Search results for: "Attention"
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- An Ennobling Pleasure… Your attention to the present moment is a type of fabrication. Your decision to watch the present moment: That’s a fabrication as well. But as you get the mind into this fabrication, one, you’re putting yourself in a better position to observe the grosser kinds of fabrication; and two, as your sensitivity improves, you can start taking this kind of fabrication apart …
- Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation… Always give that your foremost attention.
- Guiding Truths… They do this by focusing our attention on the immediate issue: What is the suffering right now? What are you doing that’s aggravating the suffering? Can you stop? What do you need to do in order to stop? Those are the questions you can apply to any issue at any time. They focus directly on your own experience, the part of your own …
- What Are You Doing?… And the questions have to do with, “What are you doing?” Of course, with the pain, what you’re doing is the perception along with the way you’re pay attention to it and the stories you bring to it and all the other issues around the pain that you add to the pain. All too often they’re things we’ve been doing …
- Look at Yourself… The four noble truths point here; appropriate attention points here: Look at the skillfulness of your actions; look at the results. That’s how the Buddha himself found the path. He’d follow a certain practice. Notice, he’d follow a practice and he would look at himself in action. Sometimes we think that all we have to do is get the mind really …
- There’s Work to Be Done… Don’t let the parts of the mind that don’t want things to open up inside divert your attention off the path. I’ve heard some people say that “working at concentration” goes against the basic principles of not-self. But then what is the principle of not-self? It’s not the principle that “there is no self,” or “there’s no …
- Change Your Mind… Be aware of where you focus your attention, where you focus your desire to develop something. All too often we water the seeds that simply reflect our cravings. When we come to the practice, we try to use right effort: generating the desire to prevent unskillful states from arising, or if unskillful states already have arisen, to try to put an end to them …
- The Fortress… Where do you feel it most prominently? Focus your attention there. That’s getting the mind in position. Now, once the body and mind are in position, you want to keep them in position. This is where it gets difficult. When the body’s sitting here without moving, sometimes there’s going to be a pain here or a numbness there. But you have …
- Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe… Then I thought of Ajaan Lee’s descriptions of the various places in the head and different parts of the body where the breath can come in and go out, so I focused my attention there. I thought of the breath coming in and out through the forehead, through the top of the head, in from the back of the neck, down the spine …
- The Desire to Be Free from Desire… Or you may decide that you simply don’t want to pay attention to that thinking. This is where perceiving the mind as a committee is useful. Some committee members may have their opinions, but you don’t have to listen to everybody on the committee; you don’t have to identify with everyone on the committee. If they’re going to chatter about …
- Worry… You understand the causes that it comes from—in other words, your continuous attention to the breath—so you stick with the causes. Then you learn how to make the best use of the comfort. Spread it around. Learn how to breathe in a way that feels good regardless of the situation in the body, and you have something you can fall back on …
- Concentration Teamwork… You can think about the breath going into parts of the body that you don’t pay much attention to. You can try different focal points. If you’ve been focusing at the tip of the nose, you can try, say, the base of the throat, the tip of the breastbone, or the spot just above the navel. There are lots of places you …
- Effortlessness Through Effort… Why does it pull you away? Why does it capture your attention? Now, “allure” here doesn’t simply mean the things that you find pleasing. There are some things that are actually negative, but the mind really goes for them anyhow. If you dig down a little bit deeper you find that there is some pleasure in going for the things you don’t …
- The Awful Truth… In the beginning, you want to give as little attention as possible to the things that pull you away. But once your center of gravity shifts so that it’s inside, then you begin to look to see: What are these things that pull you away? We build up this stillness inside so that we can use it as a foundation to look at …
- Skilled in Aims… It’s not the case that the breath pulls at you and says, “Hey, hey, hey, pay attention to me!” It’s because we have right view, realizing that the mind needs to be provided with a sense of nourishment inside that doesn’t depend on things outside, that we look for it in the breath. Then we cultivate the breath. This all comes …
- Skillful Distress… But renunciate distress focuses your attention in a different direction: toward the people who have attained awakening. They were noble people. Instead of hanging around with uninspiring people, maybe you can hang out with people who are noble. I was reading yesterday about how the idea that there is an attainment that you can attain—one that gets you out of this up and …
- Indulge in the Pleasure of Jhana… The more attention you give to this, the greater the rewards are going to be. This becomes the pleasure that’s your food as you go along the path. It gives you the strength to keep on going.
- Watch the Mind at the Breath… And it’s important that whatever feelings of ease and well-being come up, you don’t focus your primary attention on them. You notice that they’re there, but they’re not your focus. The focus has to be the energy and the quality of the energy. Eventually it’s going to grow still, and if your only concept of the breath is …
- Hope… In the same way, centering your attention on the breath in the body is a good way of stepping out of your thoughts. Or you can think of having a sense of the breath energy around the body—a cocoon that surrounds the body. Think of your awareness being sensitive to that all around. I know people who say they can see people’s …
- Memory & Motivation… And the purpose of this future thinking, of course, is to turn your attention back to the present moment, so that you can develop those qualities of mindfulness and alertness and ardency without being distracted. Take what you’ve learned from the past and apply it to the present and know that it’s going to be good for the future. These things are …
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