Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Mastery
     … You may have found that moments of concentration, or even longer periods of concentration, give rise to a sense of ease. You develop mindfulness and all the other factors of the path. You see that the burdens, in the sense of weight in the heart, get lighter and lighter. But you don’t really know the path until you’ve fully mastered it to … 
  3. A Pleasure Without Stories
     … You look at the Buddha’s descriptions of right concentration: There’s pleasure in rapture. There’s pleasure in mental equanimity, physical pleasure. All the way up through the third jhana, there’s got to be pleasure of some kind because the mind needs that. As the Buddha said, you can’t tear yourself away from your attachment to sensuality unless you’ve got … 
  4. Kind & Happy
     … There’s happiness as one of the factors of concentration, even a sense of rapture and refreshment. If allow yourself to stay continually with the breath, it starts feeling really, really good. The more centered you are, the better it gets. This is the happiness that keeps you going on the path. As the Buddha said, concentration is like food for the path; a … 
  5. The Perfection of Freedom
     … Not only that, but given the fact that the mind is always feeding, concentration gives you something good to feed on, a sense of well-being that comes from within, that doesn’t depend on people outside or anything outside, doesn’t take anything away from anyone. When the mind is well fed, it’s more willing to look at alternatives, to look at … 
  6. Expanded Possibilities
     … There’s right resolve and wrong resolve, all the way down through the factors of the path to right concentration and wrong concentration. You act in the wrong way, you’re not going to get results—like trying to get milk out of a cow by squeezing its horn. If you act in the right way, you’re going to get the results. It … 
  7. Cornered
     … He has you fix the best possible food out of the aggregates, i.e., a state of concentration—as still as you can get the mind, with a sense of intense well-being. Then your tastes get more refined: for a well-being that comes with a sense of ease, a well-being that comes with equanimity, a well-being that comes from getting … 
  8. Brahmaviharas & the Breath
     … But if you take an intelligent attitude toward it, you realize it’s something you can use as a basis both for settling down comfortably in the present moment and for developing strong concentration, the kind of concentration where your awareness fills the whole body in a way that’s all-around. This is important. If your concentration is one-pointed, there are huge … 
  9. To Make Suffering Crumble
     … When you have physical pain, first you want to be able to be with the pain and not feel that you have to run away from it or push it away, and that requires that you develop some good concentration. And where do you get the concentration? From the same five aggregates: You’ve got the breath, which is body or form, and you … 
  10. Put Your Heart into It
     … If you’re not honest, and your precepts are not honest, your concentration is not honest, your discernment is not honest, the practice isn’t going to get anywhere. Building on that, the Buddha talks of many other qualities of the heart. He extolls modesty, contentment, persistence, unburdensomeness. These are all qualities of the heart. We tend to think of someone being good-hearted … 
  11. Training Heart & Mind
     … As the Buddha said, people who are stingy and greedy can’t get into right concentration, to say nothing of levels of awakening. As for lack of virtue, there are people who are not virtuous who can get their minds strongly concentrated because they’re good at compartmentalizing their minds, but that concentration is not going to be honest. You have to learn first … 
  12. The Practice of Right View
     … And even with skillful thinking, he said there are times when it’s even more skillful to let the mind rest in right concentration. It’s another factor of the path. In fact it’s one of the central ones. There’s a passage where the Buddha refers to the other seven factors of the path as aids, as requisites to right concentration. Right … 
  13. Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds
     … So what is this hunger you have for other people’s bodies, or for your body? And what misunderstanding is it based on? Now, to conduct this analysis properly, you also have to have a good solid base in concentration, although sometimes people can actually get the mind in a good state of concentration through this analysis. You think about the body for a … 
  14. Rooted in Desire
     … That’s what right concentration is for, learning to develop a sense of ease, a sense of pleasure, a sense of rapture and fullness simply by the way you breathe. This gives you an important alternative. Once you’ve learned to master that kind of pleasure, you can tap into it whenever you need it. You can do it all the time. At least … 
  15. Don’t Worry, Be Focused
     … One of the best arguments, when you’re worried about how things could get really bad, is to remind yourself that you don’t really know exactly how things could get really bad, but you do know that, regardless, you’re going to need mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment to deal with whatever the situation is. Now, where are you going to get those … 
  16. To Stay the Course
     … But if you simply put in a lot of effort without getting the mind still in concentration, without having a sense of equanimity, you burn yourself out, just as gold would get burned up if it were stuck in a fire all the time. If you simply got the mind concentrated, things would sit there and wouldn’t develop. That’s like blowing on … 
  17. Present-Moment Intelligence
     … You breathe in ways that gladden the mind, steady and concentrate the mind, release the mind. This doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a training. In the course of the training, you’re going to be talking to yourself as you give yourself directions: “Do this, do that.” Then you learn from what you’ve done. This is what the meditation is … 
  18. The Balance of Power
     … This is why we develop right concentration. This is our main ally. In the comparison they have of the different qualities on the path, concentration is your food. It’s what gives your nourishment. So you want to develop these allies as much you can. In other words the idea of being peaceful, a mind that causes no harm, it sounds nice but if … 
  19. Issues of Control
     … All five aggregates, for instance, are involved in concentration. Form, of course, would be the breath. Think of the breath going through the whole body. Feeling would be the sense of ease you’re trying to develop. Perceptions would be the images you hold in mind about where the breath is running in the body. Thought fabrications try to adjust things and observe. The … 
  20. An End to Suffering
     … Again, this is why we work with concentration, because when the mind does get concentrated there’s a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. It feels good inside. It’s nourishing, it’s strengthening. And when you actually do the work, you get the results. Have some conviction in the path. This is what helps with that sense of desire, the sense … 
  21. Unskillful Thinking
    Unskillful Thinking November 24, 2004 The practice of concentration often goes best when you treat it as a game, something you do for enjoyment. After all, some of the factors of right concentration include pleasure and rapture, and these things don’t arise if you treat the concentration as a chore, as something grim you have to slog your way through. So make it … 
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