Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 71
  2. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … Then you’ve got to focus on your speech, as this is a primary place where you’re going to be training the mind—because you’re dealing both with their external chatter and your internal chatter. In a lot of ways, it’s easier to do a lot of harm with your mouth than it is with your body. With a few words … 
  3. The Good Side of Kamma
     … Pay attention to the breath, stick with it, learning how to focus on it in a way that doesn’t put too much pressure on it, so that you’re not forcing it too much, or in a way that’s not to so loose that the mind keeps slipping away. You find just the right amount of focus, just the right amount of … 
  4. The Pleasure Principle Made Noble
     … That means you have to focus on the pleasures of the path. So when you’re looking at things and you find that their pleasant side is going to pull you away from the path, you’ve got to look for their bad side as well. Or if there are things that get you angry, you have to look for their good side, too … 
  5. With Reference to the World
     … That’s the important point of what we’re trying to focus on. Take the body, for instance. Just try to be with the sensation of the body you’ve got right here, right now, without referring it to anything else. The problem is that we have a tendency to refer to the world in lots of different ways. When we refer to the … 
  6. Appreciating Your Practice
     … After he’d have people read the whole of “Method Two,” he’d have them put it aside and say, “Focus on your breath,” but he wouldn’t talk about jhana at all. He would talk about the mind in relationship to the breath: ways of working with the breath, ways of working with the mind, ways of putting them together. When teaching individual … 
  7. Firmly Intent
     … So focus on what you’re doing. The Buddha’s instructions for getting the mind into right concentration are in his description of right mindfulness. Right mindfulness, in turn, has its foundations. One is having your virtue purified; the other is having your views straightened out. Your virtue, of course, has to do with what you’ve been doing in the course of the … 
  8. The Right to Repair Your Mind
     … That’s usually the last thing we look at when we’re suffering from something; we focus on the pain, how much we don’t like the pain, we want somebody to do something to take care of it, and we tend to blame the problem on something outside. That’s why we hope for the solution to come from outside, but as the … 
  9. Streams of Anger
     … The in-and-out breath is *bodily fabrication; *directed thought and evaluation, the way you talk to yourself, are verbal fabrications; the perceptions you hold in mind and the feelings that you focus on are mental fabrications. We engage in these fabrications in the meditation to create a state of concentration so that we can become more and more sensitive to how the mind … 
  10. Commit Yourself
     … But even then, the mind has to make the choice to drop one thing and focus on something else, which it does very well. It keeps moving around all the time. This is one of the meanings of samsara. It’s not only the traveling around from one lifetime to the next, it’s also the habit of the mind here and now, moving … 
  11. The Dhamma Bucket List
     … And it’s not that at the end of a hundred years you’ll have all those hundred years you can live through at your leisure and focus on the really nice times. It’s all gone. As the Thais say, time eats up beings as it eats up itself. And as that reflection goes that we chant fairly often, “Aging is normal,” as … 
  12. Calming Mental Fabrication
    When the Buddha teaches concentration practice—breath meditation practice—he gives you a physical fabrication to focus on, i.e., the breath coming in, going out, and then he gives you a verbal fabrication, the instructions, “Keep track of the breath; remain focused on the breath—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” So you keep reminding yourself … 
  13. Fabricating Equanimity
     … Now, this doesn’t mean you just stay there non-reactive, because the next step after the Buddha taught his son to have his mind like earth, was to focus on the breath. And in dealing with the breath, you’re more proactive. You breathe in certain ways, you breathe holding certain things in mind, trying to develop a sense of ease, try to … 
  14. Feeding Instructions
     … In the same way, you focus on which parts of the body you can make comfortable by the way you breathe, the ones where there’s a sense of good, comfortable breath energy—whether it feels like it’s flowing or not doesn’t matter. As long as it feels okay, settle in and enjoy it. Some people are afraid to enjoy the meditation … 
  15. The Radiant Mind
     … the images we hold in mind and the feeling tones we focus on and encourage. Those are shaped by our intentions, too. Usually, we’re awfully ignorant of how we encourage these things. Yet, as the Buddha said, we shape both the present moment and our future lifetimes through these types of fabrication. If we’re ignorant of them, that’s pretty scary. Fortunately … 
  16. Genuine Happiness
     … So wherever it seems most blatant, most obvious, focus your attention there. Then ask yourself, “Does it feel comfortable? Could it feel more comfortable?” You can experiment. Try breathing deep down into the abdomen. Or even further: Think of the breath going all the way down to your feet. You can try heavier breathing or lighter; longer, shorter; faster, slower; deeper or more shallow … 
  17. Make the Most of This Breath
    When the Buddha has you focus in the present moment, it’s because there’s work to be done here, and you don’t know how much time you have to do it. But you do know that you have this moment, this breath. As the Buddha said, you should reflect, “If I live just for one more breath, there’s a lot of … 
  18. Angry
     … As Ajaan Mun said, you have to focus on the body as your basic practice and deal with the mind’s issues around the body if you’re going to get really far in the practice. But he would also recommend that people develop goodwill as a framework practice. In other words, first thing in the morning, spread goodwill to all beings; last thing … 
  19. Challenges
     … It’s very easy when we sit down to meditate to focus immediately on where the pains are and to ignore all the other parts of the body. This is because our mind seems to be primed to look for where the problems are. So we can retrain it, re-prime it. There may be pain in the back, but there doesn’t have … 
  20. A Sense of Time & Place
    When you focus on the breath, you’re creating a home base for the mind, a home base for your actions. This is the place where you’re going to take your stance: being with the breath all the way in and all the way out—being with the direct sensation of how it feels to breathe, and learning to relate to that in … 
  21. Working Hypotheses
     … But try to make your focus as steady as possible, because only then can you read the mind. In particular, you want to see what its attachments are: When the mind leaves the object of concentration, where does it go? And why? How does it go? Sometimes it’ll make a decision in a secret part of the mind, not so secret that you … 
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