Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Tuning Your Lute… If you can’t get the mind focused in a broad way, okay, focus on a small part of the body, but make it really strong. Do whatever it is needed to lift your level of energy. Then you can retune your lute as you play. It’s important that you understand that analogy. It’s not the case that everything goes up together …
- Guiding Truths… They do this by focusing our attention on the immediate issue: What is the suffering right now? What are you doing that’s aggravating the suffering? Can you stop? What do you need to do in order to stop? Those are the questions you can apply to any issue at any time. They focus directly on your own experience, the part of your own …
- The Buddha’s Secret Weapon… When you’re focused on the breath, that’s directed thought. So you’ve got the three causal factors of the first jhana right there. Then the results will come: a sense of ease and well-being or pleasure; a sense of refreshment, sometimes to the point of rapture. It feels really, really gratifying breathing in, breathing out. It seems to satisfy the body …
- The Making Of… While you’re doing this, there may be some thoughts in the back of your mind that you are the person doing it, but primarily you’re focused on your actions—how to do them well. You want to learn to keep thinking in those terms. The same with name and form: That’s another one of the factors of dependent co-arising that …
- Delight in Conviction… You’re focusing on your mind in the present moment because your mind in the present moment has a lot of potential power, and you want to learn how to use it well. There are a lot of potentials you have here for understanding yourself, understanding your breath, understanding the way you talk to yourself, understanding the perceptions you hold in mind—even the …
- What Are You Doing?… In dealing with the issue of the unattractiveness of the body, why is it that you can be focused on the unattractiveness of the body for an hour or so and then suddenly switch? All of a sudden the body is attractive again. What happened? The body didn’t change. It was your perception that changed. The same with the pain. Sometimes you come …
- Shelter Through Restraint… That means you can take things apart more carefully because you’re more precisely focused, and even though there’s a narrowing of the range of where the mind is going to go, it opens a world inside, a world of understanding, seeing all of the different tricks the mind plays on itself. This is one of those cases where a habit you learn …
- Look at Yourself… That’s where the training is focused: on straightening yourself out—and it’s a hard lesson for us to learn. We spend our time looking at other people because we think that’s where the problem is. Yet you can look at the rest of the world and try to straighten out the rest of the world as much as you like, but …
- Daily-Life Dhamma… You’re true in focusing on your object. You make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath and abandon all other thoughts: Well, stick with that. Be true to that. And it’s easier to be true in your meditation when you’ve learned to be true in your daily life. Self-control: Whatever irritations there may be in the …
- A Load of Straw… When you have the right perspective, it’s a lot easier to keep focused on the path.
- Skill… For example, if focusing at the breath in the nose doesn’t seem right, you can focus at other places as well. If long breathing doesn’t feel good, you can try short breathing. You can try deep or shallow, heavy or light, broad or narrow. There are lots of ways of playing with the breath. You can think soft breath or heavy breath …
- Mindfulness Immersed in the Body… In personal relationships, you might think you want the other person, but usually your craving is focused on an image of the other person. Then you’re upset when the person doesn’t fit in with the image. The same principle applies to a lot of things, both outside and in. So we do these practices to locate exactly where those cravings are found …
- Brahmaviharas at the Breath… Are you putting too much pressure on it? Are you focusing in the right place or the wrong place? What perception of the breath do you have in mind? Is there a perception that can make things easier? I’ve talked about the perception of the body as being like a sponge, where the breath can come in and out of the body from …
- Disenchantment… Can’t we still have sex? In other words, if I get to the point where I don’t want it any more, can I still have it? This is the kind of thinking that comes from focusing entirely on how you can dress things up, taking pleasure in the dressing up without really looking at the raw materials that you’re dressing up …
- Circumspection… When you’re focusing on the breath, how strong is your focus? When you’re holding a concept of the breath in mind, what is the concept? The best way to ferret these things out is to experiment. You look at the various ways Ajaan Lee has of explaining the breath energy in the body. Those all come from his experimentation, and part of …
- Before Your Face Was Born… This is why right view focuses on the issue of suffering. There’s no question about making you a better person. It’s simply a matter of seeing where there’s suffering and where there’s a cause of suffering. That motivation goes a lot deeper than your self-image. When you were a little baby, you didn’t have a self-image, but …
- The Missing Fabrication… When you’re focusing on something for the sake of insight, ou want to see how it’s originated—in other words, what causes it—and how it passes away. You also want to look at the allure: Why is it you go for it? Even though it may pass away on its own, you dig it up sometimes. Why? What’s the attraction …
- Metta Can Hurt… You find that you stay focused there very easily. And a lot of people like the brahma-vihāras.* *It feels good to be sitting here thinking, “May all beings be happy” or to think of anyone who’s suffering and send compassion: “May that person be free from suffering.” You see people who are happy or doing things that are good, you’re happy …
- Strength of Concentration… The themes of right concentration are the frames of reference in establishing mindfulness, and the three big frames you’re going to be focused on right away will be body, feelings, and mind. The body, of course, is how you experience it right now, and how you experience it is going to come through the breath. So what you’re evaluating is: “Is this …
- The Goldsmith… Is it because you’re not focused on the breath or because the breath isn’t spreading well or you’re not letting the different breath energies mingle well, or you’re at the wrong focal point in the body? There are lots of ways that you can take those basic principles and ask questions around them to get some handle on what might …
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