Search results for: "Attention"
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- Choices… Whereas if you focus attention on what you’re doing, on the choices you’re making, and getting more sensitive to them, you find something inside the mind that is not a choice, that is not conditioned, lying right next to your freedom of choice. This is where you’re going to find it. So learn how to exercise your freedom, exercise your power …
- From Darkness to Light… Right here is where you focus your attention. It doesn’t matter how long the process has been going on. The fact that you can stop it now means that it’ll have to stop. Ajaan Suwat’s image is of a cave that has been dark for who knows how long. If you bring in a light, he said, the darkness has no …
- The Buddha’s Relationship Advice… Back when I was in Thailand, there was a famous monk whose monastery I visited once, and he seemed to pay an awful lot of attention to me. I began to get the sense that he wanted me to leave Ajaan Fuang and come and stay at his monastery. I really didn’t trust him, even though he was highly regarded in general. I …
- Equanimity… The factors of the practice are the ones we need to pay attention to. The one that’s a by-product is going to happen on its own. But the ones we work with—developing the equanimity that allows us to endure things, developing an even deeper equanimity that allows us to see things really clearly, very deeply in the mind: Those are the …
- Happily on the Path… fabrication, intentions, attention, perceptions, feelings. We’re actively shaping things, and that’s what we’re trying to train: the way the mind shapes its experience. Part of that is learning how to find joy in simple things like generosity and virtue, and moving up to finding joy in the concentration, joy in the fact that you’re getting some control of your mind …
- What You Can’t Change, What You Can… We’re not paying very careful attention to how we shape our experience. We crave for things to be a way that they can’t be. Or even when we crave for things to be a way they can be, those things are going to change on us, and that ultimately leads to disappointment. That disappointment is what you’ve got to look into …
- The Rivers of Karma… You’ve got all these pain receptors in your body, along with the various parts of your nervous system that make the decision as to which little pains you’re going to pay attention to and which ones you’re going to ignore. Most of this happens on a sub-conscious level, but as you meditate you train yourself to become more conscious of …
- Between You and Your Eyes… Out attention is mainly focused someplace else—on our plans for the future, issues from the past—so that what’s immediately present is simply used as a means to something else. As a result, the important issues in life—the things that are immediately present to our awareness, the things we’re doing right now—we don’t really comprehend. Even something as …
- In the Present… But when you’re sitting here doing concentration, you want your attention to be more and more totally right here—but still with that sense of mindfulness, of holding the right things in mind. If you lose your mindfulness, the concentration drifts into what Ajaan Lee calls “delusion concentration,” where you lose sense of where you’re focused, where you are in time and …
- Don’t Stop with Awareness Itself… Focus your attention there and then think of the warmth spreading throughout the whole body. If things got too warm, you could think of water. That would cool things down. Whatever was the coolest spot in the body, focus on that and think of that coolness spreading through the body. Then earth: the solid feelings in the body, the weighty feelings in the body …
- Respect as a Sign of Intelligence… All too often, we’re doing things and our minds are half here and half someplace else, so our actions get only half of our attention, if that. When the results come, we can’t really be sure where they came from, because we don’t even know what we did, or we have a confused notion of what we did. But if you …
- Head & Heart… And when you learn to ignore them, to pay them no attention, it’s like a bullet that seemed to be aimed at your heart but suddenly just falls on to the ground. So there are times when it’s effective to see this practice as a kind of battlefield, with skillful and unskillful desires battling it out, and you’ve got to learn …
- Directing & Not Directing the Mind… In terms of the Buddha’s classic ways of dealing with distractions, this falls under just not paying attention to any distraction or relaxing any tension in the body around the distraction that would correspond to the thought. Because when you’re thinking of something that’s not right here, right now—something not immediately apparent to your senses—you’ve got to create …
- The Committee of the Mind… We focus our main attention on the fourth, which is the path to the end of suffering, because that’s what we have to work at hardest. But it’s good to keep in mind that the Buddha promises that there is such a thing as the end of suffering. There was one Dhamma teacher I heard one time saying, “I don’t know …
- Safety in Awareness… And this was at a point when I was just beginning to learn how to trust it! That teaching came at the wrong time for me because up until that point, I had a lot of trouble trusting my own immediate awareness, my own immediate attention to things: this quality of knowing, knowing, knowing in the mind—what knows the breath, what knows the …
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think… They’ll say more and more outrageous things to catch your attention. But finally when they see that there’s no reaction at all, then they get bored and they go away. Many of your thoughts are like this. The mind will stir up these things, and if you latch on to them, then they’ll stir up some more. Or you can think …
- A Happiness Based Inside… So even though there may be pains in the body, you can focus on the breath in such a way that the energy in the body can help either alleviate the pain or at least provide you an alternative place to focus your attention. Now, once you’ve learned how to master this kind of pleasure, it’s not automatic that you’ll suddenly …
- Control from Within… You give your attention. You give your full energy to the practice. You restrain the mind from wandering off. These are lessons we learn in practicing generosity and virtue. As we meditate, we dig deeper into them. Even the Buddha’s more abstract teachings on not-self and emptiness grow out of the insights we gain from generosity and virtue, learning about the happiness …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… Others require what he calls the fabrication of exertion, where you have to figure out how the way you’re breathing is contributing to the problem, how the way you’re talking to yourself is contributing to the problem, how the perceptions you hold in mind, how the feelings you pay attention to are contributing to the problem. From there, you learn how to …
- Perceptions of Earth & Space… Of course, that’s not all it is, but for the time being, that’s all you’re going to pay attention to. Your body is earth, the people around you, the things around you are all earth, but you don’t think about the particular features of the earth. You don’t think about the mountains and the valleys, or the individual people …
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