Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Using What You’ve Got
     … You can make them into different levels of concentration, and once the concentration gets developed, you apply it to different issues. Ajaan Fuang used to say that there are three basic steps in practicing concentration. First is learning how to do it. Second is how to maintain it. That’s where mindfulness comes in. It’s needed to keep the concentration going. Then the … 
  3. An Island of Concentration
     … This is another one of the ironic things about the typical picture of mindfulness and concentration: that mindfulness is expansive and concentration is restrictive. But as I mentioned just now, mindfulness has its territory, but its territory can be fairly large—like the whole body. That’s also the range of right concentration. Can you be aware of the whole body all at once … 
  4. Generating Power
    Generating Power July, 2003 Concentration practice involves work. We often think of it as a place for the mind to rest, and it is, but it’s even more a place for the mind to recharge its batteries. That requires energy, requires effort, requires work. In Thailand the idiom for meditation is “to make an effort.” And in meditating there very definitely are things … 
  5. The Heightened Mind
     … When you’re working with the mind in concentration, you’re getting practice in how not to let the mind be overcome by pleasure. You create feelings of pleasure, you try to maintain them, but if you just start wallowing in them, you destroy them—and you destroy your concentration. If you want to maintain them, you have to learn how to be with … 
  6. A Position of Strength
     … If you can just stay here with the breath as you stick with this intention, your mindfulness turns into concentration. Sometimes you hear that mindfulness is one thing, concentration is something else, but they really do go together. Mindfulness means keeping something in mind. And, of course, you can’t be concentrated unless you have something in mind and you stick with it. The … 
  7. To Understand the Path
     … So concentration is something you want to be attached to. As Ajaan Fuang once said, you want to be crazy about the concentration if you want to do it well. In other words, you really like it, you’re really interested in it, you keep coming back to it again and again and again, trying to do it more and more skillfully. So make … 
  8. The Resolve to Let Go
    In the factors of the noble eightfold path there’s a strong correlation between right resolve and right concentration. Right resolve is composed of three kinds of resolve: the resolve for renunciation, the resolve for non-ill will, and the resolve for harmlessness. All three of these are essential to the practice of right concentration. To get the mind rightly concentrated, you have to … 
  9. How to Read Yourself
     … But when your concentration is not going well, it’s not the case that nothing else is going well. When the Buddha talks about having a sense of yourself, it’s learning how to read: How far have you come in different qualities of the mind? When you suddenly find that your concentration has trouble getting started and is waylaid by different hindrances, remind … 
  10. Meticulous
     … This is one of the ways in which you develop discernment through the practice of perfecting or mastering your concentration. All too often, it’s thought that you work on concentration, and then you set aside the concentration to work on insight. That’s not how the Buddha taught it; that’s not how the ajaans taught it. Actually it’s in the process … 
  11. The Field Hospital
     … That way, you start protecting your concentration with discernment, and you strengthen your discernment with your concentration. Of the factors of the noble path, these two are the ones that are the most important: right view and right concentration. So see if you can get them working together—so that you can maintain your field hospital. That way, when you get wounded, you have … 
  12. Seclusion
     … So, knowing that the mind has to depend on a source of food, make concentration your food. The sense of ease, the sense of fullness that you can gain from concentration: Make that your food. And don’t regard concentration as a waste of time. The chant we had just now talks about having respect for all three parts of the training. But then … 
  13. In & of Themselves
    The basic frames of reference for getting the mind into concentration are three: body, feelings, mind. And the Buddha has you look at these things in and of themselves: the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind states in and of themselves, because otherwise, we go and create them into becomings, acts of taking on identities in worlds of experience … 
  14. Do. Maintain. Use.
    Ajaan Fuang used to say that there are three aspects to doing breath meditation, practicing concentration. One is doing it, the second is maintaining it, and the third is putting it to use. Like right now, we’re trying to do it and maintain it. Get the mind to the breath. Try to keep it with the breath. Experiment with different ways of breathing … 
  15. The Thread of Mindfulness
    The Thread of Mindfulness April 13, 2015 The Buddha speaks of concentration as a perception-attainment through all the levels from the first jhana up through the dimension of nothingness. In each case, the perception you hold in mind keeps you in concentration, which means that as we’re concentrating, we’re fighting against the passage we chanted just now about perceptions being inconstant … 
  16. Use Your Defilements
     … Here the best way to learn about the mind in itself is by working on the skills of concentration and virtue, working on your questions as to where the concentration can help you, where its drawbacks are. In other words, what’s its allure, what are its drawbacks? Looking at the drawbacks of the concentration will take you into deeper and deeper levels concentration … 
  17. Two Eyes, Not Just One
     … So you really do want to develop this all-around eye that comes with concentration. It’s ironic that people think of concentration as being very narrow and blocking out. Now, there is that kind of concentration, but that’s not what the Buddha’s talking about. As he says, when you settle down, there’s a sense of ease and well-being with … 
  18. Food for the Mind
    One of the reasons we practice concentration is to make sure that the mind is well-fed, that it has the strength it needs to deal with things. And that it’s also in the proper mood for dealing with things. In other words, if we take on lots of issues in life, after a while the mind gets frazzled. It’s responsible for … 
  19. The Taste Is Release
     … So we go back and work on our virtue so that our concentration will have great fruit and great benefit. The Buddha is not saying that you can’t get the mind concentrated without virtue, but the kind of concentration you’d get that way would be pretty dishonest. It’d be built on disassociation, denial. When you sit down and get quiet with … 
  20. How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration
     … In the path that the Buddha teaches, the last two factors are right mindfulness and right concentration. The description of right concentration tells of the different levels of concentration you can get into, but it doesn’t tell you how to do it. The instructions on how to get into concentration are in the description of right mindfulness. To begin with, you remain focused … 
  21. Conditions for Concentration
     … As the mind settles down, you get into concentration. That multiplies the joy, deepens the concentration, makes it more and more the kind of concentration that’s appropriate for going deeper into the mind, developing the discernment that can go deeper. This is why some people are able to gain awakening while they listen to a Dhamma talk. So remember, the Buddha didn’t … 
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