Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Precept Meditation
     … To begin with, it focuses your attention on your intentions, because you can break a precept only intentionally. This forces you to ask yourself, “What are your intentions? Why do you act? What’s the motive behind your actions and your choices?” When you’re forced to focus on these questions, you realize that one of the few intentions really worth sticking with all … 
  3. One Thing Clear Through
     … The Buddha focused on the gratitude we owe our parents — that the good they’ve done for us is something of value. We really are in their debt. All that your mother went through just to give birth to you: Think about that. In Thailand it’s traditional for there to be a chant on this topic before an ordination. They hire somebody to … 
  4. Greed & Distress with Reference to the World
     … Wrong concentration is when you get focused on sensual desire or ill will or sloth or anxiety or your doubts, and you just keep at those thoughts. You get obsessed with them. That is a kind of concentration, but it’s wrong. Any mindfulness that would keep those issues in mind is wrong mindfulness. Right mindfulness is safe. And although it may not seem … 
  5. Intelligent Effort
     … use your imagination to give rise to skillful qualities, to create the mind state that wants to practice and finds it easy to settle down. The formula for right mindfulness is: focused on the body in and of itself—or feelings or mind states in and of themselves—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. It’s good to know, to … 
  6. The Bureaucracy of the Defilements
     … Instead of focusing outside all the time, get it to fully inhabit your body. That way, all the little back corridors and basements in this bureaucracy you’ve got here become opened to your conscious awareness. All of the kamma that you’ve been creating in a semiconscious way becomes a lot more conscious—and your ability to bring consciousness and discernment to these … 
  7. Bursting Bubbles
     … You can use the power of the mind to do this, just focusing on whichever element is weakest. You can strengthen it. In other words, when the weather is feeling hot outside, you can focus on the water in the body, and it cools you down. There are cool sensations someplace in the body, and you focus on those. You’re trying to make … 
  8. Two Kinds of Middle
     … If you step back and looked at the lust, you’d realize you’re focusing only on a few things in a narrow narrative that includes a few details of the other person’s body—and your body—but the narrative excludes an awful lot. After all, there’s an awful lot of oppression that goes on even in a consensual sexual relationship, but … 
  9. The Current News
     … As you sit here focusing on the breath, you can ask yourself: What would be the best way to breathe right now? Unlike the news outside, this isn’t anything you can discuss as a topic of conversation with your friends: “I had a really great breath last night.” But it is important for your internal well-being right now. That’s because the … 
  10. The Lightened Mind
     … You’re focused on your object, but you’ve lifted your awareness up a little bit, just enough so that you can observe the mind itself as it relates to the object. This, the Buddha said, is how you begin to develop discernment within the practice of concentration so that the concentration itself isn’t heavy. It gets lighter and lighter as you drop … 
  11. Contentment
     … Keep reminding yourself that this is what the Buddha was focused on the night of his awakening—his breath. Everything he needed to know in order to gain awakening was present right here when the mind was present at the breath. So even though you haven’t reached that point in your breathing yet, in your comprehension of the breath or your comprehension of … 
  12. Sophisticated Dhamma
     … Sometimes it seems that focusing the breath is like trying to balance a ball bearing on the tip of a needle. It just keeps falling off, falling off, falling off. So you have to have a lot of respect for the potential of concentration to keep at it. The other part of the problem is that we tend to overlook concentration. We all have … 
  13. A Handful of Leaves
     … At the same time, it focuses on where the real problem is. The problem isn’t in trying to figure out which of the Buddha’s teachings is right for you. The problem is that you’re sitting here thinking and using your mind in ways that are causing lots of unnecessary stress and suffering. So you want to look right here so that … 
  14. Skilled in Leaving Concentration
     … You can reflect a little bit more: “During the meditation, at what point were you most settled?” “At what point was the concentration strongest, or the breath most comfortable?” “Where were you focused at that point?” “What was the quality of the breath?” “What had you been doing up to that point?” If you can remember any of these things, make a mental note … 
  15. Worries & Regrets
     … That focuses you back on the present. As for the thoughts that come up after that, learn how to chop them up. As you breathe in, think of the breath scattering the thoughts. Or you can think of the breath as a big broom sweeping through the body, sweeping through the mind, sweeping those thoughts away. That way, you can settle down and actually … 
  16. Discernment: Commit & Reflect
     … And you remember that discernment is a value judgment as to what’s worth doing, what’s not worth doing—because everything the Buddha teaches is focused on action: which actions are better than others. After all, as you see your actions, you begin to see the mind in action. And you catch yourself: “Oh, I’m doing this. I’m clinging here. Craving … 
  17. Behind the Scenes
     … Instead of focusing on the breath, we focus on what we did or somebody else did in the course of the day. And we could feed on that kind of thing for an hour, yet we wouldn’t gain the benefits from the meditation. So we try to put things into the proper perspective. Think of all living beings in all directions, and how … 
  18. Specifically
     … That’s when the teachings work, because you’ve got them focused right at the right space, the right event, the right moment in the mind.
  19. Close to the Heart
     … to look after our own minds, our own hearts.” So although the words may seem foreign and the process of meditation mechanical — you’re focusing on the breath, you’re dealing with the mechanics of the breathing, how the breathing relates to the pains in the body — ultimately these things start getting closer and closer to your heart. As you learn to treat your … 
  20. The Buddha Aimed High
     … There’s a way out, and it’s through your actions. “I’m the owner of my actions.” His quest as he said, was to find what was skillful, so he focused immediately on his actions. He wasn’t interested in testing the idea that human action was incapable of finding the deathless, or that the deathless could be found without acting. He wanted … 
  21. Determined Goodwill
     … When you find yourself overwhelmed with thoughts of ill will, stop and ask yourself: “How am I breathing? How am I talking to myself about the issue? What’s wrong with what I’m saying? How can I change what I’m saying to myself?” And finally, “How can I change my perception of the situation? The feelings that I’m focusing on?” In … 
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