Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 67
  2. Keep It Simple
     … The other five factors all work together, particularly the factors for right concentration. Start out with right effort: Look at the mind, see what’s skillful in the mind and what’s not skillful. You know that mindfulness and alertness are skillful, so you stick with them. Try to be alert to the breath and keep remembering to stay alert to the breath. For … 
  3. On Top of Your Actions
     … Without them, you really can’t get the mind into right concentration. A lot of people want to go straight from right view to the meditation side. But the meditation side of the practice has to work its way through right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort. So you want to make sure that all those factors are present. At the … 
  4. A Quiet Spot
     … In fact, when the sense of concentration gets solid and begins to spread out through the body you find that it’s much more expansive than your ordinary states of awareness. And it’s all right here. So we start out with this little corner, this little spot. Look after it. Make sure it’s still. Make sure it’s quiet. Make sure your … 
  5. W.W.B.R.
     … Ajaan Maha Boowa calls this discernment fostering concentration. He wrote a whole book on the topic. As he says in the book, sometimes things don’t go right in line with the way they’re listed in the texts: that first there’s virtue and then there’s concentration and then there’s discernment. He says your defilements don’t stand in a neat … 
  6. Three Virtues for the Mind
     … This is another reason why we practice concentration. By showing goodwill for ourselves, it makes it easier to act in a way that’s kind, compassionate, and empathetic with other people. Finally, there’s the issue of right view, realizing that our actions do give results. They might not give results as quickly as we’d like, but they do give results. If we … 
  7. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … At first, don’t be too quick to try to analyze the state of concentration when you get into it. Just see what you can do to keep it going. Then, as you get more and more proficient at keeping it going, you can begin to notice: “What in here is still an unnecessary burden? How can I stay concentrated, but with less effort … 
  8. Meditation as a Skill
     … You’re mindful, alert, or as the passage says in terms of right concentration, you have directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate how things are going. Then the results are going to come: a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, a sense of refreshment. You don’t have to create those. Those come as … 
  9. A Meditation Karma Checklist
     … As soon as you find a nice restful spot, you’ll stay there either with some alertness, or if you really want to rest, you let go of the alertness and go into delusion concentration. This is why the ajaans always say at the very beginning of each meditation session to make sure that your intention is clear. We’re here not just to … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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