Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 67
  2. Right & Wrong Decisions
     … This is another good lesson you learn from paying attention to the breath, because you can see immediately that the way you focus on the breath will have an immediate effect on how you sense the body, and on the mind’s ability to stay in the sense of well-being. It happens right away. If you clamp down too hard on the breath … 
  3. The Trick to Staying in Place
     … You focus on the breath and, after a while, the mind gets bored. Something else comes up. Anything else can come up and seem a lot more interesting and worthwhile, and suddenly you found that you’ve gone with it. You’re hardly even aware that it was there and suddenly you’re in a different world. So you have to bring yourself back … 
  4. Verbal Fabrication
    As you focus on the present moment, remember that you’re not simply watching what’s happening. You’re playing a role in making it happen. The Buddha talks about three kinds of fabrication, and we’re engaged in all three as we put the present moment together. There’s bodily fabrication—the i-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation; how … 
  5. Three Levels of Effort
     … This is why we focus on the breath, because the breath is our anchor to the present moment. You can’t watch a past breath; you can’t watch a future breath. You can just watch this breath right here, coming in and going out. So take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. See how it feels. Where do you … 
  6. The Train Trestle
    The Train Trestle December 30, 2016 Put aside the world outside for a while and focus on the world inside. What have you got here? You’ve got the body—particularly, you’ve got the breath—you’ve got feelings, and you’ve got the mind. You want to bring those all together in a way that’s nourishing for all three. Take a … 
  7. The Middle Way
     … You focus on the body in and of itself. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the definition. How it works out in practice is that you focus on the breath without any reference to anything else outside—just what it feels like to be breathing right now. As for any thoughts that … 
  8. When Nothing’s Happening
     … You have to focus your intention on what’s getting in the way. So one thing you might do is to ask yourself, “The level of stress in the mind: Does it have its ups and downs? When it goes up, what did you do that could be abandoned? When it goes down, what did you do? What did you abandon at that moment … 
  9. Meditate to Win
     … To begin with, you may enjoy exploring different ways of breathing; you may enjoy getting to know your own mind as you focus on the breath. Then there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes when you know that you’ve mastered a skill. Take joy in that as well. Remember what the Buddha said to Rāhula: You reflect on your actions—your thoughts … 
  10. For What It’s Worth
    We focus on the breath to train the heart and the mind. In Pali they use one word, citta, to cover both what we mean by heart and mind. The mind is the calculating part, the part that reasons, takes things apart, tries to understand them. The heart is the part that wants true happiness, that wishes well, the good heart—and you’re … 
  11. A Good Path to Be On
     … One of the strangest developments in the tradition of Buddhist meditation was the idea that, one, you had to focus on your nose, couldn’t focus anywhere else. I even read a piece by a monk who was saying that if tell people that they can meditate in any place else besides the tip of the nose, you’re going to destroy the religion … 
  12. Determined to be Happy
     … In other words, focus on the causes—what’s going to help you stay here—and keep reminding yourself, “Come back, come back,” when the mind wanders off. When you focus on the causes, the results will come. If you sit here simply hoping for the results but without doing the causes, without wanting the causes, it’s not going to happen. Everything is … 
  13. The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness
     … After you’ve surveyed the body for a while, choose one spot in the body to focus your awareness, wherever the breath is clear, wherever it seems easy or natural to be focused. Then let your awareness spread out from that spot to fill the whole body, so that you’re aware of the whole body all the way through the in-breath and … 
  14. Mindful Judgment
     … To do that you have to focus your mind on something that’s steadily there. You’ve got the breath coming in and going out, and as long as you’re alive it’s going to be coming in and going out. So it’s a good place to start. You focus on the breath going in, you focus on it coming out. After … 
  15. Taking a Stance
     … We focus on the present moment not simply to hang out here, but because there are duties to perform here. We want to understand or comprehend what it is to suffer, so that we can identify the cause. When we see the cause, that’s what we let go. We do this by developing the path, and eventually get to the point where we … 
  16. Skills Needed at Death
     … When we talk about mindfulness of death, we usually focus on the fact that it could come at any time. But you could take that fact and do a lot of different things with it. One common attitude, of course, is, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” In other words, try to stuff your time up with as many pleasures … 
  17. The Will to Awaken
     … When you learn how to focus on those, it cuts through a lot of garbage. And then when you look at what qualities need to be developed in order to put an end to suffering, you find that they’re also qualities required to improve your discernment. You need to develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more concentration. And part of that quest for the … 
  18. Goodwill Plus
     … So you focus on their good habits, their good behavior. You can give rise to a feeling of ease and well-being around the goodwill by getting the right perceptions, the right way of talking to yourself, the right way of breathing. You do that to develop the quality of goodwill, and then you start analyzing it further if you want to go beyond … 
  19. A Refuge from the Winds of the World
     … If you’re going to be rightly concentrated as you go through the world, you have to focus specifically on resisting those qualities of greed and distress. How do you maintain your focus? How do you maintain your balance, without your greed and distress pulling you out of balance? One useful way to think is to take the Canon’s image of the world … 
  20. The Buddha Meant What He Said
     … The whole point of this is to look at your actions and take that as your main focus. I’ve talked to some people who find these instructions tedious. It’s like Lucy in that old Peanuts cartoon when she says, “If you go around watching everything you say, you never get much said.” But that’s the whole point. What you’re doing … 
  21. Help Others, Help Yourself
     … Then you try to maintain a steady focus there, so you stay away from any thoughts about the world. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful. Ardent in trying to do this well. Alert in watching what you’re doing. And mindful in remembering what you should be doing. If something comes up in the mind, you have to learn how to recognize what it … 
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