Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 64
  2. The Right Attitude to the Body
     … You focus on the breath, you focus on the elements, i.e., the properties of warmth or coolness, energy, solidity in the body as you feel it from within. You take those as themes for your meditation so that you can develop a sense of ease, a sense of rapture, a really good solid base for your mindfulness and concentration. Then as you maintain … 
  3. Make Yourself Small
     … Well, learn how to be good at different spots, but always take just one spot at a time and focus your full attention there. This is how little things get to grow. It’s like starting a fire with a magnifying glass and a piece of paper. You go out into the sun, and you concentrate as much of the light of the sun … 
  4. Mindfulness over Time
     … Are you ready to go into low energy mode?” In other words, do you want to conserve energy so that you can still use the phone? The mind has an equivalent setting, you might call it, where you just focus on one spot and say, “I’m not going to think about anything at all.” No evaluation, no nothing, just staying with that one … 
  5. Keeping the Buddha in Mind
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has you focus on the breath, and develop mindfulness around the breath. It’s like a string around your finger. Every time you look at the string, you remember why you tied the string around the finger. And here, if you imbue your breath with mindfulness, it means that wherever you go, you’ve got … 
  6. Pleasure Has a Price
    When you focus on the breath, think of the whole body breathing. Every cell is engaged in the flow of energy, so that the breath feels spacious, loosens up any patterns of tension in the different parts of the body—so that it feels good to be here inside your body. If you have any diseases or chronic pains, work around them. Instead of … 
  7. In Harmlessness Is Strength
     … He was saying the Buddha teaches a lot about how this is not-self and that’s not-self, but then he gets to that passage we chanted just now, “I am the owner of my actions.” That’s what you want to focus on, because that’s where you are responsible. This is our motivation for developing the mind, because all our actions … 
  8. Disposable Worlds
     … Or if there’s a pain in the body, a part of the body doesn’t seem to be functioning well, you know how to focus on it so as to make it feel better. If you know that you have a particular disease in a particular part of the body, there are ways of breathing into that part of the body that make … 
  9. A Doctor’s Strategies
     … And in the beginning, it’s best to focus your attention on the shortest, simplest statements. Gradually, you begin to learn how to read your own mind and see what it needs, realizing like any good doctor that sometimes you have to use strategies. For instance, with the breath: You want the mind to stay with the breath so that it can settle down … 
  10. Commit & Reflect All Around
     … You want to focus on that energy. Where do you feel that? Which parts of the body are most sensitive to how the energy flows? For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the middle of the chest. For others it’s in the throat, in between your eyes—there are lots of different places where you could be sensitive to this kind … 
  11. A Refuge from Karma
     … The immediate focus, of course, is on what you’re doing right now, but you also begin to realize that the reason you’re suffering right now comes from how you relate to things coming in from the past. The Buddha’s teaching you to relate to them in a skillful way. Remember that image of the salt crystal: If you make your mind … 
  12. Audacious & Undaunted
     … Because the precepts can be broken only intentionally, they focus your attention on your intentions. All too many people go through life without paying careful attention to their intentions. They just go on their urges. If you ask them, “Why did you do that?” sometimes they can’t say. But when you practice virtue, you have to be very clear about what your intentions … 
  13. Noble Right Concentration
     … But then you notice, as the mind gets concentrated, that even in concentration there are ups and downs in the level of stress, ups and downs in the level of focus. You try to iron those out. And to some extent, you can. But there are certain things that, even in the most stable level of concentration, are a little bit uneven. After all … 
  14. The Pursuit of Pleasure
     … So it’s the peaceful parts o fthe body that you want to learn to focus on, and these are precisely the ones we tend to ignore because we seem to be hardwired to look for the places that are problematic, where there’s pain. We’re awfully good at stitching the different pains in different parts of our body together into one big … 
  15. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … It could come at any time, and you can ask yourself, “Am I ready to go?” Almost universally the answer is, “Not yet.” Okay, what would stand in the way of your going well right now? Focus on dealing with that. See if that gets the mind to settle down. Then you can come back to the breath. Then there’s mental fabrication, the … 
  16. Generosity of Spirit
     … We focus on feelings inside that sap our strength, sap our energy. Even with people who meditate and learn how to fabricate skillfully while they’re sitting with their eyes closed or doing walking meditation, sometimes their old habits intrude. And then they take over when you leave meditation. You can look at a lot of the Buddha’s teachings as recommendations for how … 
  17. Delight in Striving
     … Verbal being the way you talk to yourself—what the Buddha defines as direct thought and evaluation—you pick a topic, you focus on the topic, and then you ask questions about it and come up with answers. And then there’s mental fabrication, which is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you’ve put on things—that identify what they are, what … 
  18. Mission Possible
     … Your intent, the amount of focus you put on this, has to be not too excessive, not too weak. And your powers of analysis have to be not too excessive, not too weak. So you have to use those different qualities to keep one another in line. In other words, you use your powers of analysis to notice: When is the desire too weak … 
  19. Meditation as a Skill
     … You do what you can to help nurture a state of mind that’s willing to settle down, because sometimes even with the best breath and the best focus, the mind is going to be resistant. So you have to figure out what’s going on inside the mind. Get it in the right mood. This comes under not only desire, but also persistence … 
  20. Contemplating the World You Create
    We focus the mind first at the breath because as you get to know the breath, you begin to realize that the mind opens itself up there, right at its attention to the breath. And that’s what we’re trying to understand. Our primary task here is not trying to understand the world outside. It’s trying to understand the worlds of our … 
  21. Deconstructing Anger
     … We focus on an idea, we focus on a topic, and then we comment on it: ask questions about it, make comments; ask more questions, make more comments. Have a little internal discussion there. And then there’s feeling and there’s perception. The perceptions underlie how you analyze and evaluate things. Sometimes the perceptions are obvious; sometimes they’re more hidden. But a … 
  22. Load next page...