Search results for: "Attention"
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- A Good-Natured Attitude… He noticed that Ajaan Fuang wasn’t interested, so he decided to turn his attention to helping the young nun. One time the nuns came to him for instructions. He asked them if they were observing the eight precepts, and they said yes, they were. Then he talked about Lady Visakha seeing groups of people observing the eight precepts, and going from group to …
- Truth with Boundaries… Focus your attention there, and that helps get you out.
- Ideals… Then you focus your attention there. You’re motivated by considerations like the simile that the Buddha gives of the spears. As he said, if you could make a deal: They would spear you three hundred times a day—one hundred times in the morning, one hundred times at noon, one hundred times in the evening—every day for a hundred years, but you …
- The World of the Body… He doesn’t say that it’s going to be leaving us someday so we might as well just not pay it any attention. You’ve got to care for it. There’s a great passage in a collection of Ajaan Lee’s Dhamma talks. It’s not actually part of a Dhamma talk. It was a conversation recorded there. A guy comes to …
- The Wealth of Simplicity… It can give those things its full attention.” It is like an exotic fruit in the market. If there’s only one piece of that exotic food, it’s going to have a really high price. But if it’s all over the market, it doesn’t have any value any more. So try to keep the value of your mind high, the value …
- Resistance… Whether you’re here to find something solid in the midst of the world, or as an expression of goodwill, it’s useful to remember — each time you sit down to meditate or do walking meditation — why you’re doing it, the importance of what you’re doing, so that you do it with an attitude of proper respect and attention. In other words …
- Equanimity… This is where you practice what some people call “bare awareness” or “bare attention,” but it’s actually an intention not to react, so it’s not totally bare. One of the Buddha’s recommendations is that if someone criticizes you, you tell yourself, “Okay. An unpleasant sound has made contact at the ear. When the contact ends, the sound ends.” Can you leave …
- A Clear, Calm Lake… This is where we bring in the quality of what the Buddha calls appropriate attention, where you focus on what’s happening in the mind. If something unskillful is coming up, you know what to do with it. It should be abandoned. If something skillful is coming up, you develop it. When you develop that principle even further, it turns into the four noble …
- Wisdom for Dummies… And that’s why meditation requires that we focus our attention on the present moment, because these choices are being made right now. This again brings up the distinction between short-term and long-term happiness. Not all your choices are between doing something harmful and something not harmful. Sometimes the choice is between two things that are relatively harmless, but one leads to …
- Sensitive in Seven Ways… If you have so much desire that you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, that becomes a problem, too. You have to learn how to modulate that, and again, how do you know? Well, with practice. What’s the right time? When you get to the question of having a sense of the time and place, what’s the right time …
- Calm & Insight… In some places it’s more prominent than others, and you want to focus your main attention there. Then eventually, as that area becomes more comfortable, you want to think of that comfort spreading throughout the body. Your awareness spreads throughout the body, so that you’re bathed in breath and awareness. As for insight, the questions are: “How do you view fabrications (the …
- The Buddha’s Encouragement… Sometimes he just wasn’t paying attention. On top of that, of course, were the different hindrances that came in: sloth and torpor, doubt. In each case, he had to identify what the problem was and figure out a technique for counteracting it. So it requires some discernment to get the mind to settle down, because you’re fighting the mind’s old habits …
- The Best Use of Your Time… That’s the carrot that pulls you in to the present moment, realizing that simply paying good attention to the way you breathe can relieve a lot of stress in the body. You can think of the breath as a whole-body process that permeates down to your fingers and toes. And the way you breathe can relieve a lot of the stress that …
- On an Even Keel… We have so many other things we have to pay attention to that we push this out of our awareness. Now we’re trying to bring it back in, realizing that we’ve been abusing it in a lot of ways. The energy flow in the body has been all bollixed up. Now it’s time to let it get back to normal. So …
- A Load Off the Mind… Okay, what did you do? Why do you have that habitual reaction? What is there about trying to be consciously aware of the breath that makes you tense up around it? If you find that happening, stop and think about goodwill for a bit, or any other meditation topic so that you can divert your attention away from the breath for a while. Then …
- The Language of the Heart (2)… that you have to pay attention. But then they say, “Well, there’s no such thing as success or not success. Everybody’s already awakened.” Well, no, we’re not. If we were already awakened, we wouldn’t be suffering. And the Dhamma’s not a Dhamma of make-believe. The Buddha didn’t just sit around and think up ideas of what would …
- Giving Weight… Your mind becomes a slave, like a dog running after whatever captures its attention. It’s under the power of all the things around you. As a result, the mind never gets any rest, never gets any sense of its own importance, because it’s constantly being a servant to this, that, or the other mood or notion or desire, or just whim of …
- Serenity… Focus your attention here, and the effects will spread out—which means you can begin to let go of a lot of your concerns for things out there, the things you can’t control. To whatever extent you can control things, that comes under your ability to train the mind well right now. This helps to focus you in, it helps you put other …
- The Bright Tunnel… When the sense of ease, energy, and wellbeing is solid, you can turn your attention to the issue of suffering. Learn how to discern suffering. Where is it? How is it happening? The Buddha says, basically, that it comes down to what he calls the five clinging aggregates. There’s form affected by clinging, feeling affected by clinging, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness, all of …
- Mundane Right View… You’re here to give your attention, your powers of observation to this process. You’re not going to be too quick to call in all your chips. Give it time. People who have time are the ones who are really wealthy. When I first went to stay in Rayong, it was a pretty hard place to stay. The monastery was quite poor. I …
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