Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Willing to Learn
     … I want to master these skills.” And you can have some confidence that as you master the skills and are paying careful attention, with that desire to learn you’re going to become a different person, a person who feels at home in this new world. What does it mean to be willing to learn? The Buddha lists three types of discernment that you … 
  3. A Promise to Yourself
     … The way the mind maintains that state of stillness contains all kinds of aggregates and mental events, acts of attention, acts of intention. There are many levels of conversation going on inside. You get one level still, and then in the stillness you begin to realize there’s another conversation going on, more subtly. “I’ve got to look into that”: That’s the … 
  4. Bases for Success
     … The third base for success is to pay careful attention to what you’re doing. You’re really intent on staying focused, trying to be as sensitive as possible to what you’re doing. These three qualities—desire, persistence and intent—are supposed to exist in every state of concentration. They differ simply as to which is most pronounced. In some cases, concentration is … 
  5. Tranquility & Insight with the Breath
     … If the attention is too narrow, you can build up a lot of tension in other parts of the body, and you come out of the meditation feeling tired, because you were tensing everything else up so that you could stay focused on your one spot. To prevent that, you want to be able to be aware of everything, all around. This also enables … 
  6. Learning by Doing
     … If there’s an imbalance in the body—too much pressure, say, in the head—how do you bring your attention down so that you’re not making the pressure in the head worse? Don’t think that you have to focus only at the nose. You can focus anywhere in the body where there’s a feeling of energy. The energy may be … 
  7. How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration
     … In this case, you don’t feed the thought with your attention, and eventually it’ll go away. The mind will begin to settle down with a sense of ease. This is where you have to be very careful, because once there’s ease, we tend to wallow in it. We drop the topic of our meditation and just go for the ease. But … 
  8. A Good Mood to Meditate
     … You just confine your attention to that one little spot and hide out there. It’s like going through a storm. If you have a little tiny shack, and there’s a big storm outside, you just stay inside your little shack. You don’t go venturing outside. Try to find a place that’s safe from the wind and the rain, and just … 
  9. Be Prepared
     … You pay attention to what you’re doing now, but you also think about the long-term consequences. If you see that in the future there are potential dangers, okay, you prepare for them. And how do you prepare for them now? Getting to know your breath really well, getting to know your sense of the body, the breath energies in the body, and … 
  10. At the Door of the Cage
     … I didn’t have the soundtrack to go by, but even without paying much attention I found the story pretty easy to figure out. The hero had a miserable family life, and so when the opportunity came to step onto that humongous flying saucer and go off who-knows-where, he was willing to go. Now, if he had had a happy family life … 
  11. Issues of Control
     … Remind yourself that you have some responsibilities here, and they’re not going to get done by paying a lot of attention to what’s going on in the world outside. One of the Buddha’s definitions of the difference between a wise person and a fool is that the wise person knows what duties fall to him or her, and takes on those … 
  12. The Mind's Immune System
     … You don’t pay much attention to them. You don’t really see them, because you’re out looking for the pleasure and trying to push away the pain. The neutral feelings seem unimportant, and so a lot of delusion comes into the mind right at that point. That’s where the Buddha says the ignorance obsession tends to focus. He said that these … 
  13. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … They can be anything from the thoughts that direct your thinking to the breath or your attention to the breath, or the thoughts that encourage you. This is a really important part of the meditation that often gets overlooked: learning how to encourage yourself, to remind yourself, “This is something really good and you have the ability to do it.” There was a sad … 
  14. To Purify the Heart
     … You’re not paying attention to the fact of how you’re reacting to things, and so you can miss a lot of things that way. Which is why, when the Buddha taught Rahula, he taught him to look at his actions throughout the day, his speech throughout the day, his thoughts throughout the day. You want to watch yourself not only while you … 
  15. A True Person
     … The people who pay careful attention, who try to think the Dhamma through: They’re a good example. The people who put it into practice: They’re a good example. So you look for people whose behavior is exemplary. They pull you up and make you a better person because you want to be like them. All of these things are qualities that are … 
  16. An Inside Job
     … Sights come in and there are certain sights that you pay attention to and others that you don’t. You interpret them in different ways. The same thing with all the other input that comes through the senses—and it’s your shaping of that input that makes a difference between whether it’s going to cause suffering in the mind or not. And … 
  17. Overcoming Obstacles
     … So give this issue your full attention. What’s needed to be done to get the mind to settle down? What’s needed to understand this process of fabrication that’s constantly going on in the mind with which we create our experience out of the raw materials that come from the past? This process, the Buddha said, is so stressful but it only … 
  18. Good & Independent
     … Where do you feel that energy? How does it feel? Does it feel good? Do you want an energy that’s nourishing? Calming if you’ve been upset? Energizing if you’ve been tired? Relaxing if you’ve been tense? If you pay a lot of attention, you realize that that energy responds very quickly to thoughts in the mind. You can say to … 
  19. The River Gauge
     … What can you do for them to satisfy them? That gets your attention more and more focused right here, interested in exploring right here. In that way, you don’t have to talk to yourself so much about why it’s a good thing to be meditating. It feels good to be meditating. It’s interesting to be meditating. There’s a sense of … 
  20. Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness
     … the desire to do it skillfully; the persistence that sticks with it till you’ve mastered it; intentness, paying a lot of attention to what you’re doing; and analysis, using your powers of discernment to see what’s not yet right, trying to figure out how to get around problems, how to solve them. This fourth factor also involves ingenuity — all the active … 
  21. Looking After Yourself
    The Buddha’s last words were to reach completion in the practice by being heedful, which focuses attention on the word heedful. It’s important to notice who he was talking to. The text tells us that all the monks in the assembly were at the very least stream-enterers, in other words, people who’d had their first taste of awakening, their first … 
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