Search results for: "Attention"
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- Mindfulness Island… What would it mean to neglect discernment? It would mean to not pay attention to the long-term consequences of your actions. Here again, it’s so easy in this world, where everything is measured in quarterly or day-to-day terms, for you to think in the short term along with everyone else. And although the Buddha does recommend that you focus on …
- Streams of Anger… It’s your choice of the things you pay attention to—your intentions, your perceptions, your feelings: That’s what’s causing the problem. The problem starts inside. The outside aggravation is just an excuse. So learn to look inside, and see what you can do to take apart this mass of emotion you develop through the way you breathe, through the way you …
- Learning How to Learn… The Thai translation for this word “intent,” or citta, here is “putting your whole heart into it.” It also means paying careful attention to what you’re doing. You notice what’s happening as it’s happening. It’s a quality related to alertness. Then, finally, your powers of analysis: If things are going well, try to understand *why *they’re going well so …
- What Should & Shouldn’t Be Done… I think he could read their minds and figure out what they were doing, so he would say, “Don’t focus there, focus here.” If something came up, he would tell them whether to pay attention to it or not. And listening to him teach and seeing all the many different problems that people could come up with, I began to realize that the …
- Commit Yourself… Or else something else grabs its attention, forces itself on the mind. But even then, the mind has to make the choice to drop one thing and focus on something else, which it does very well. It keeps moving around all the time. This is one of the meanings of samsara. It’s not only the traveling around from one lifetime to the next …
- Exercising the Mind… Pay a lot of attention. Try to do this well. Try to be quick in noticing, when the mind slips off, why did it slip off? What distracted it? In the beginning, don’t analyze it too much. As soon as you sense that the mind has slipped off, just bring it back. We talked today about the problem of meditating for an hour …
- A Pleasure Not to Be Feared… So give it your full attention. Try to master the skills that can bring on this pleasure, so that you can bring the path to fruition and find the even greater happiness, even greater well-being, that lies at its end.
- An Island of Concentration… the feelings of pleasure you’re trying to create as you pay attention to the breath. You’ve got mind states right there: the mind state of concentration that you’re trying to develop. And you’ve got mental qualities. The mental quality he emphasizes in this case is equanimity: the ability to not react to things so that you can pass clear judgment …
- After-work Meditation… And you want to be more proactive, developing the strength inside so that your pro-activeness fills more and more of your attention, and grows more and more skillful. That way, you’ll begin to find, as you come home in the evening, that you’ve been collecting less and less garbage, and you’ll have less to throw out. This is how you …
- Calming Mental Fabrication… The next one is paying no attention to the perceptions of form. In other words, the sense of a boundary or a shape to the body begins to dissolve. There’s just a mist of sensations, and there’s space between the dots of the mist, so you focus on the perception of space, knowing that you could go back to the body at …
- No Mistakes Are Fatal… Often we get bored with the meditation because we’ve grown sloppy, we’re not really paying careful attention, and nothing new seems to be coming along. Look very carefully at what you’re doing. Look very carefully at each breath, and you’ll begin to see things you didn’t notice before. This is why mindfulness and alertness are qualities appropriate at all …
- Attached to the Body… But first you have to pry your attention away from the object of the anger so that you can look at the anger as a mental event. And the same with lust and passion: You have to pry your attachment away from the object so you can start looking at the actual passion, the actual intentions in the mind to see them for what …
- Making a Difference… You pay attention. When you’re with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. The more sensitive you are to detect the slightest little bit of tension or tightness and work through it, then the more comfortable the breath becomes, the more absorbing it becomes. It feels really good just sitting here breathing. You can start …
- The Middle Way… You’ve got to find the proper balance in how much tension you have to bring to your attention so that it’s not too tense but also not so loose that it’s going to let everything go. The classic image is of holding a baby chick in your hand. You don’t want to hold it too tight, or it’s going …
- Stick with It… One of the tendencies of the mind is that when it knows certain things are going to come up that it doesn’t want you to see, it diverts your attention someplace else. You’ve got to learn how to resist that, to see right through whatever the diversion is. You begin to see things in the mind that you don’t want to …
- 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.
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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