Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Genuine Goodness
     … So focus as much energy and attention as you can on learning the skills that can put you in touch with that goodness, so that you can know how truly good it is.
  3. Challenges
     … The mind begins to wander off or its attention begins to unravel a little bit. In the beginning, it’s not too much. You don’t notice it. It’s just a fraying at the ends. But bit by bit, other things begin to penetrate. The ease you had begins to disappear or you get bored with it. A sense of irritation comes in … 
  4. Beyond Gratitude
     … And you want to make the breath a good place to stay, so pay attention to how the breathing affects the different parts of the body. Notice: What kind of breathing feels good in the chest? What kind of breathing feels good in the stomach? What kind of breathing feels good in the shoulders? In the legs? In the arms? In the head? The … 
  5. Working Hypotheses
     … If you didn’t pay any attention to it, it would scratch your leg. If you looked down at it, it would look away as if it hadn’t done anything. That’s the way the mind is with itself. It’ll do something and then pretend that it didn’t do it. What we’re trying to do as we meditate is to … 
  6. The Skill of Not Suffering
     … You want to give full attention to your intention to stay here. It’s only when you hold on to one intention that you begin to see how many other intentions slosh around in the mind and where they can be pulling you. You learn to say No to them. You strengthen that No by making your Yes stay with the breath, making the … 
  7. Healing Breath
     … And it’s the steadiness of your alertness that requires the breath to get more easeful, because the comfortable breathing that we tend to subject ourselves often to happens during the moments when we’re not paying careful attention. We’re jumping around here, jumping around there, and in the midst of the jump, the body tends to react in different ways. But if … 
  8. Painful Thinking
     … So focus your attention right here, right here at the breath. And notice how it feels. Notice how you can play with it. If you don’t play around, you can’t really understand anything. If you simply watch without any input of your own, you don’t know exactly what makes things change. This is why we have experiments in science. You change … 
  9. Attachment vs. Affection
     … we can learn how to get away from that identification, that need to feed and lay claim to those we feed on, then we can have affection for others, pay special attention to those to whom we have special debts, and yet not suffer for it. That’s why it’s important to make these distinctions—the distinction between clinging and affection; the distinction … 
  10. Many I’s, Many Eyes
    Focus your attention on the breath. Take a couple good long deep in-and-out breaths and see how it feels. Notice how the breath is flowing and see where you find the sensation of breathing easiest to follow. We’re not focusing just on the movement of the air in and out of the nose. We’re also focusing on the sensation of … 
  11. A Meritorious Heart
     … But the actual energy and attention, mindfulness and discernment that are needed to develop a skill: Those are things you have to bring to the practice. So there is work involved, but it’s good work. This is why people are happy to do it. In Thailand, they have the phrase, jai boon, which literally means someone with a meritorious heart, someone who enjoys … 
  12. At Home with the Breath
     … Or if you have headaches, focus your attention down in your chest, and think of the excess energy in the head coming down through your throat and into the chest and out into the air. There are lots of ways of playing around with the breath energy. It’s very malleable. Often the limiting factors are, one, our imagination, and two, the steadiness of … 
  13. Set Your Heart on the Breath
     … There has to be the desire followed by the persistence and lots of paying very careful attention to what you’re doing. So remember, you’re training both the heart and the mind. If they’re trained together and they work together, you can get a lot more use out of them—a lot more happiness out of them—because they’re not working … 
  14. Chronic Pain
     … It’s simply a matter of learning how to focus your efforts and your attention in the right way, in the right place. In that way, you give yourself a chance.
  15. The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
     … The politician is doing his dirty work, but he keeps diverting our attention, pointing out that “Those other people are horrible; look at those horrible things other people are doing.” But if you keep looking right here, right here, right here, staying with the breath, then because the breath is the closest thing to the mind, you begin to see the movements of the … 
  16. Vows
     … What this often means is turning your attention from the goal and focusing it on the steps that will take you there. You focus more on what you do than on the results you hope to get from what you do. For example, you can’t sit here and say, “I’m going to get the first jhana,” or the second jhana, or whatever … 
  17. Concentration Nurtured with Virtue
     … But words and deeds deal in particulars, so you have to pay attention to the particulars as well. For example, if you’ve taken the precept against killing, how are you going to deal with ants? How are you going to deal with termites? This forces you to think like an ant, think like a termite. When they come into your house, why do … 
  18. The Duty to Understand
     … the directed thoughts that focus your attention on the breath, and the evaluation that looks at it to see where it might be improved, or where it’s already pleasant, and what can be done with that sense of pleasure. We can spread it around. And we try to maintain our awareness of these things. So we’re still holding on, but we’re … 
  19. The Six Properties
     … As with all of the Buddha’s teachings, the importance of the teaching is what you do with it, and what it does for you in helping to gain insight into how stress and suffering are created in the present moment — and how you don’t have to create them, if you pay attention, if you work at these skills.
  20. The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness
     … Mindfulness isn’t just being aware of the present moment or having bare awareness, bare attention, or non-reactive awareness of whatever you’re doing, willy-nilly. Being non-reactive is not necessarily part of the practice, not always the practice. Sometimes you have to respond, and your awareness has to be very directed toward what the skillful response might be. In fact, that … 
  21. The Buddha’s Medicine
     … But you do your best to chip away at it bit by bit by bit, listening to other people, using your own appropriate attention to see where there’s still stress and what’s coming along with it. The combination of your own developing skill and the lessons you can learn from outside: These’ll help you to be a good doctor. So even … 
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