Search results for: "Attention"
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- The Power of Intention… Here, too, you’re paying attention to your intentions. How is the breath going? How do you stay with the breath? It requires fabrication. The breath itself is a kind of fabrication. You can breathe in all kinds of ways. You’re not stuck with any one way of breathing. And there’s nothing in the Buddha’s teachings to say that you just …
- Skillful Fears… So keep your attention focused here, for this is where all the necessary work gets done.
- A Gift of Strength… It means keeping certain things in mind—and especially, the whole issue why you want to focus on being skillful, where you have to focus your attention, focus your energy, looking at the way your intentions take shape. Where do they take shape? They take shape right here. That’s why alertness is often paired with mindfulness, seeing exactly what the mind is doing …
- Choose Your Actions Wisely… If it keeps coming back, coming back, coming back, you have to be really insistent in not paying attention to it. It’s like a stray puppy who wants to move into your house, but you don’t want the puppy. It’s going to make all kinds of sad noises, but you have to be firm. If it gets so that you can …
- The Right Touch… Let the breath work gently, and have a lot of patience. “Patience” here doesn’t mean just putting up with things; it means sticking with something that requires your full attention and your full sensitivity and not giving up, but also not squeezing things to hurry up the results. So, try to bring the right touch to your meditation. Observe what you’re doing …
- Life’s First Question… So do your best to focus your attention on that issue, learn how to translate everything else into those terms, and drop ways of thinking that get in the way of seeing things in those terms. When you keep things simple, and you keep the mind directly focused like this, then you begin to see the real value of these teachings, because they really …
- Arising & Passing Away… What do you watch? Any of the themes that are among the factors of dependent co-arising—everything from fabrication in the mind to acts of consciousness, intentions, moments of attention, contact, feeling, perceptions, the physical elements in the body, the sense spheres, feelings, craving, clinging, becoming—any of these things. The problem is that you never know beforehand which of them is going …
- Totally Secure… This is why you want to keep your attention focused, realizing that the fabrications that come from within the mind are the big problem. What other people fabricate, that’s their issue. Your issue is how you maintain your even keel. As you do this, you begin to see the process of fabrication of the mind more and more clearly all the time. That …
- Always Observe Your Mind… That’s why we have the precepts, not only to make life better for ourselves and for the people around us, but also to focus our attention on our intentions: What do we mean to do? That’s the difference between breaking a precept and not breaking a precept. Similarly with generosity: There are different factors that go into determining how much you’re …
- The Power of the Mind… Craving, clinging, intention, attention, perception: Which of those are causing the problems? Realize that you can change those actions into something more skillful. There’s a basic duality here. It’s very ironic that Buddhism is supposed to be all about oneness and non-duality, but with the four noble truths you’ve got two dualities. And the message of those dualities is that …
- Only One Person… In other words, you’re giving them the dignity of being responsible people, paying attention to the fact that they’re not just the recipients of your actions. They’re also generators of their own actions. So if you try to get other people to break the precepts, you’re really harming them. If you talk them into being ungenerous, you’re harming them …
- 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.
- Metta Meditation… All too often, as we sit here and look at the body, the first things that pull our attention are the pains. It hurts here, it’s tight there, it’s tense here, and if you focus on those areas, they become the little monster in the hall of mirrors. Try to find the spaces between the pains and the parts of the body …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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