Search results for: "Focusing"
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- The Opportunity to Be Quiet… This is another reason why you should be focusing on getting the mind really still. Because actions come out of where? They come from your intentions. Your intentions come from where? They come from the mind. And if they come from an erratic mind, you really can’t trust them. If they come from a mind that’s really still, solid, secure, then you …
- The Wisdom of Incongruity… to get things focused, to get things centered. In the beginning, we actually have to use that ability to think around things from various angles to help get the mind settled in on the breath in a comfortable way. If the mind has a tendency to think, well, try to have it think about the breath. Think about evaluating how comfortable it is, where …
- Not-self in Context… Here he’s focusing it on parts of the path. But after all, the path is something originated. It is going to pass away some day. So before it passes away, you want to make use of it and then get beyond it, while you can. That’s when the teaching on not-self becomes something you apply everywhere, all around. So it has …
- Cooking the Present Moment… You could be sitting here, focusing on your pains right off from the start, and then your breath will get constricted by the pain. You breathe right up to the edge of the pain and then stop right there. But if you perceive the pain as porous, or if you focus on the areas around the pain, you find that the breath can go …
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… Even with something simple like this, focusing on the breath: Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths, and try to stay with nothing but the breath. In other words, the sound of the crickets, the sound of the wind, the sound of the crows: You don’t have to pay them any attention. They’re there, you know they’re …
- The Buddha Respects Your Potential… Have some respect for the potential of a mind focused on the breath with a sense of the breath filling the whole body, the pleasure of breathing filling the whole body, your awareness filling the whole body, and learning how to maintain this state. There will be a lot of voices in the mind that say, “Hey, you’re not thinking about anything right …
- Recollection of the Buddha… After all, he gained awakening while focusing on his breath. And that’s the technique he taught more than any other. But even if you do find it easy to settle down with the breath, it’s good to stop and reflect every now and then on the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as a way of maintaining your energy, keeping your practice …
- Priorities in Life… And he can’t even stay focused on an issue long enough to form a proper question or to really take the answer and do something with it. All he says is, “Hmm, that makes sense. That sounds reasonable.” Then he moves on. It’s a picture of the drawbacks of being in a position of power. You have to think about this as …
- 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 …
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