Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 55
  2. Put Your Heart into It
     … So whatever disturbances there are outside, you learn how to not pay them any attention. Whatever disturbances there are in the mind, disregard them as just another committee member or block of committee members. They don’t have to have control over everything. You hold on. You’re resolute. You’re ardent. And you do this because you’re heedful. You realize that if … 
  3. Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds
     … In other words, the purpose of this is to deflect your attention away from the object back to the fact that you’ve got this desire for the body to be attractive. You have to keep asking yourself: why? Why do you want it to be attractive? What is this fermentation that comes bubbling up? What does it want? What are its assumptions? That … 
  4. Rooted in Desire
     … But, you had to learn how to balance that desire so that you can actually pay attention to what you’re doing while you practice. So, instead of just thinking about how much you want to do it well, you actually focus on the steps. If you’re learning a musical instrument, you focus on your scales, you focus on your intonation, you focus … 
  5. The Right Attitude to the Body
     … As soon as the Buddha saw that he’d gotten her attention, he then had the women in the vision get old, get sick, and then die and decompose. Rupananda realized that even the most beautiful bodies would end up that way. The realization hit her so hard that she was able to let go of her attachment to her own body and gain … 
  6. Learning Right Speech
     … When the Buddha taught the noble eightfold path, he didn’t teach any extraneous folds, any extra factors that were unnecessary, so learn how to give each of the factors the attention it deserves.
  7. Savor Your Breath
     … Pay special attention to the in-breath, because that’s the energizing breath. The in-breath is something you do. The out-breath is something you should learn how not to squeeze out. You do the in-breathing; the body will allow the breath back out again at its own pace. Then when you feel the need to breathe in again, then breathe in … 
  8. Present-Moment Intelligence
     … Most people go through life without paying much attention to their breath. As for the way they talk to themselves, they take it for granted: This is the conversation, this is how it tends to be, these are the voices that tend to have power in the mind. As for the perceptions, what we think is abstract thinking is often driven by underlying images … 
  9. For Your Future’s Sake
     … That doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing, just that you should give all your attention to what you have to do right now, and don’t try to second guess what’s going to come down the line, how far away it may be. The Buddha makes that point again and again: You have no idea in advance when the moment … 
  10. Responsible Happiness
    Focus your attention on the process of breathing in the body. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? There’s the passage of the air through the nose. There’s the movement of the abdomen, the movement of the chest. Focus less on the air and more on the movement of the body. It may be subtle, but it’s there. In … 
  11. The Treasure Hunt
     … What happens when you really focus your attention right here and don’t let yourself get distracted? What happens when you develop your sensitivities in this area? What do you find? Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about his time with Ajaan Mun, saying that Ajaan Mun would give long Dhamma talks, sketching out the whole path of the practice, because at any one time there … 
  12. Wilderness Wealth
     … He says to think of “earth” without paying attention to its hollows and irregularities—just its earthness, like a hide that’s stretched free of its wrinkles with a hundred pegs. Don’t think of any particulars of earth, but just remember that everything around you, everything within the body, is all earth. And as far as you can think out in any direction … 
  13. The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha
     … You focus your attention totally on developing the path. And in developing the path, the realization of the end of suffering appears right there. So focus on bringing the mind to stillness. If the mind hasn’t yet come to stillness, ask yourself: What’s getting in the way? Use your ingenuity. It’s not just a matter of desire. You use desire, you … 
  14. A Refuge from Karma
     … If you just sit here wallowing in how good it feels, it’s not going to feel good very long, because the cause for that good feeling comes from the fact that you’re alert, paying careful attention to the breath. If you lose that foundation, either you go into delusion concentration, which is pleasant but it’s like falling asleep, or else the … 
  15. Accepting the Buddha’s Standards
     … You want to evaluate and adjust the breath, keep your attention focused on the breath until it gives rise to a sense of ease and fullness. Only when the mind is settled like this is it going to see anything clearly. Yesterday I read somebody complaining that they had seen a passage where someone had said that jhana is necessary for awakening, and he … 
  16. Fixing the Present
     … They’re truths to be used right now, to focus your attention. If you’re suffering, well, what is the suffering? And what’s the cause? What arises together with the suffering and falls away when the suffering falls away? That’s something you can watch right here, right now, and you can see it more and more clearly as you develop factors of … 
  17. Noble Right Concentration
     … Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if long breathing is comfortable. If it is, keep it up. If not, you can change. You could make it even longer, or shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to notice when the rhythm and texture of the breathing feels good for the body right now. When you find a rhythm that feels good … 
  18. A Culture of Self Reliance
     … That way, you’re free to focus more of your attention on developing your inner refuge. The freedom that comes from contentment with external things also gives you perspective on what work to take on to make your living. You just need enough in order to be able to practice. Most of the jobs that go beyond that also take a lot of time … 
  19. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way
     … So, why create misery? Who wants it? It’s possible to develop a sense of fullness and well-being in the body simply by paying very careful attention to how you breathe—adjusting things here, adjusting things there, and noticing that, as the mind gets trained, it really does have the power not to suffer from the things that it used to suffer from … 
  20. Encourage Yourself
     … It’s to focus our attention on what’s really important right now, which is the intentions we’re thinking right now, the intentions we’re following through with right now. He has many stories about the cycles of the universe, past lives, future results of present actions. They seem to point far away from the present. But actually they’re pointing right back … 
  21. Three Levels of Concentration
     … You don’t want to look where your thoughts are pointing your attention; you want to look at them simply as fabrications. So all the important work in developing concentration and insight happens right here: learning how to deal first with pain and then with pleasure, so that the mind can settle down in a way that’s still, solid, and very alert, no … 
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