Search results for: "Attention"
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- 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 …
- Endurance Through Discernment… The media keep telling us other people are the big troublemakers; they divert our attention from where the real work is: the way in which your mind is creating trouble for yourself right now. And it’s not a selfish quest to try to focus on solving this problem, because the less suffering you create for yourself, the less you’re going to be …
- Beginner’s Mind… Give it the chance to come up to the forefront to see what else it can do when you take proper care of it, when you give it the attention it deserves. And think of ways of making the breath interesting. Think of the breath coming in and out of body parts that you normally wouldn’t think about: the legs, or the elbows …
- Seeing with the Body… From this point you can begin to spread your attention to other problems that need depersonalizing as well. But make sure you’ve got this foundation strong. Simply stay with the issue of how the breath is coming in, how the breath is going out. Are you enjoying it? Even though the breath moves between two different types of pain, if you adjust it …
- Noble Treasures… If nothing else, he’d make a vow to focus his energy and his attention to really understand a problem. This aspect of meditation is all too often overlooked, especially in methods that give you a set body of instructions and say, “Just do this and don’t make any variations.” But how do you know that the results you get from just following …
- Fear of Death… You’re not paying careful attention. But here as you focus on the breath, you get more and more sensitive: What are these feelings in the body? How do you understand them? How do you relate to them? And also how does the way you label them affect them? For instance, when you feel certain sensations that you don’t like, if you just …
- Rhythms of the Mind… The issue is that you’re paying attention and you’re sensitive to what you’re doing. There are other markers we hear about, as when, with the fourth jhana, the breath stops. Here again, you don’t stop the breath. It’s going to stop on its own as you’ve been connecting the different breath energies in the body. The sense of …
- No Arrows, Nothing… We train the breath—focus a lot of attention on the breath—because it’s one of our main tools in helping us settle down. But ultimately, the real issue is what the mind is doing. We mentioned this a little last night: the way the mind puts together sensations, puts together thoughts, puts together feelings—glues everything together. And then the things we …
- Timeless… All kinds of events could suddenly grab your attention. Have you trained the mind well enough so that it’s not going to be interested, it’s not going to be waylaid by those things? If not, you know what you’ve got to do: You’ve got to work on your concentration, work on your mindfulness, work on your discernment—to bring your …
- Standards for Thinking… A thought comes into the mind and the question is, “Should I follow this thought or should I drop it?” Something happens outside: “Should I pay attention to this or should I ignore it?” “What to do? What to do? What to do?” This is always there in the background. So here again, you want some filters. Resolve not to indulge in sensuality, which …
- Delight in the Breath… So you focus attention there. Ask yourself: What would feel really good right here, right now? Even forget the idea that it’s “breath.” You say: “What would be a sensation in that part of the body that would feel good?” And the breath will provide it. When you drink it in—the word for rapture in Pali is related to drinking, as if …
- Pain… The first stage is to pay the pain no attention. You have other work to do: You have to get the mind ready to be willing to look at the pain and see clearly what it’s doing around the pain. To get there though, you first have to get the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being. Otherwise, it’s …
- Nurturing Patient Endurance… How are you breathing right now? Where in the body does the breath feel good? Focus your attention there, and be patient with it, because good may not be very good in the beginning. To be protective of that spot in the right way, think of it being wide open. Don’t allow any thoughts to come in that would squeeze it up, tighten …
- A Refuge in Mindfulness… it well, realizing that, of all the skills you could develop, this is the most important one, so you want to give it as much time as you can, as much attention as you can. Here again, the world will make inroads. It’s not the case that it’ll step out of the way for you to practice. You have to push. It …
- After the Fire… It’s only when you find the mind is really lopsided in one direction that you really have to focus your attention on either the more active side or the more passive side. But once things have been brought more into balance, you want to have all seven of the factors of awakening present. Sometimes you see them presented in such a way that …
- The Buddha’s Tools… We can live with our sense of our lives, and the world outside, and how our minds work, based on what we’ve picked up from our culture, and it can really skew our attention. We’re trying to solve the wrong problems with the wrong tools. Sometimes you hear the demand that Buddhism has to adapt itself to the Western worldview. Well, the …
- Looking for Happiness Inside… The things you notice, the things you pay attention to are going to shape your experience. What you try to do is to deconstruct these things so that you can see subtler and subtler layers of stillness inside, and then subtler and subtler layers of movement that you didn’t detect before. This is the process of meditation that goes deeper and deeper right …
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