Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … As I said last night, the first one is to pay careful attention to the questions you ask, to make sure you don’t ask questions that are framed in the terms of becoming, and instead to look at things in terms of the four noble truths. That approach deals specifically with the effluent of becoming and the effluent of ignorance. Of the remaining … 
  3. Genuine Satisfaction
     … How are you going to breathe in a way that’s good for the whole body? If you make your point of attention too narrow, you may be able to get that point comfortable, but other parts of the body will be starved. So you’ve got to think of the whole body breathing in and out. Ajaan Lee talks about getting the breath … 
  4. Rooted in Desire
     … That’s what the questions focusing on stress do, because otherwise you just go flowing through the various causal links in the chain without paying much attention to what you’re doing. It’s become so natural that you don’t see the extent to which you’re fabricating things. Only when you ask questions do you begin to notice, “Oh, there was something … 
  5. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … So keep your attention focused right here, and discernment is bound to arise.
  6. There is This
     … You simply look at, “Here is the pain, here is the sensation, what can be done about it? Where should I focus my attention so I don’t have to suffer?” One thing you could do is watch the pain pass away, pass way, because from moment to moment, it just keeps passing away. It’s like the difference between riding in a car … 
  7. Well-armed Efforts
     … And then there are the feelings of pleasure you can create by being attentive to the breath. So when you learn about these processes of fabrication, it gives you some focus. You know exactly what to abandon and what to develop; how to take things apart if they’re unskillful and how to put them back together to make them skillful. All this you … 
  8. An Anthropologist from Mars
     … There, if you’re a layperson, you have to pay attention to how much money and how many people you need to survive in physical comfort. But when you start practicing, the question is: How much do you really need for mental comfort, for the mind to find the happiness that comes from peace and tranquility? If you’re engaged in work that takes … 
  9. Merit: Actively Happy
     … You give your full attention. And you give up the mind’s desire to go wandering around wherever it likes. Building on generosity is virtue, which is also a gift. As the Buddha said, when you carry through with a vow that you’re not going to harm anybody—you’re not going to kill, steal, have illicit sex, lie, take intoxicants, ever, at … 
  10. Gladdening the Mind
     … Notice which part of the body has been the neglected stepsister — starved of breath-energy — and focus on giving it as much breath energy and attention as you can. In other words, use your imagination. If you feel patterns of tension in the body, think of a big knife coming through to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut all the patterns of tension. In other … 
  11. Possessed by Emotions
     … She didn’t pay much attention to the present moment, she was off in her own little worlds. She wasn’t really inhabiting her body, she wasn’t really inhabiting her mind, so that left room for the spirit to move in. This is a good principle to think about, not only because of the possibility of spirits moving in, but also but also … 
  12. Training the Mind
     … You also want some ardency, which means that you really are paying attention to what you’re doing and trying to do it well. When you’re with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. When you find the mind wandering off, that sense of ardency means you want to bring the mind back to the … 
  13. No Running Away
     … When you think of the bones, say, in your fingers, actually pay attention to how your fingers feel. Is there a tension in your fingers around the bones? If there is, let it relax. Then move up your hands, past the wrists, past the forearms, past the elbows, the upper arms, the shoulder on either side. And then start with your toes, going up … 
  14. Breath Energies
     … Sometimes, when there’s a pain in one part of the body, we tend to associate, “Well, if there’s a pain there, there must a blockage in the breath right there.” So we focus all our attention on the area around the pain. But that’s not necessarily the source of the problem. Sometimes a pain in one side of the body is … 
  15. A Real Education
     … One of the first skills you have to learn is that not everything coming into the mind is worthy of attention. And things are not going to be perfectly quiet right from the start. So no matter what the mind is thinking about in the background, keep it in the background. As the texts say, you bring mindfulness to the fore. “Mindfulness” here means … 
  16. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … So, when you listen to the Dhamma, remember that you’re asking not only, “How does the Buddha describe things?” but, “What kind of description is he replacing?” When he asks a question, what questions is he not asking? This comes under the heading of appropriate attention—how you frame things in the mind. The way you frame things, and the perceptions you use … 
  17. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … What’s it like to breathe? Pay a lot of attention to that. When the impulse comes to breathe in, where does that impulse come from? How does the breath then spread through the body? Does it spread smoothly? Does it spread comfortably? You can take advantage of that ability of the breath to respond to your thoughts. The thoughts in the mind can … 
  18. On Being Non-reactive
     … We’re not paying appropriate attention, seeing it in the terms of what we’re doing that’s causing stress and what we’re doing—or what we could do—to put an end to that stress. That requires that you step out of the different thought worlds that you’ve made and look at them as patterns of cause and effect, events leading … 
  19. Three More Recollections
     … This, of course, focuses your attention on your intentions. The more you get to know your mind, the easier it is at the moment of death to have some control over what you’re going to choose to do. To whatever extent you have any of these five qualities, you’re going to qualify as a deva. So regardless of what other people think … 
  20. Get Out of Yourself
     … This is why we practice concentration, focusing on the level of intentions and attention, the raw material we use to put together states of becoming in the mind. You can look at these events from a more impersonal standpoint, a much larger standpoint, and that gets you out of them. As the Buddha said, the essence of discernment is seeing things as separate. An … 
  21. Directing the Flow
     … If you don’t pay any attention to them, if you don’t appreciate them, you just step on them and they’re dead. But if you allow them to grow, they can turn into big plants. The same with the sense of ease and rapture: It doesn’t seem like much to begin with, but there is the potential for rapture in every … 
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