Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 51
  2. The Door of the Cage
     … This is where you focus your attention: on what you’re doing and trying to do it well. You can think of yourself as being in a cage, like a bird in a cage. If you hold onto the walls of the cage, you’re never going to get out. However, one of the walls has a door. You hold onto the door. Someday … 
  3. Shaping Your Life
     … They can come at unexpected times of the day, so you want to be attentive to what you’re doing throughout the day. The more you focus on being skillful in what you do, the more likely the insights are to come—the insights that lighten your load, that lighten the load of the people around you. Ultimately, you get to that point where … 
  4. A Point of Balance
     … This is the area of life where we need to devote as much energy as we can, as much attention as we can. Look for ways in your life where you’re expending a lot of unnecessary energy in your emotions, in your attitudes, and in the issues you take on, because those things really do pull away from this work that’s really … 
  5. To Get Ourselves
    When we first started the monastery, Ajaan Suwat said something that really captured my attention. He said, “We’re not here to get anyone else. We’re here to get ourselves. If other people like the way we’re practicing, they’re welcome to come. But if they want to practice some other way, they can go someplace else.” His was an attitude that … 
  6. Peace vs. Clinging
     … So you’ve got to focus your real attention on the good that can be developed in the mind. We’re not saying that the body is bad or that it has no use at all in the practice. But while we’re sitting here breathing, watching the breath, trying to develop a sense of well-being in the body through the breath, we … 
  7. Introduction to the Breath
     … That’s the third quality that’s needed, the quality of ardency or intentness in what you’re doing, giving it your full attention, because your happiness depends on your ability to train the mind, to develop these qualities. It’s not only your own happiness that comes from this, but also the happiness of people around you. There are so many times when … 
  8. Guarded
     … Find a spot where you feel at home inside, let your attention settle there and learn how to protect it. One of the ways in which we feel invaded or threatened by other people is when we feel their energy moving into our energy field. And one way to prevent that is, once you’ve got some good energy going in your selected spot … 
  9. Protection from Fools
     … They are complex enough, so they require your full attention, but there are not that many of them. Once you start with this issue of stress and its ending, and focus on that, then you can sort everything else out from that perspective. Where is stress seen? It’s seen right here. Where it’s cause seen? The cause is seen right here, too … 
  10. Easy to Instruct
     … So they brought this to Ajaan Lee’s attention. He turned to Ajaan Fuang and said, “Tomorrow, get all the monks in the monastery under the hall”—there was a kind of crawlspace there—“and move the box.” Ajaan Fuang thought to himself, “There’s no way we’re going to able to move that box, it’s buried deep in mud.” But he … 
  11. Mindfulness Like a Dam
     … What’s important there is that you take a very matter-of-fact attitude toward what’s happened and just bring your attention back. Stay with the breath again. But the next time around, try to be a little bit more alert to the warning signs that the mind is about to go off, and do what you can to counteract them. There may … 
  12. Positive Capability
     … The Buddha points our attention in the right direction. We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We’re not going to be looking outside. We have to look inside. We have to look at our cravings, see why we crave things. He has you look for the allure of something. That’s precisely what he’s focusing on: Where are your cravings focused … 
  13. Heedful of What’s Precious
     … The future is uncertain, but you prepare for the future by being heedful of what you’re doing right now—protecting what’s valuable right now by being careful, ardent, resolute, attentive, observant. These are some of the aspects of what it means to be heedful. It’s through these aspects that the path comes to completion.
  14. Ask Yourself the Buddha’s Question
     … And try to keep your attention there with those feelings of the in-breath and the out-breath. If it helps, you can use a meditation word to go along with it. Buddho is a common one. It means “awake.” You think bud- with the in-breath and dho with the out. Or you can count the breaths one through 10, then one through … 
  15. Sensitive to Stress
     … If the “you” is still in there, sometimes a perception comes up and it’ll spark a memory of something you did when you were a child, or something else that happened early in your life, or something about the world outside, and that will deflect your attention away. So, you’ve got to learn how to think in the Buddha’s vocabulary: simply … 
  16. Discerning the Middle Way
     … Those are the kinds that survive in the mind simply because you’re not looking, not paying much attention to them. But as you notice them and watch them, you realize, “This is ridiculous,” and you can drop them. But there are other causes of suffering that just stare right back at you. They’re going to stay right there. Those are the ones … 
  17. Here Be Tigers
     … This is the problem that needs most attention. Once you’ve solved this problem, then nothing else is going to be a problem for the mind. So make sure your priorities are straight. And then be very still and watch. What will happen is that you’ll begin to see every now and then little thoughts forming in the mind, and they’ll be … 
  18. Evaluation
     … That’s where he points your attention. He says to focus your powers of evaluation here, and then he has you apply that same principle to the practice of meditation. You focus on the breath. Think about the breath and evaluate it. Is this a good comfortable breath to stay with? Does it feel good being with the breath? If it doesn’t, you … 
  19. Delusion Concentration
     … Keep your main attention with the comfortable parts of the breath, the areas where the breath feels good. This, of course, leads to the problem on the other side. When you’re with the comfortable parts, you have to be very careful not to just wallow around in the pleasure. This is especially tempting after a tiring day. It’s like coming home to … 
  20. Protection in all Directions
     … That something more solid is when you learn how to give up your interest in all your sensual thinking—thinking about how you’d like the world to be this way or you’d like the world to be that way—and you turn your attention to your inner world instead. This is why we meditate. The meditation is embedded in this larger teaching … 
  21. Visakha Puja – True Homage
     … Be ardent, really paying very close attention to what you’re doing. And be resolute: Once you’ve got the mind firmly planted in the breath, keep it there. This way, we practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. It’s an important phrase. Throughout the forest tradition, they talk about how Ajaan Mun took this as one of his two most favorite … 
  22. Load next page...