Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Make a Difference
     … This is the state in which the Buddha said you’re focused on the body in and of itself, or feelings, or whatever your concentration object may be, but you’re not thinking thoughts about the object, and you’re certainly not thinking thoughts about anything else. You’re getting the mind still. It’s only when the mind is still that you can … 
  3. Your Judgments Matter
     … This is especially important as the mind settles down and you get focused. Sometimes you just see things from one angle. The more intense your concentration, the more one-angled you get, which is one of the reasons why we develop the kind of concentration that spreads your awareness around and makes a lot of use of your powers of evaluation. You’re not … 
  4. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … In mindfulness practice, this is called focusing on the topic of mind states both internally and externally. It’s not that you can directly experience other people’s mind states, but you can infer them from your own. You’ve got this body. You’re living as a human being in a society. There’s going to be suffering. Other people have bodies. They … 
  5. Training the Whole Mind
     … As we were saying today, there are times when, for your own good, you don’t want to be focused on the breath. There are things you have to think about, things you’ve got to plan for, things you have to ponder, where you take all the powers of the mind you’ve trained in concentration and put them to other uses. That … 
  6. Freedom
     … This may seem like a restriction, but the Buddha is focusing your attention in an area where you can find a happiness that doesn’t cause any suffering to anybody. He’s setting a high standard for happiness. He isn’t like the sort of teacher in high school who would just let you get away with anything. You may have liked those teachers … 
  7. The Safety of Jhana
     … You’ve got your old karma and then you’ve got consciousness, focused in on whatever old karma presents in terms of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness itself. Instead of delighting in the idea of making something new out of these things, you can simply see them as they arise and pass away. That’s how you go beyond the dichotomy between … 
  8. Meditation as a Skill
     … After all, while you’re focusing on long breathing and short breathing, there are lots of ways you can do that. You can simply allow the breath to come in and out on its own at whatever rate it wants to. Or when you begin to notice that when the breath seems to be doing this on its own, there’s actually an element … 
  9. Taking a Stance
     … So even though staying focused on the breath may require time and effort, it’s an important skill, for once you have this center it’s here not only when you sit with your eyes closed. Wherever you go, there’s the breath. When you learn to relate to the breath in a good way, you have a good relation going on inside. In … 
  10. Boxed Stories
     … You’re in one, and all of a sudden you find yourself either backing off into a larger framework or focusing in on a smaller one. You’re telling yourself one story: You’re meditating, and you’re a meditator right now. The story of your meditation is that you’re staying with the breath. Then all of a sudden you find yourself in … 
  11. Strengthening Discernment
     … So, we’re focusing on the breath. This is called bodily fabrication. How do you use this bodily fabrication to create a state of right concentration? As you watch the breath, you begin to notice that there are feelings, and the way you breathe is going to be guided by your perception, your mental image, of what it actually means to breathe. There’s … 
  12. What Is Skillful?
     … And it’s the same as you’re focusing on the breath: There will be a lot of wandering around in the mind that you wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t made up your mind you were going to stay right here. Otherwise, you float seamlessly from one thought into another into another. If, on a normal day, you were to draw … 
  13. Dhamma Survivalism
     … The concentration is what gives you that sense of well-being, simply being here right now, breathing in, breathing out, focused in the body, gaining a sense of the different energies flowing around, and seeing what you can do with them—learning to take an interest in this dimension of your awareness, because it has a lot of potential. The way you breathe doesn … 
  14. Surveying the World
     … But if you just look at the events that would lead up to becoming, if there has to be a becoming, let it be the becoming of concentration, where you’re focused on your inner world, where there’s no conflict aside from your own inner conflict. At least you don’t have to fight other people off. No one else is pushing you … 
  15. Goodwill Starts with Gratitude
    When the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son Rahula, he started out with some preliminary meditations to get the mind in the right shape to be focusing on the breath. I’ve talked a lot in the past about the meditation on making your mind like earth so that you’re not shaken by events coming up outside or coming up inside your … 
  16. True to the Teachings
     … When you’re focusing on the breath, you’re giving the mind another place to stay. You’ve always got that other place to stay, so learn how to make the most of it. If you catch yourself wandering off, you can let go. Think of that as dropping one more burden from the mind. If you find yourself picking up the burning thought … 
  17. A Mirror for the Mind
     … It’s just mental action that you’re focusing on. So what are your mental acts? In terms of mindfulness, you’ve got mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. In terms of concentration, your acts are directed thought and evaluation, plus the effort to bring that directed thought and evaluation to one object. So keep your eye on those activities. Direct your thoughts to the breath … 
  18. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … But it does require qualities of patience, endurance, determination, to get it right so that you’re focused, clear, alert, and not just resting, but mindful and ardent. That’s why this is a superior pleasure—because it makes you a better person. And you pursue this pleasure, you pursue this sukha. There’s a sutta that goes through each of the different jhanas … 
  19. Mindful All the Way
     … Wherever in the body you like to stay focused, go right there. Make a survey through the body first to make sure that everything is calmed down. Any obvious patterns of tension or tightness, you allow them to relax. Then find your favorite place to settle in. When you settle in, you don’t just sit there doing nothing. If the mind is doing … 
  20. The Dualistic Path
     … You have the choice of focusing on that vague shape or you can focus on the space between the droplets. That doesn’t have a shape at all, doesn’t have a boundary. And you’ve just learned a lesson about the power of perception, and the sense of ease that comes with particular perceptions, the sense of disturbance or burdensomeness that come with … 
  21. Protection Through Mindfulness
     … If focusing on one spot doesn’t work, try another spot. Use your ingenuity. Be observant. That’s how you protect yourself. That’s how your skill as a meditator grows, so that the protection becomes more and more all-around. The meditation really does become your refuge, and you yourself become a person you can trust.
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