Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Page 63
  2. Protecting the Mind from Itself
     … And all three of them are focused on the mind. In the textbooks that they use in Thailand for the monks and novices, there’s a statement to the effect that virtue is a matter of your words and your deeds. When the textbooks first came out in the 1910s, Ajaan Mun took exception to this teaching. He said, “Virtue is primarily a matter … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. The Problem Is Birth
     … Visualize these things to yourself and have a sense of, say, when you’re focusing on the liver, where in the body is the liver right now? What does it look like? What is it bathed with? It’s bathed with blood. In the beginning, you don’t have to focus on the unattractive side of these things. Just be objective—“What have you … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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.
  16. A Point of Balance
     … So right here is where effort should be focused on developing a foundation. Without that foundation, no matter how much you read about insight or think about insight, it’s not going to be insight. It’s going to be, as Ajaan Lee once said, “outsights”: stuff you bring in from outside to impose on the present moment. It’s only when you can … 
  17. Learn from Your Mistakes
     … It was a path of action that he was constantly focused on. He never thought that maybe some god would come down and save him, or that his own innate goodness would carry him through. And that meant that when he noticed he was not getting where he wanted to go, he had to look back on his own actions: What could he change … 
  18. The Energy in the Body
     … the length of the breath, the spot in the body where you’re focused, the importance of getting the breath comfortable and then spreading those comfortable breath sensations throughout of the body until it feels like the whole body is breathing in unison, and your awareness can spread to fill the whole body as well. Those are the important principles. Once you’ve got … 
  19. Noble Contentment, Noble Discontent
     … You watch it so that you can try to figure it out and then improve it. “What is it about the breath that’s uncomfortable? Why is it uncomfortable? Is it the way I’m holding my body? Is it the way I’m focused on the breath?” Some people, when they decide to concentrate on the breath, clamp down on all the energy … 
  20. Protection from Fools
     … But it takes someone focused like the Buddha to really look at it and tease out its implications, that this is the big problem in life. What does that mean in terms of other problems? Some of them you have to work on, but a lot of them you can learn to let go. If you focus exclusively enough on this issue, then once … 
  21. Selecting from the Teachings
     … Being more sensitive is one way of keeping check on whether your desire is too much, whether it’s getting in the way of your seeing things as they’re actually happening by focusing on what you want to have happen the next moment, the next breath, whatever. Stay right here and watch what’s happening right here, right now. Be sensitive to what … 
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