the sake of getting the mind into concentration. You use directed thought and evaluation, again for the sake of getting the mind …
- In Training… But the process by which the product is made is pretty much the same, a question of what you focus on, what you don’t focus on, what details you notice, which details you don’t notice, how you stitch things together. It can be something simple, as when you’re sitting here with pain. How do you stitch the pain of one moment …
- Training Your Commentator… Don’t focus your comments on you as a meditator or a commentator. Focus them on actions and results. And don’t let yourself get overcome by negative comments about your own abilities. Try to speak to yourself in more positive ways that are more encouraging. And remember that ups and downs are normal. Don’t get complacent about the ups. Don’t let …
- Choices Now & at Death… Tell the person who’s passing away not to expect closure, and focus instead on the state of his or her mind. The next question is, “Are you afraid of leaving your body? Are you afraid of leaving human sensuality?” If the person says, “Yes,” the Buddha’s first answer is really interesting. He says that there are levels of being where the sensuality …
- Why We Meditate… Where is that feeling most pronounced, where is it strongest? Focus your attention there. Try to stay with the sensation of the breath all the way in, all the way out. You may want to use a meditation word along with the breath. Buddho is a traditional one. It means awake. It’s the title the Buddha earned on the night of his awakening …
- On the Surface of Things… So instead of going behind the scenes, we want to focus more precisely on: What is the seen? What is the sensed? Get your alertness more focused right here. As you get quicker, things will seem to slow down, so that what sounded like a raucous squawk actually becomes a series of notes. You can see: Oh, this follows on that, that follows on …
- Truth as Medicine… Learn to focus your thinking on the aspects of truth that are really helpful right now. You could focus on all kinds of things that would make you depressed and make you discouraged in the practice. They may be perfectly true but they’re not right for you right here, right now. Those particular truths are not useful truths. They’re not worth talking …
- Fear & Conviction… It gives you a place where you can focus your efforts and your desire for what you need to do: You need to train the mind. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you do know that, whatever happens, you’re going to need more mindfulness, you’re going to need more alertness, more discernment, more concentration. You …
- Unraveling the Present… When we try to develop discernment, we focus on pain, and again that’s something very close to home. Focus on stress. Reduce things to basic experiences that you can relate to immediately, because the more you start dealing with abstractions or big metaphysical theories, the further and further you get away from what you’re actually experiencing, and the more room there is …
- Goodness Comes from Heedfulness… This is one of the reasons why we focus on the breath as a primary form of meditation. If you can breathe with awareness, with a sense of ease and well-being, it’s a lot easier to think good thoughts about other people’s happiness, other people’s well-being as well. If the way you breathe is causing you to suffer, it …
- Stay Principled… where to focus the mind, how to stay with the point of your focus or the theme of the meditation; how to work with it so that the mind can begin to settle down and stay settled down. There are even skills techniques how to leave meditation. All these are techniques that we can work on, but they’re not what the meditation is …
- Load next page...
