Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Breath Meditation: The Second Tetrad
     … You focus on the breath. As he said, the fact that you are paying careful attention to the breath: That, in and of itself, is a feeling. It’s a strange statement, that an act of attention would be a feeling. I think what he’s referring to is the fact that feelings are fabricated. They come from some potentials from the past: the … 
  3. An End to Suffering
     … If you just focus on the “I” it helps give you some encouragement to get your act together. But if you focus on all living beings, it changes your perspective. This is what gets you on the path to the end of suffering. So when you find yourself tied up in your narrative or tied up in your views, try to get a larger … 
  4. Rivers of Craving
     … So we don’t have to go over to the Bodhi tree to gain awakening, we can focus right here, where the mind and the body meet at the breath, and learn a lot of the same lessons he learned. But first we have to get the mind into concentration, get it focused as steadily as we can. It wasn’t until he got … 
  5. Serenity
     … This helps to focus you in, it helps you put other things aside. You can reflect on your own virtue, you can reflect on your own generosity. These are calming thoughts as well: realizing that even though your virtue may not be perfect, you’ve got at least some good things that you’ve done in your past. Your generosity may not be perfect … 
  6. What’s Real
     … So these are the realities we have to focus on. I was talking this evening to someone who was saying, “Living in the monastery, you must have it easy. No TV, no Internet, nothing to stir up your defilements,” and in some ways that’s true. We’re not constantly bombarded by the images meant to incite greed, aversion, delusion, lust, fear, whatever, that … 
  7. A Poker Mind
     … But if you’re going to focus on the knower at that point, you don’t have anything to focus on but the perception itself. When there’s a gap in the perception, the focal point is gone. So you need practice in learning how to make your perceptions more and more continuous. This is what mindfulness is for. It stitches these perceptions together … 
  8. The Uses of Concentration
     … We tend to focus on the pains, the tight areas, the problems, and we miss the areas that are actually okay. It’s like that book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which teaches how to draw a face by focusing not on the eyes or the nose or the mouth, but on the space between the eyes and the mouth, or … 
  9. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … Where in that process of breathing is the potential for ease, pleasure, a sense of fullness in the body? If there doesn’t seem to be much pleasure just yet, focus on the parts that are okay, but don’t think that they’ll have to stay just okay. Learn how to develop the potentials you have here, because the breath does have a … 
  10. In the Driver’s Seat
     … Where you focus, how strong your focus is, what kind of image you have in the mind of how the breath is going to go—that will have an immediate effect on how the breath is experienced, so you want to take advantage of that. As for things you can’t control, you may have some pains in the body that come from past … 
  11. Sensitive to the Breath
     … They’ll point out areas where you should focus, or where you might profitably focus, but what you’re going to see depends on you. You have to learn how to read not only the breath, but also the body and the mind. Learn to read the times when the mind is exerting too much control over the breath. Those times when, no matter … 
  12. The Bowl of Oil
     … Focus not on what’s difficult, but focus on the good things you’ve got going, and use your heedfulness as the man with the raised sword. Remind yourself that things are going to get a lot more difficult than this as life goes on, and if you spill your oil just over a few words that someone else said, what’s it going … 
  13. The Three Perceptions as Tools
     … He was less interested in looking at the characteristics of what things are, or in making statements about reality out there, and was more interested in developing perceptions that will have an impact on the mind—perceptions that are true as far as they go, and that focus on an aspect of reality to develop dispassion. In other words, we’re not trying to … 
  14. Matters of Life & Death
     … Once you get that sense of the right touch, the light touch, that keeps you balanced, then even though there may be pains in different parts of the body, you don’t have to focus on them. You can stay with that sense of ease, that sense of easiness that comes when everything is balanced. You begin to realize that it’ll depend less … 
  15. Respect for Tranquility & Insight
     … But what that means is that, for the time being, you have to focus on what you *can *do right now. And don’t look down on it. This is especially hard for people who have skills in some areas and who want to do the things they’re skillful in. It’s hard to go back and start over with a new skill … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. The Buddha’s Program
     … How you tell yourself to focus on the breath will influence how the breath goes right now. This is why we try out different assumptions about the breathing and the breath energy in the body—and why, when the meditation isn’t going well, you don’t just chalk it up to past bad karma. You look at what you’re doing right now … 
  18. Admirable Friendship
     … Don’t focus on the other person; focus on the action in and of itself, as part of a causal process, and then turn around and look at yourself. If, in your mind, you create other people out there, you create a lot of problems. But if you simply see life in the community as an opportunity to watch the principle of cause and … 
  19. Undividing the Mind
     … Here’s an opportunity to focus directly on the mind, to train the mind and then test the Buddha’s claims: Are they really true? Are they something you can give rise to within yourself? Can you prove him right or wrong? It’s an important issue, the possibility of a true happiness, a happiness that doesn’t have to depend on conditions and … 
  20. The Power of the Will
     … Those are the people we focus on so that we can become one of them. We remember how they went about it. You read the stories of the ajaans. If they hadn’t had a strong will, they probably would have just ended up tilling the fields, having families, dying, and they would have disappeared. But they had that will to figure out what … 
  21. Three Weapons
     … The mistakes you made came from your own lack of skill, and if you don’t work on those skills right now, you’re going to keep on making those same mistakes.” So the solution to dealing with issues in the past is to focus on your lack of skill in the present moment: the way the mind talks to itself, the way the … 
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