Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 68
  2. A Home of Your Own
    When we focus on the in-and-out breath, we’re focusing not so much on the air coming in and out through the nose as on the feeling of breathing as we feel it from inside. When you breathe in, which parts of the body move? Do they feel coordinated or do they feel like they’re working at cross purposes? Do they … 
  3. Taking Stock
     … In this way, as you focus on the breath, it’s not just developing a potential for your own, personal, individual happiness, but you’re also developing the kind of happiness that spreads around. This happiness that spreads around is what makes human life worthwhile. We are, after all, social animals, and we do depend on one another. This is why it’s good … 
  4. Bases for Success
     … So focus in on what you’re doing. Try to want to be with the breath, try to want to catch the mind, to want to get it back. Do what you can to foster this desire and foster it to be focusing in on the right place. That’s how you actually get results. The same goes with persistence. You can’t try … 
  5. Curious About the Process
     … And you can focus on one spot in the body, or you can focus on two or three spots all at once. That’s a way of really nailing yourself down in the present moment. Or you can think of all the cells breathing in, all the cells breathing out, without emphasizing any one of them. Which perception is most conducive to getting the … 
  6. Intelligent Design
     … It gives you a purpose and it’s something you can focus on totally in the present moment. The best way of doing that is to drop the whole narrative that’s driving you crazy: the fact that things seemed to be going well and now all of a sudden they’ve crashed. Whether it’s a sudden crash or a gradual one doesn … 
  7. An Exercise in Sensitivity
     … If you simply focus on the pleasure, you lose track of the breath, and things begin to zone out. You get into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where everything is very pleasant, very misty, but you’re not really sure where you are, what you’re focused on. It’s like someone who takes on a job, gets a paycheck, and then quits … 
  8. Intelligent Restraint
     … Sometimes it goes flowing out and you’re not really quite sure what you want to be greedy about, so you look around until you find something to focus it on. The same with anger. You want to be angry, so you look for something that’s good to be angry about. It’s not all that hard to find. The same goes for … 
  9. Death Is Normal
     … It’s common property all over the world.” When you focus on the breath, then you’ve got your mind. And we can just talk about the mind directly without any thought about what religion we are, because the problem with the mind everywhere in the world is all the same. There’s the suffering of aging, illness, death, and separation. These are things … 
  10. Today Is Better than Yesterday
     … To fight that impatience, you need a combination of your conviction that, yes, this is worth it; and your persistence, your willingness to stick right with it; and your mindfulness and concentration working together so that you can stay focused and use that focus to pierce through things, like a magnifying glass that focuses all the rays of the sun in one spot: You … 
  11. Right Now
     … But there are a lot that do, a lot where you have to be circumspect—particularly about what you let the mind focus on. This is very important, because you can focus on all kinds of wrong things. Even though they may be true, they’re the wrong things for your life in terms of how you will use them to shape your life … 
  12. Beyond Sound-bitten Dhamma
     … So focus on the work. Don’t focus on how bad that other person is. Leave that issue behind. You’re in training, and one of the aspects of being in training is that you have a privilege that a lot of people don’t have. So you show some understanding for those who are not in training. They’ve missed an opportunity that … 
  13. The Lightness of the Concentrated Mind
     … You’re going to focus it on the breath—or, as the Buddha said, the breath in and of itself, the body in and of itself. You don’t want to connect the body to its meaning in the world—in other words, whether people like it, whether it’s attractive, whether it can do the work that needs to be done. Just focus … 
  14. The First Noble Truth
     … He’s advising you to focus on this issue: to figure out what it is that weighs the mind down, what puts a squeeze on the mind, and why. In fact, by centering his four noble truths on the issue of suffering, he’s saying that this is the most important issue you’ve got to understand and resolve. And the first step lies … 
  15. When the Mind Is Still
     … But if you focus on their pleasant side, that just aggravates the passion. You want to focus on their unpleasant side so that you can develop some dispassion for them. Why do you want dispassion for them? Because when you learn how to pull out of them, you begin to realize that they really are stressful and you’re better off not getting engaged … 
  16. Path & Goal
     … There’s no objective standard out there saying that your breath has to be like “this,” or the place you focus has to be right “there.” You can focus anywhere in the body you want. You can take pleasure in any kind of breathing you like. No one’s imposing this on you. This is your expression of freedom. People who have trouble living … 
  17. The Karma of Self
     … You couldn’t focus the mind. You couldn’t be mindful. You couldn’t develop any of the qualities that are needed. You’d just be sitting there waiting for something to happen. But, as the Buddha said, if skillful qualities couldn’t be developed, he wouldn’t teach people to do it. If unskillful qualities couldn’t be abandoned, he wouldn’t teach … 
  18. Imagine
     … has built up momentum, and you want to maintain that momentum to keep going forward. But we go forward by coming back to the same old practice over and over again. Focus on your breath. Be with your breath all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out. See what you can do with it. There’s a phrase, yathābhūta … 
  19. Feeding on the Breath
     … One is to focus in on the fact that right there where that sense of fullness is, there’s also a subtler level of energy. If you focus on that subtler level, it’s as if the sense of fullness disappears. Or if the fullness feels oppressive, that it’s putting pressure on something, remind yourself: You can’t put pressure on something unless … 
  20. Heart & Mind
     … These things are directly related to the breath energy, which is why the Buddha not only has us focus on ideas of right view, but also encourages us to reclaim the body, so that we can fill the space of the body with our awareness. That way, we know what’s really going on and can exert some control over it. We may not … 
  21. Patience & Consistency
     … A centered and broad awareness lasts a lot longer and is also more helpful in gaining insight than a very narrowly focused one, because a narrow focus gets confining after a while. And it’s easily knocked off center. But when your awareness is broad and covers the whole body, you can maintain this centered but broad state of mind in all your activities … 
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