Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Treating the Diseases of the Mind
     … In some cases, as with concentration practice, you want to make sure that the medicine is right for you. This is one of the most defining features of the Forest tradition: that they don’t have a defining meditation technique. Ajaan Lee probably worked out the most complete guide to concentration, but it’s not the only way to meditate taught be the ajaans … 
  3. Seeing the Stillness
     … The same principle works as you’re practicing concentration. You sit here with a body; you notice that there’s a pain here and a pain there. The mind tends to connect the pains in the same way we play Connect-the Dots, and that can cause you to create bands of tension all over your body. But instead of focusing on the bands … 
  4. Questioning Everything
    One of the important benefits of concentration practice is that it allows you to question everything that comes in your mind. As you’re focusing on the breath, the only thoughts that are really relevant are the ones that help you stay focused on the breath, the thoughts that ask questions about: How is this breath? What’s going on with that breath? How … 
  5. The Body Doesn’t Care
     … So you’re developing your concentration, alertness, and mindfulness as you let go of everything that gets in their way. You’re holding on to the object of concentration as you let go of the hindrances. And behind all this, you hold on to the idea that you’re going to benefit from this. It’s interesting that when the Buddha describes one of … 
  6. Life’s First Question
     … This is why discernment is based on virtue, by way of concentration: in other words, learning how to look at your actions and being able to admit that “This as a mistake. This is not working. This is causing suffering and stress either for me or for somebody else. How can I do it differently? How can I talk myself out of doing it … 
  7. On the Path of the Breath
     … Here he’s not talking about the ultimate release, but simply about how you refine your concentration. One of the important ways of gaining insight while you’re in the process of developing concentration is to be able to notice the differences among the various levels of concentration as you go through them. Sometimes you settle down and you’re still sort of hovering … 
  8. Cook Your Mind
     … Instead, it focuses on three mental attitudes that get in the way of concentration. In fact, all the other factors of the path starting with right resolve through right mindfulness are aimed at getting the mind in right concentration. As you do that, you begin to see how the aggregates function in the mind. The aggregates aren’t things. It’d be good if … 
  9. sBeyond Acceptance
     … I saw a discussion recently where people were saying that Westerners find it hard to get the mind into good, solid concentration, so maybe, could there be a path that doesn’t involve concentration? The ajaan they were talking to said, “It may be difficult, but it’s not impossible.” The effort that’s put into adjusting your form and feelings and perceptions and … 
  10. The Joy of Curiosity
     … It’s the insight part of your concentration practice, because you begin to realize that how you put things together right now depends both on the raw materials you have to work with coming in from your past karma—and past karma here can be anything from earlier in this lifetime or habits you picked up from previous lifetimes, all the way up to … 
  11. Strategic Friends
     … A lot of the concentration practice is just this: finding little potentials for well-being, little potentials for the mind to settle down, and learning how to tend to them, not just dismissing them because they’re not as dramatic as you might have imagined concentration to be. Big things grow from little things. Trees can grow from very tiny seeds. If you step … 
  12. Discernment Performs
     … Now this, too, has its time and place because you do want to maintain your concentration. There are times when concentration requires that you get back into the breath, work with it, move it around—and you’re in the body, in the breath while you’re doing this. If you don’t keep this up as a regular practice, you find that your … 
  13. The Interactive Present
     … It’s not only the case that discernment requires concentration. Concentration also requires discernment — learning how to bypass whatever issues you can bypass and how to deal directly with the ones you have to deal with before you can get the mind to settle down. If there’s rampant lust or anger in the mind, you’ve got to deal with it. You can … 
  14. How to Be Happy
     … This combination of inner virtue and discernment lies at the basis of what’s needed to get the mind into good concentration. We talk about gaining discernment from concentration, but you also need to have some discernment to get the mind into concentration to begin with. Discernment is what allows you to know what to do, where to look, where the real problems are … 
  15. Simplify
     … This is why we spend so much time sitting here with our eyes closed, working on mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, because these are the qualities that will see the mind through any situation. When you see people really “losing it,” this is what they’ve lost. They’ve lost their mindfulness, they’ve lost their concentration, they’ve lost their discernment. So you want … 
  16. Totally Secure
     … This is how concentration gets developed. You really stick with the object of your concentration no matter what. It’s like having a gyroscope in the ship. No matter which direction the waves tilt the ship, the gyroscope stays on an even keel. No matter what happens outside, no matter what happens inside, you want to keep your mind on an even keel. That … 
  17. Levels of the Breath
     … What you’re going to notice depends on which one you focus on; and which one you focus on is going to determine how strong and steady and precise your concentration can be. First you work with the in-and-out breath, which is the easiest to observe and can get the mind to a certain level of concentration, but the in-and-out … 
  18. Doubt vs. Questioning
     … For example, a common complaint about concentration, as you begin to fabricate it, is that you notice, “Hey, this is fabricated. This is willed. There’s got to be something wrong here.” You’d think that concentration should be something that happens naturally. Sometimes it does, but other times you really have to will it. You really have to work at it. After all … 
  19. Food Insecurity
     … You want to be confident in that, because when the Buddha talks about comparing the different aspects of the practice to different parts of a fortress, concentration is the food. With concentration you’ve got bodily fabrication (the breath), verbal fabrication (directed thought and evaluation), and then mental fabrication (perceptions and feelings). You put them all together in the right way, and you’ve … 
  20. Because the Mind Is Purposeful
     … We’re fabricating a state of concentration. That’s the best way to get to know fabrication: by doing something skillful with it. It’s like learning about wood. When you make different pieces of furniture out of wood, you learn its characteristics: how the different kinds of wood respond to being planed, how they respond to being sawed. You learn this because you … 
  21. One Person
     … Mindfulness and concentration go right together. Without the mindfulness, there can be no concentration, because when you make up your mind to stay with the breath, you have to keep remembering each time you breathe in that that’s what you’ve made up your mind to do. Then try to make being here as pleasant as possible, so that it’s interesting, enjoyable … 
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