Search results for: "Attention"
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- 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 …
- Undividing the Mind… That narrows your attention down to what you’re doing right now. As one of the contemplations adds: We’re heirs to our actions; whatever good or evil we’re going to meet with in life come from our actions. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So you really do want to train the mind. The positive contemplations are …
- Tap, Tap, Tap… As the Buddha pointed out in Majjhima 2, there are lots of questions that you could ask that are inappropriate and they’re not even worth your attention. When you look at the list, you can see that many of them are the kinds of questions you would be tempted to ask if you had knowledge of this sort: “What was I in the …
- Looking Inward… The reason there doesn’t seem to be very much here is because we haven’t really paid attention here. We’ve been distracted by things outside. But now that we turn around and look inwardly—look inward consistently—we find there are lots of subtle things going on here, things that you can master, areas where you really can make a difference—where …
- All Your Old Baggage… And you find that as you get more and more engrossed in the idea of choosing the right way of breathing right now, right now, right now, all the baggage you’ve been carrying in from the past gradually gets put aside as more and more of your attention, more and more of your alertness gets applied to the present moment. So there is …
- “My Way”… Keep your attention focused there more than outside. Our media nowadays tend to focus on everything outside. We almost live in the screens of our hand-held devices or our computers or whatever. And the important people seem to be the ones who are in the screens. But they’re not. The important person is the person holding the screen. What is this person …
- Go in Brightness… You put it into practice first by applying appropriate attention, asking, “How does this teaching apply to my problem of suffering right now? How do I identify where my suffering is, what I’m doing to cause it, and how does this teaching give me some insights into how I can develop a path that brings that suffering to an end by bringing the …
- Two Hands Washing… When the Buddha talked about appropriate attention, he defined it in terms of the four noble truths. Learning to see where the stress is, where’s the cause, where’s the cessation of stress, and what you’re doing to help the stress stop. The questions should be aimed in that direction. And you use those standards to judge the answers, the results that …
- Chanting on Your Own… In the beginning, of course, I paid most attention to “Method 2.” It wasn’t long, though, before he asked me to memorize The Divine Mantra. He said it would help with my meditation. As you know, it’s a chant on the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, relating them to the six properties, the six dhātu. I found that …
- Just Rightness… Right view, one, focuses your attention on the whole issue of karma: your actions and their results. Then, two, on its more refined level, it points out the issue of suffering, seeing things in terms of four noble truths, which means you don’t see them in terms of what you want or what you don’t want. That’s in the background: You …
- Cutting Edge Perceptions… And the more careful attention you pay to it right here, right now, the more you’re going to notice. For example, if you have any subconscious ideas that a comfortable breath or a good meditative breath has to be long and slow, you might ask yourself, “Is that what you need right now? What does the body need right now? What does the …
- The Power of Intention… Something in the thought captures your imagination, captures your attention, and you build a whole world around it. Then you go into that world, and at that point you’re separated from the world of the body. But if you can see the initial stirring as simply a stirring and then breathe right through it, that can be your game: zapping the thoughts before …
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