Search results for: "Focusing"
- Page 62
- In the Driver’s Seat… What you’re doing right now is going to have an effect right now, so the way you’re focusing on the breath, for instance, will have an impact on how you experience the breath. Where you focus, how strong your focus is, what kind of image you have in the mind of how the breath is going to go—that will have an …
- Pain… You’re trying to keep the mind focused, and the body’s doing everything it can to fall apart. Yet you’ve got to maintain that focus. So that first step is not one that you just skip right through. It’s teaching you an important lesson. You’ve got to maintain focus despite the fact that things are not working. When the Buddha …
- Taking the Long View… So, paradoxically, by taking the long view, the focus gets focused right back here, right now. But then again, that’s how the Buddha gained his awakening. He took the very long view. He saw the cycles of rebirth that beings can go through. Then his immediate reaction was to turn around and look at the mind right here in the present moment, realizing …
- Your Territory… It’s one of the ways in which we modulate from being focused on the breath into other states of becoming and we go traveling around. But here you don’t want to travel. You want to settle in. Because states of becoming are places you can’t really stay. You travel for a while and then they run out. Either they simply disintegrate …
- Remembering Luang Lung… He belonged to a generation that wasn’t wealthy—they had had to live through a war—so he focused on what he did have to be generous with: He had his energy; he had his strength. He was very slight of build but he had a lot of energy of will, so he was generous with that. I owe him a lot. He …
- Undividing the Mind… What’s the appropriate thing right now? How much is just right? How much is properly focused effort? As with any practice, it’s not just the amount of practice, but it’s when you’re practicing, what you focus on. There’s a book on learning to be a good swimmer that makes the point: It’s not a matter of how many …
- Victory in Battle… That’s when the practice gets a lot more focused. But in the beginning, it’s like a mother hen trying to gather all her chicks under her wings. She gets this chick and that chick and ah!—the first little chick runs away. Gets that one, ah!—another one’s gone away. It can be frustrating at times, but as they say in …
- Looking Inward… And what are you doing right now? Where is your mind right now, where is it focused? Ajaan Lee says that good meditation is composed of three things. One is the right intention: You make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath for the hour. And the second is the right object: the breath. So—where is the breath right …
- Finding Your Own Balance… If they’re not getting along, what can you do to change? For the breath, not only is there the question of how long or short or heavy or light the breath is, but there’s also the question of where you’re focusing. There’s the question of how you’re conceiving the breath. These are things you have to adjust and get …
- Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity… the realization that you’re not giving up on the search for happiness, simply that you’re focusing it on areas where it’ll have an effect. The primary effect, of course, is going to be in your own actions. If you find that you’re doing something unskillful, that’s not an area where you can have equanimity, to be content with it …
- Your Quiet Corner… He has us look directly at the world of our experience, and focuses on the big problem in that world of experience, which is the suffering that comes from the way we engage with that world. Now, to deal with the suffering in this world we have here, we need to find a quiet corner. That’s what we try to create as we …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
