Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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.
  7. 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 … 
  8. Mind Your Own Business
     … If you find yourself focusing outside, then it’s a sign that you’re abandoning and neglecting some of your duties. So try to have a clear sense of what is your business here. If each of us were looking after his or her own mind properly, there wouldn’t be many issues aside from the issue of why there’s a mouse in … 
  9. Lean into the Present
     … Where in the mind right now is the craving focused? Where is the suffering located? You’ve got to stay with the breath to give yourself a good place to stand, to watch, and ask these questions. But be confident that everything you need to know is right here. And if one line of questioning doesn’t get to the answer, you might try … 
  10. A Mind Bigger than Pain
     … At the same time, realize that you don’t have to be focusing on the pain all the time. It’s good to try to create a much larger state of mind that’s not overwhelmed or overcome by the pain. Think of the Buddha’s image of the lump of salt. If you’ve got a lump of salt and you put it … 
  11. Encourage Yourself
     … We often think meditation means not thinking—just focusing on the breath and coming back, coming back, coming back. But there are times when that just doesn’t seem to work and you’ve got to sit down and encourage yourself. A good part of meditation is skillful thinking: how to think when you’re angry to get past the anger. How to think … 
  12. A Friend When You’re on Your Own
     … That’s not just a matter of focusing on the breath or being mindful as you do walking meditation. It’s a matter of how you talk to yourself and how you talk yourself into doing skillful things and out of doing unskillful things when you’re on your own.
  13. Three Noble Truths Versus Four
     … This is where you should be focused”: That’s perception. The directed thought and evaluation that adjust the breath to fit the mind, adjust the mind to fit the breath: That’s fabrication. And then there’s the consciousness that’s aware of these things. You turn those five aggregates into a state of concentration. And in doing so, you’re fighting against those … 
  14. A Light in the Darkness
     … I wish it was the way it was years ago.” You have to put those thoughts aside and say, “Where is it right now? What are my abilities right now? What issues are presenting themselves right now?” If you get used to handling what’s here right now, you’re focused on the right spot. You’re developing the habits you need. After all … 
  15. Discernment Fosters Concentration
     … It gets concentrated—in other words, solidly focused—and you maintain that focus. As the sense of rapture begins to get too strong, you tune in to a more refined level of energy right at the same spot. You don’t have to move. If the rapture’s going to do its thing, it can do its thing. You don’t try to hold … 
  16. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … Which means that when we’re focusing on these immediate forms of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication right here, right now, we’re at the source of our karma. In dependent co-arising, these things come even prior to intention. But they actually are a form of intention. When you do something with your body, you have to start with the breath. Otherwise your … 
  17. Negative Emotions
     … For example, when lust comes, you have to learn how to let go of the object you’re focused on and turn around to look at the lust. When anger comes, let go of the object of your anger, turn around to look at the fact of anger in the mind—what it’s like to be angry. The same goes for other emotions … 
  18. Discerning Actions
     … So we’re focusing on our actions. And where do our actions come from? They come from the mind, activities in the mind. This is why we have to train the mind to develop the mindfulness and the alertness it’s going to need to watch its actions and really see what we’re doing and the results of what we’re doing. Then … 
  19. Concentration Food
     … Here your alertness is focused on what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. Then finally there’s ardency, which is trying to do this well. These’re all things you develop. Your consciousness is there, but it’s constructed. If there’s clinging to it, that’s part of the first noble truth. It’s to be comprehended. But mindfulness is … 
  20. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … Which is why we meditate by focusing inward. If the causes of suffering were outside, we’d be sending you outside to search them down. But they’re here, inside. We have to keep that point in mind. The Buddha’s teachings on breath meditation underline this. We’re not watching just the breath, we’re watching the process of fabrication, the processes of … 
  21. Contemplating the World You Create
     … That’s why we’re focused right here, because this is where the problem gets solved.
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