Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Cheating the System
     … You’re focusing on something else. You have other perceptions around it. One of the reasons we practice breath meditation is to get really sensitive to how our perceptions affect things. One of the steps, as the Buddha said, is to become sensitive to mental fabrication, which includes your feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain, and the perceptions around them. But before … 
  3. The Anatomy of the Present
     … Those first two knowledges were expressed in terms of narratives of worlds and beings, whereas the third knowledge, in the focusing on the present moment, was not a narrative, and had none of those terms at all. He asked, “How do you become a being?” It’s based on your desire. “How do you understand the world?” It’s through how you experience things … 
  4. Question Your Actions
     … Can you go through the day with a sense of your spot in the body where you stay focused? Keep that open and relaxed. It’s as if there were networks of roads in the body. Tension builds up at one spot, and then it goes down the road to another spot. Then another spot, and there are some places where these different roads … 
  5. Noble Priorities
     … So even though the precepts are focused on what you do in terms of your speech and your physical actions, the real focus is on the mind, so that you get to know your intentions. This gets you ready for concentration practice. They also promote right view in the sense that you realize that your intentions are going to be really important in determining … 
  6. Choices
     … You could be sitting here thinking about the world outside, the world of your life, your daily life, or you could be focused on the present moment to develop powers of concentration and mindfulness. And because there’s a choice, and because there are parts of the mind that would go with either choice, there’s going to be a battle inside. This is … 
  7. Choosing & Watching Your Choices
     … Try to focus your attention on any spot where it’s most obvious and where it feels easiest to stay focused. If you wander off, just keep coming back. This is called establishing mindfulness. In other words, you keep reminding yourself that this is where you want to stay. And alertness: You want to watch what you’re doing so that if you wander … 
  8. Self-Bypassing
     … Of course, the emphasis is not focused on the self, it’s on the action, but self is always there in the background. Sometimes it’s explicit. Think of the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula, when he told him to reflect on his actions before, during, and after doing them. In each case, Rahula was to take responsibility for his actions. “This action that … 
  9. Turning Anxiety into Heedfulness
     … Where your attachments are focused is going to determine whether they’re relatively safe or not. If you have lots of attachments in the world, as Ajaan Lee said, you have lots of magnets out in the world that are going to pull you to where they are. It’s like leaving yourself exposed on many sides. Wherever you have an attachment, there you … 
  10. Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself
     … That’s the only self you really need to develop as you practice, because you’re going to be focusing on your actions, so a self that’s responsible, a self that’s capable, a self that’s going to benefit from the actions: That’s all you need. And give a lot of attention to the Buddha’s shoulds. You should try to … 
  11. To Make Suffering Crumble
     … For instance, when you’re driving yourself crazy talking about certain things in your mind, focus less on the content of what the mind is saying, and more on the process of how the mind talks to itself, and how it uses perceptions to stab itself, and how it doesn’t really have to—or, how it focuses on certain feelings in the body … 
  12. The Reasonable Path
     … In his teachings to the Kalamas, everyone focuses on the passage where he says, “Don’t go by texts. Don’t go by reports. Don’t go by received tradition, or simply because your teacher says something is good.” We often forget to look at what else he said not to go by. In particular, he said not to go by things because they … 
  13. Inner Poise
     … So, as the Buddha said, “Will the man let himself get distracted by the woman or the crowd? No, he’s got to stay focused on the oil.” Try to have that same sense of focus and the same sense of the preciousness of your concentration. Try not to spill a drop. Try to keep your poise. After all, that’s what concentration is … 
  14. Rooted in Desire
     … As with any job, the desire to finish the job should be focused on each step as you do it. Don’t give in to the old habit of just rushing, rushing, rushing through things—that’s when desire gets in the way. Think of whatever skills you’ve mastered. You had to want to master the skill in order to do it, so … 
  15. The Right Attitude to the Body
     … But it’s interesting that they say in doing so you “touch the deathless through the body.” That’s because, one, it’s through the practice of concentration, focused on the body; and two, where you sense the body now, that’s where the deathless will appear. It’s not going to appear anywhere else. It’s like the body’s hiding it. The … 
  16. A Meditator is a Good Friend to Have
     … The best gift you can give to someone else who is in trouble is that you’ve taken care of your habit of personalizing the grief, of focusing on how much you’re going to feel the loss, how much you’re going to feel deprived. Once you’ve gotten past those issues, you can look more carefully: What does this person need? How … 
  17. Pleasure Has a Price
     … Instead of focusing on the pains, focus on the areas of the body that can be made comfortable, spacious, and open. This connects with an important principle of right concentration: that there be pleasure and rapture. The word for rapture—piti—can also be translated as refreshment or fullness, a sense of really satisfied well-being. It’s an essential element on the path … 
  18. Imagine Your Breath
    Keep focused on the breath, in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the formula. What it means is that you put aside all your concerns about the world right now. You can think of the world as anything from starting from the skin around your body on out, except for the cocoon … 
  19. Protective Meditations
     … So insight into intention was the content of the awakening, and focused intention was the means that got him there. So it’s a lesson in the power of intention: You’ve got this power here in your hands, right here in your mind right now. And thinking about the Buddha’s life, thinking about his teaching career, thinking about his teachings, reminds you … 
  20. All Dhamma, All the Time
     … That’s why he focused his teaching on stress and the ending of stress, because that’s the framework that helps sort everything out. That’s the frequency of the Dhamma. Try to tune in to it as much as you can, as consistently as you can.
  21. Accepting the Buddha’s Standards
     … You want to evaluate and adjust the breath, keep your attention focused on the breath until it gives rise to a sense of ease and fullness. Only when the mind is settled like this is it going to see anything clearly. Yesterday I read somebody complaining that they had seen a passage where someone had said that jhana is necessary for awakening, and he … 
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