Search results for: "Attention"
- Page 58
- Tapping into the Breath… Focus your attention there. And then, when you feel more confident, you can go to the spot that’s actually malfunctioning and ask yourself, “Where is the healthy breath in here?” Notice the attitude not so much that you’re going to make it healthy. You’re just going to allow it. It’s in this way that you learn how to use your …
- Overcoming Complacency… It’s part of the fine print that we didn’t pay attention to when we signed on, but it’s there. You can’t deny it. And so the question, given this fact that we do have such a creative role in our experience, is: What we’re going to do with it? And the first thing you have to do is just …
- Attahi Attano Natho… So when the consequences depend on what you do, you pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Don’t let your focus get distracted outside. There’s an aspect of the practice that has an impact on other people, but it comes down to the qualities of your mind. You want to be unburdensome. You want to be modest. You want to be …
- The Management of Suffering… So what does that tell you about your actions, how much attention you should give to them, how much care you should take? That’s the first quality of a good friend and the first quality that leads to happiness in future lifetimes. The second quality is virtue: the desire to be harmless in your words and your deeds. This basically comes down to …
- Step by Step… Don’t focus so much attention on the goal that you misstep. Dogen the Zen master has a nice image. He says that, in walking the path, the realization of the cessation of suffering is the same thing as the development of the path. Now, this doesn’t mean that the path is the goal. What it does mean, though, is that in the …
- A Safe Home… They just go for whatever is attractive, whatever captures their attention. To keep this child at home, you’ve got to give it toys to play with, so play with the breath. You can try long breathing, short breathing, deep breathing, shallow breathing, heavy or light breathing, fast or slow. Think of the breath as a whole-body process. In other words, you don …
- Training Your Inner Teacher… You start by finding a teacher who’s reliable, and you listen to the Dhamma; you pay careful attention; you try to remember the Dhamma. All of that comes under discernment that comes from listening. The next steps are the discernment that comes from thinking. You take the Dhamma you’ve heard and you compare it with other lessons you’ve learned, and you …
- Ingenuity… Why do you do it? Because you’re not really paying attention, you don’t see the connections. Sometimes the perception of not-self or the perception of emptiness will hit home. There are lots of different ways of developing dispassion. The tools are there not for you to say, “Oh yes, this is the way things are: inconstant, stress, not-self. What’s …
- Mindfulness & Perception… Just focus your attention on the breath, and the mind’s old habits of focusing will do that. There will be an arrow and, for the least little while, the ability to remember. But then you forget. You drop the perception. It may take you a while before you come back. This is where you need to know exactly what the mechanics are, so …
- Meaning & Becoming… Our attention begins to withdraw from the external senses and goes inside. A little world appears. We enter into the world, and then we’re gone. We’ve fallen asleep and gone into a dream world. All kinds of worlds can appear. The process can be pretty random, going from one dream to the next. And there’s very little continuity. Occasionally, there will …
- Think of the Consequences… And allow your attention to settle there. It doesn’t have to be one tiny point. In fact, eventually, the Buddha wants you to have a whole-body awareness. So you could focus say, on the chest or on the abdomen, in the middle of the head, wherever the energy flow feels most prominent and also most comfortable, where it feels really satisfying to …
- Patience… Other parts of our culture are less likely to try to erase you, but still, they want you to pay attention outside. The media tell us that the really interesting things in the world are things that other people are doing someplace else. So when you come to sit and meditate, you find that the territory inside here has gotten squeezed out of shape …
- Take the One Seat… You need mindfulness to stitch together your moments of awareness, moments of attention, so that they become continuous. Mindfulness is the ability to remember you’ve got to stay with the breath. Alertness is what watches the breath. As you settle down with the breath, you notice there are a lot of other things right next to the breath: all the activities of the …
- A Home for the Mind… Just the fact that we have this body requires a lot of care and a lot of attention. And the things we need to survive place a burden on other people. So how do we live in a way that’s light—as unburdensome as possible? Well, again, the more you can find well-being in the mind, the less of a burden you …
- Maintaining Stillness… If your concentration depends just on one spot, then as soon as your attention leaves that spot, it’s gone, it’s dead. But if the range of your concentration fills the whole body, then even though other things come in and you have to deal with other issues in life, you’ve got this background, this whole-body awareness that you’re in …
- Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t… The mind is often like a politician who, when the fingers are being pointed at the politician, is very clever at diverting everybody’s attention someplace over there. Of course, in doing that, we never solve whatever our actual problems are. Even when we sit down to meditate, we’re often more interested in what’s over there. There’s a story Ajaan Maha …
- Persistence… If you have trouble with your legs going asleep during the meditation, start right now paying careful attention to how the back of your neck feels as you breathe in. Does it feel good? What could you change? Is there any tightness there? See if you can loosen it up. Now work down the spine. You find that by improving the circulation down through …
- Goal Orientation… He had to teach them in a way that’d grab their attention. First, he showed off his psychic powers. He won over most of them, except for their leader. Finally, he read the leader’s mind back to the leader. He had been reading his mind all along, but finally he announced, “This is what you’ve been thinking, and it’s stupid …
- Learning by Doing… So, as you breathe in, and there’s a flow of energy that allows the air to come in and go out, where do you feel it? Focus your attention there. Try to breathe in a way that feels good. You can experiment with different kinds of breathing—long, short, or in-long, out-short; in-short, out-long; heavy, light; fast, slow; deep …
- Doing Aggregates… And be on the lookout for any signs that the mind is about to slip off, or it’s made a decision that it’s going to slip off as soon as you’re not paying it attention. It’s this ability to watch the actions of the mind that makes this the path to the end of suffering. In other words, to get …
- Load next page...
