Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Living Honorably
     … That question is, in the Buddha’s terms, an expression of appropriate attention. He has an interesting analysis of attention. He’s not talking about bare attention—just sitting there, passively watching things arise and pass away, as if you’re in a drugged state. To pay attention to life means to ask questions. Appropriate attention is when you start asking the right questions … 
  3. Meditation as a Skill
     … Where do you notice it most prominently? Focus your attention there and then try to keep it there. One way of making it easier to stay there is to make it comfortable. So ask yourself: Is the breathing comfortable? Could it be more comfortable? You can try it longer or shorter, heavier, lighter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow. Experiment for a while to see … 
  4. Blessings
     … Focus your attention on whatever spot in the body the breath is most obvious and pay particular attention to how the breathing feels in that spot. Choose a spot that’s very sensitive, one that tells you, “This kind of breathing feels good. That kind of breathing doesn’t feel so good.” Those voices are the wise voices in your mind right now: the … 
  5. Rooted in Desire
    When you listen to a Dhamma talk, give only one percent of your attention to the talk, ninety-nine percent to the mind with the breath, right here, right now. Think about the time of the Buddha: People were listening to the talks he gave and they gained awakening. Not simply by listening to the talk—they were looking at their minds. When the … 
  6. The Current News
     … We pay attention to other things. We let the news of the world outside coming through the media invade our attention, to the point where we really don’t know what we’re doing or why. So, it’s good when you meditate to remind yourself that this is the news you should be current with: Each time the breath comes in, what are … 
  7. Perplexity
     … They call it “bare attention,” but it’s actually, in the Buddha’s terms, inappropriate attention. Your attention is inappropriate when you don’t have the purpose of figuring out whether something is skillful or not, something that’s got to be developed or abandoned. Appropriate attention is basically the seeing things in terms of the four noble truths and figuring out what the … 
  8. Farming Your Body & Mind
     … If you give the breath your full attention, it responds. If your attention stays steady, the breath gets steady. If your attention is subtle, the breath gets subtle—and it can provide a good place for you to stay right here in the present moment. Then, when you can stay here, you can watch what the mind is doing. Because, when we say “The … 
  9. Breaking Old Habits
     … He calls this ability “appropriate attention,” paying attention to the right issues—in other words, the issues related to the end of suffering and precisely what your mind is doing to create suffering. This factor—appropriate attention—is the third condition for stream-entry. Our ordinary tendency is to blame our suffering on this person or that person, not liking what this person is … 
  10. Appropriate Attention Always
     … These are the principles of appropriate attention, which the Buddha explains in two connected ways. One is the principle that skillful actions should be developed, unskillful actions should be abandoned. The Buddha gives a list of what counts as skillful and what counts as unskillful, and you can take that as a framework for approaching every present moment. A lot of the principles of … 
  11. An Hour of Bliss
     … In fact, the more attention you pay to the breath, the more you realize what it can do for you. For most people the breath just keeps them alive, that’s all. But if you pay attention to how the breath feels in the body, you begin to realize that you can breathe in a way that feels good in the stomach, feels good … 
  12. Exercising Discernment
     … Once you’ve determined that this looks like a road that’s going to go to the mountain, you focus your attention on the road. Check every now and then to make sure that the mountain isn’t suddenly appearing in your rearview mirror. But otherwise you focus your attention right in front of you, on the road. The road doesn’t lead you … 
  13. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … All this is called appropriate attention. The Buddha tends to tie those two qualities together: the set of seven factors for awakening and appropriate attention. Appropriate attention is what develops all of the factors. Because that’s what analysis of qualities is: paying appropriate attention to these issues of skillful and unskillful thoughts, and what can be done with them in a way that … 
  14. Mindfulness Defined
     … Psychologists have shown that moments of attention are just that: moments. You can be attentive to something for only a very short period of time, then you have to consciously return to it if you want to keep on being attentive to it, again and again. This means that you need to keep remembering to stitch those moments of attention together, from moment to … 
  15. Overcoming Delusion
     … And the other is our own appropriate attention: learning how to look at our actions and their results in a useful way. That’s the only thing that can break through our ignorance. Because the whole problem with an unskillful action is that even though it’s causing suffering, it’s causing stress, it’s causing harm in one way or another, we don … 
  16. The Mind in Good Shape
     … So if you’re feeling drowsy, bring your attention up higher in the body. If you’re feeling restless and anxious, you may want to bring your attention lower in the body. Try to breathe in a way that feels really gratifying each time you breathe in. In short, if you see the mind wandering off in a particular direction again and again and … 
  17. Freedom
     … When you practice meditation, you’ve got to learn how to be very, very precise with the mind, very attentive, very heedful about what you’re doing. You can’t focus on extraneous things. This may seem like a restriction, but the Buddha is focusing your attention in an area where you can find a happiness that doesn’t cause any suffering to anybody … 
  18. Befriending the Breath
     … Pay attention to this new friend you’re trying to develop here. You’re still learning about the friend. As with all friends, it’ll respond if you pay attention to what it needs. Be sensitive to its needs. And as a response, you find that you feel a lot more at home here in the breath, a lot more at home here in … 
  19. Get Attached to Jhana
     … The issue is simply learning how to pay careful attention right here. That’s how you’re going to be able to detect it. And so what does careful attention mean? You learn how to savor things, savor the pleasure that comes from having a mind that can settle down and be steadily with the breath. So take your time to give full attention … 
  20. Allies
     … We have two ways of paying attention to the body. One is that we improve the blood-flow to the spots where we’re focused, but in order to keep our attention focused, we tend to squeeze the blood flow off in other parts of the body. Another way is actually the other way around: We squeeze things off in the part that we … 
  21. Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes
     … In other words, your mind and body are primed by the way you pay attention to them—whether in ignorance or with knowledge—either to give rise to more suffering or to bring about suffering’s end. These prior factors include acts like attention, intention, perception, the way you talk to yourself, even the way you breathe. Now, of course, because of the nature … 
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