Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Renunciation… This awareness gives you something a lot more solid to stay focused on, regardless of what happens to the body as the world begins to crowd in, crowd in, crowd in, as you get older and approach death. You just basically step out of the way. Don’t let the world come in and squash you. And having a sense of a separate awareness …
- Ingenuity… See what way of focusing on the breath works for you right now. And learn how to balance the full-hearted doing with the evaluating. As a meditator, you want to develop a repertoire of skills so that on the days when the mind is frazzled, you have the right way of breathing for a frazzled mind. On days when it’s tired, you …
- Afraid of Inner Pleasure… What happens when there’s pressure is that you’re actually focusing more on the liquid part of the body than you are on the breath, moving the blood around and finding that it runs into blockages. It’s like undoing a blockage in one part of a system of pipes, and then the water runs into another one. So try to think of …
- Renunciate Grief… We come back for more largely because we get focused on the pleasures. Even as they’re falling from our grasp, we keep thinking, “Maybe if I come back the next time, I can get something better and hold on to it a little bit longer.” But then it gets torn away again. How about a little bit longer still? It gets torn away …
- Equanimity as a Skill… It focuses your attention on what you can do. When I was in Paris, one evening toward the end of my stay, I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, waiting for a ride. I suddenly realized: This was my first time in the country without a translator around. What would I do if someone came up and asked me a …
- Strategic Wisdom… Stay focused on the breath. You can focus on the feeling of the breath anywhere at all in the body, any spot where it’s convenient, where the sensation of the breath is clear, that lets you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Try to stay there. Keep it up. This is the difficult part in …
- Persistence… what strategies, what objects you focus on, what ways of focusing, how you look after the mind. Mindfulness keeps these things in mind and gives directions to your efforts: What do you need to do right now? One of the things you learn pretty quickly after you’ve been meditating is that what you do right at the beginning of the meditation session is …
- Calming the Breath… As often happens when you start focusing on the breath, you immediately start changing it. It becomes more a willed activity, not just something happening on its own. You want to be sensitive to that fact. You want to be sensitive to how your *willing *affects the breath, and then learn how to calm that, because often the willed part of the breath is …
- The Buddha’s Map… Even in that enlarged frame of vision, there will be things you’ll have to ignore, because when you’re focused on the breath, what else are you looking for? If you’re looking for anything that will take you away from the breath, see it as a disturbance. When you’ve made up your mind you don’t want to go there, that …
- Factions in the Mind… But instead, he focused on heedfulness — the principle that your actions are important and you have to be careful about what you do because actions can take you in all sorts of different directions. They have results. And so, as you meditate, remind yourself that you’re here to learn how to be a lot clearer about what’s going on in your mind …
- A Magic Set of Tools… We simply want to stay focused on an aspect of the present moment that’s going to be helpful. Mindfulness is what reminds us to stay at that present sensation or present occurrence; alertness is what allows us to see what’s going on. The third quality we add is persistence or ardency. Keep with it. No matter how loud the bombs or incessant …
- Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna… Okay, you’re focused on the breath. Then there’s verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—that’s how you talk to yourself. They’re two of the factors of the first jhāna. Then there’s mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. States of right concentration all the way up through the dimension of nothingness are called perception attainments, and the different levels of jhāna …
- Mental Seclusion… That’s what you’re really focusing on, not so much the air coming in and out through the nose, but the energy flow in the body. It’s going to be more prominent in some places than others. Keep your attention right there, wherever it’s prominent. As for anything else that comes up, your rule of thumb right now is that anything …
- Living Honorably… to gauge if something you’re focusing on is really worth taking as a goal, if it’s really an answer to the question of discernment. The first test is that if it’s not constant, it’s not going to be trustworthy. It’s not going to be long-term. Is it stressful? If it’s stressful, it’s not going to be …
- Becoming Consummate… You open your eyes, and if the mind is focused on just one point, it goes. But if your awareness is a whole-body awareness, it can’t go flowing out your eyes or ears. It’s too big. As long as you maintain that awareness of the whole body, you’re firmly grounded here in the present. Your hands are in your hands …
- Saying No to Distraction… The defilements like it when the mind has a spotlight attention—when it’s focused on one thing from one angle, and a lot of the mind is in the dark. Here we’re trying to illuminate as many dark spots from as many angles as possible. Think of the whole body, be *aware *of the whole body—all around, in front, behind. You …
- Groundwork… Directed thought is focusing your mind in a particular direction, and then continually reminding yourself to stay there, because the nature of the mind is that it doesn’t listen to directions well. You tell it to think about one thing, and it’ll think about something else. In fact, the more you tell it not to think about something, the more it’s …
- Energy Channels… Notice where there are places where there’s still stress that you’re causing and learn new strategies so that you don’t have to cause that stress and still able to keep the mind at ease and focused. It’s in the course of this that you discover the important things you’re looking for. One way you can think about the development …
- Injustice… Meanwhile, your emotional feeding habits have to be taken away from the world and focused more on skillful qualities of the mind inside. When you’re feeding well inside, then your actions outside tend to be more skillful because you’re not trying to find emotional gratification out of changing the ways of the world or changing other people. That kind of feeding tends …
- Peace Requires Character… Because it’s ultimately right here where the Buddha focuses his teachings. Sometimes we hear that the Buddha wanted to get rid of all forms of suffering, but actually he was looking at, “Where does suffering come from? Focus on the cause.” Stop setting fires that you then have to put out. Find a place where you’re setting a fire, stop doing it …
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