Search results for: "Attention"

  1. Page 68
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Choiceful Awareness
     … The point he was making is that the monk was really not paying much attention. There’s a lot to doubt; there’s a lot to question yourself about in the practice. And this is not a matter of unskillful doubt. There are lots of things you can have skillful questions about. You want to explore. This especially applies to your choices. Too often … 
  18. Purity
     … So you should pay very careful attention to that. Oftentimes, we feel our lives are shaped by the events that happen around us, the things that other people do. And to an extent, that’s true. But the important factor is what you do with the events that are presented to you. It’s like being dealt a hand of cards in a card … 
  19. sBeyond Acceptance
     … It’s simply that you haven’t been paying careful attention, which is why that part of the mind gets away with doing what it wants. But there are other things in the mind where you give them your steady gaze and they stare right back. They’re not going to be embarrassed. That’s where you have to do what the Buddha calls … 
  20. Xtreme Drama
     … And the way he got around this was to decide not to pay any attention to this idea—he didn’t care whether it was progressing or regressing, he was just going to stick with his practice. In his case it was repeating the word buddho. In other words, he decided he wasn’t going to buy in to the drama that had begun … 
  21. The Breath Soufflé
     … There’s physical fabrication, which is the effect of the breath on the body; verbal fabrication, what you talk to yourself about; and then mental fabrication, the feelings you create through the breathing, through your attention to the breathing, and the perceptions you hold in mind to be aware of the breathing as a whole-body process. They’re all right here. We take … 
  22. Load next page...