Search results for: "Attention"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- Analyzing Anger… Then apply these five terms to whatever comes up and is creating a disturbance in the mind, always remembering that even though the bullet may be shooting out, you’ve got to keep your attention right at the gun, right at the trigger if you want to learn how to stop shooting. And these are the five terms that you use in order to …
- Study & Practice… The other is through your own appropriate attention, i.e., looking at your actions and figuring out what’s working, what’s not. But even if the inspiration comes from the voice of another, the voice of another can’t do the work for you. You take what you learn and you apply it, accepting the fact—and this where the acceptance is really …
- Limitless is the Buddha… Pay more attention to the breath this time and also keep an eye out for any warning signs that the mind is about to slip away again. This requires a quality called ardency: that you put effort—you put your whole heart—into doing it well. Part of ardency is motivated by the realization that if you don’t train the mind, there’s …
- Saying No to Distraction… The defilements like it when the mind has a spotlight attention—when it’s focused on one thing from one angle, and a lot of the mind is in the dark. Here we’re trying to illuminate as many dark spots from as many angles as possible. Think of the whole body, be *aware *of the whole body—all around, in front, behind. You …
- Control… So, he says, focus your attention on the area where you do have control and make the most of it. You can choose to cause suffering. You can choose to cause temporary happiness. You can choose to cause lasting happiness. You could choose to find the end of suffering. These are choices you can make. So don’t spend your time getting upset about …
- Groundwork… This double process of paying attention to the breath and then evaluating how it’s going: The technical terms for that are direct thought and evaluation. Directed thought is focusing your mind in a particular direction, and then continually reminding yourself to stay there, because the nature of the mind is that it doesn’t listen to directions well. You tell it to think …
- The Uses of Pleasure & Pain… Learn how to treat them as tools, showing them the proper care and attention that tools need, but also realizing that they’re not the be-all and end-all of life. They’re processes, not things. They’ve got their uses, but they’re not ends in and of themselves. Once you’ve got that point clear, the path opens up.
- Happy to Be Here… For the time being, the main emphasis is on giving a lot of attention to the breath, being very careful about how you talk to yourself about the breath, how you talk to yourself about the meditation, how it’s going. Always try to be encouraging. You’re accomplishing two things at once: on the one hand, getting the mind to settle down, and …
- Think… Notice where the breathing is most prominent in the body and focus your attention there. Try to make that spot comfortable, then see how far the sense of comfort can spread. You’re going to need this as your foundation because it’s inevitable that when you’re sitting and meditating, especially for a long time, pains will come up. If you’re going …
- What Right Mindfulness Remembers… some turn up the volume and others turn down the volume, focus your attention here, focus it there. Because you’re already doing this kind of fabrication, what the path is teaching you is to fabricate in more skillful ways. So the purpose of mindfulness is to remind you how you want to fabricate, what you’re going to do right now. You’ve …
- The Power is in Your Hands… We’re attached to our ideas, to our perceptions, to the way we pay attention to things, and to the intentions we have. We’re attached to the body. We take these things for granted, and the Buddha’s asking us to get a little distance from them so that we can see them clearly. He says that it’s when you see these …
- Creating a World of Concentration… So you’ve got desire, persistence, intent—where you’re really interested in something, pay careful attention to it—and then finally, the more active qualities of analysis and ingenuity. These parallel the four ways in which you build worlds in your imagination. First, there’s the ability to create a world through desire. Then you maintain it—that’s the persistence. The intentness …
- Limitations… You focus on the areas that really are important in life and you have to develop equanimity for everything else, so that you don’t get distracted from the important things by things that are pressing or urgent, or things that are in your face, demanding your attention all the time. Just because something is urgent and pressing doesn’t mean it’s important …
- Here to Learn… Once you’ve got that part stable and comfortable, then you can start spreading your attention to other parts of the body, allowing that sense of comfortable breath to flood throughout the body along with your awareness. When you’ve developed a sense of well-being like this with the breath, then you can turn and focus on the pain. Be careful to observe …
- The Path of Questions… This is called appropriate attention — yoniso manasikara, learning how to ask skillful questions — and it’s essential to the whole practice. In fact the first question you’re supposed to ask when you go to meet a new teacher is: “What is skillful? What is not skillful? What, if I do it, will be for my long-term happiness? What, if I do it …
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