Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Page 47
  2. Mindfulness Immersed in the Breath
     … It’s from focusing on the breath that you develop a lot of the important qualities you need to be truly happy. Keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath: That’s called mindfulness. Then be alert to what’s going on with the breath. Know when it’s coming in; know when it’s going out. Notice how it feels. Where you feel … 
  3. The Buddha’s Filters
     … In other words, we get focused and fixated on questions and issues that really have no importance and actually get in the way of putting an end to suffering. Like that famous sutta about the man who’s been shot by an arrow. They take him to the doctor and he says, “Now, before you take the arrow out, I want to know who … 
  4. The Swinging Balance
     … That takes time, especially if you haven’t been focusing much on the body or have been avoiding the body. It’s all too easy, when you focus on the body, to barge in and just say, “This has to be that way, that has to be this way,” and you start pushing the blood into different parts of the body, pushing the breath … 
  5. Sense Pleasures & Sensuality
     … These precepts, by limiting the pleasures of the senses, are really good for focusing you on where you really need to be focused, which is finding pleasure in concentration. So with sensual pleasures it’s a matter of selective restraint. With sensuality, though, it’s a matter of trying to escape from it entirely. First you have to see the drawbacks of that kind … 
  6. Tranquility & Insight
     … It can be thoughts of goodwill, or focusing on the breath, or whatever topic you find congenial as a place where the mind can get some rest. As you do this, you’re getting the mind into concentration. It’ll involve some thinking to begin with. You think about the breath—in case you’re taking the breath as your object. You think about … 
  7. Signs Along the Road
     … remaining focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The same with feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves. For example, when you focus on the breath, this is an aspect of the body in and of itself. Then you follow … 
  8. Buddhist Engineering
     … When you’re focusing the mind like this, don’t throw away whatever mindfulness or concentration you have. Some people say, “This concentration is weak, so I’ll throw it away to find something better and stronger.” But where is concentration going to get strong unless you take the weak concentration you’ve already got and work with it, try to extend it? If … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...