Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 52
  2. Balance & Release
     … Ajaan Fuang once said, “You have to be really crazy about this to do it well.” Otherwise, you might not be paying close attention when things seem to be going okay, and then “okay” begins to get a little loose, shaky, wobbly. That’s when you have to heighten your level of involvement and focus. To get very involved in an activity, whether it … 
  3. When You Hit a Plateau
     … But if you’d stopped and paid attention, you could see more. In the same way, there’s a lot to see here in your body and mind. After all, what’s happening right now to shape your experience? There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the images you hold in mind … 
  4. Mindfulness of Death
    When the Buddha talks about the importance of being attentive and alert in the present moment, it’s usually in the context of mindfulness of death—the message being that you don’t know when death is going to come, but you do know there are duties you have to do in the present moment in order to prepare. This is why mindfulness of … 
  5. Breath Energies
     … You also notice that the more subtle your attention, the more subtle your awareness, the more the sense of well-being that comes from the breath and the pleasure that comes from the breath seeping into areas that used to be hardened inside. The fact that we’ve ignored this part of our awareness for so long allows us to treat it pretty poorly … 
  6. Boxed Stories
     … When you’re with the breath, the fact that you’re attentive to the breath and alert to the breath creates a feeling of pleasure. When you’re with the breath, you’re mindful. The mind is getting a little bit more steady. That’s a quality of the mind. There are also the mental qualities of equanimity or concentration, or whatever good mental … 
  7. Maintenance Work
     … He says that your intentions will make a big difference in the mind if you pay attention to them, if you stick with them. So you’ve got to test that principle. The fact of intention becomes more and more helpful the more harmless you can make it. Can you do that? Well, you’ve got to stick with it if you want to … 
  8. Respect for Concentration
     … Don’t pay attention to anything else, even the voice of the talk here. Let that be in the background. These activities are called aggregates, and ordinarily we suffer a lot because of the aggregates. But it was the Buddha’s insight as a strategist to see that we can take these aggregates and learn how to engage in them skillfully, because aggregates are … 
  9. Dhamma Survivalism
     … Regular survivalists have stocks of food, weapons, whatnot, not realizing that by having lots of food stocked away, if they’re not generous with it when bad times come, then it’s going to be something that will attract the attention of the neighbors—and not in a friendly way. So there’s a danger even with having a stockpile of food. But there … 
  10. Passion for Nostalgia
     … There has to be an act of attention and intention to keep them going, and the intention has to be fed by the allure. But you have to realize that this is all suffering. You’re clinging to these different aggregates. And what are you getting out of them? You’re placing ruts in the mind, or as the Buddha would say, you’re … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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