Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. The Basic Medicine
     … The sense of ease and comfort is a product of your focus on the breath. If you lose your focus and start focusing on the wrong things, then once the cause is gone, the result is going to have to start fading away as well. You’re left with nothing. It’s like building up scaffolding and seeing a cloud next to the scaffolding … 
  3. Values
     … You can focus on the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha either by simply repeating one of those words in your mind as you breathe in, breathe out, or by focusing on their qualities. Think about the Buddha, think about the Dhamma and the Sangha—what you find inspiring about them. You could think about your generosity or your virtue. Think about the times when … 
  4. How to Leave Meditation
     … Whether you’re focused on the chest, the middle of the head, wherever, there’s some spot in the body where you should feel most natural in your focus. And some ways of breathing are particularly conducive to get your mind to settle down. If you notice that, make a note of it. As you sit down to meditate the next time, remember what … 
  5. Sensitive to Fabrication
    A lot of people, when they focus on the breath, want to be with the pure sensation of the breath without any mental images, without any words. But these things are intimately tied together. If you’re not clear about the image you’re holding in mind about the breath, it goes underground and has an impact on the way you’re seeing things … 
  6. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … Only when you focus on one intention, and make up your mind that you’re going to stay with that one intention, do you see the other little intentions that want to push you away. Otherwise, we’re like a boat with no anchor, floating on a river, and we’re so far from shore that we have no clear points of reference. Currents … 
  7. Safe Haven
     … You can focus on the breath, you can focus on the word buddho, whatever you find calming and easeful and pleasant. The breath is good because it helps work with the whatever sense of dis-ease you might have in the body. Ask yourself what kind of breathing would feel good right now and allow the body to breathe that way. If you’re … 
  8. Figuring Out Concentration
     … But still, where do you feel the breath? Do you feel it just at the nose? If you focus just on the nose, you’re not with the whole body of the breath itself. So, notice where you feel it. Notice where you don’t feel it. Then, as you get more familiar with the breath, you’ll get like Jivaka, when he was … 
  9. Cut, Cut, Cut
    Cut, Cut, Cut December 2, 2016 The chants we have in the evenings focus on very ordinary things—parts of the body, food, clothing, shelter, medicine; the fact that we’re going to get sick, grow old, die. All very basic stuff. Nothing about emptiness, nothing about interconnectedness—no big abstractions, just concrete details. There’s a purpose in that. It’s to remind … 
  10. Recollecting the Devas
     … But for right now, focus on those deva virtues right here. How do you make your mind a deva mind right now? How do you make your actions deva actions? Focus right now on conviction, generosity, virtue, learning, and discernment, regardless of whether you have visions or not. And that way recollection of the devas really can raise the level of your mind.
  11. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … When you do this, when you hold this perception in mind, when you focus in this way, what are the results you’re getting? If you change the focus, change the perception, what results do you get? You want to be clear about that. In this way, you become your own admirable friend. You establish an admirable friendship inside, which is where you really … 
  12. Fear of Death
     … There are lots of different ways you can breathe, lots of different places in the body you can focus. You want to familiarize yourself both with the needs of the body and the with the needs of the mind, and how they can be met by the breath. That’s why we spent long hours just sitting here watching the breath, so that we … 
  13. To See What You’re Doing
     … So we focus on the breath. In the beginning, the mind may not be that still. The breath may not be all that still. But you’re working in that direction. You want to breathe in a way that makes the mind more and more interested in staying here, because one of our big problems in seeing the connection between our actions and their … 
  14. Technique & Attitude
    When you meditate there are two things that are important to focus on. One, is the technique: simply what you do. How you focus on the breath. How you keep the breath in mind. And how you’re alert to the breath. There are specific steps, specific techniques that you want to master, because it is a skill. And having a specific technique like … 
  15. Reflections
     … You give yourself one place to focus, one topic to focus on, like the breath. If any disturbances that come up, anything that would pull you away from the breath, you recognize, “Okay, that’s got to be a hindrance of some kind.” If you let it take over, you’re not going to be able to see your mind clearly. So whatever comes … 
  16. Lessons in Fabrication
     … You’ll notice, though, as you focus in on the breath, that there are other aspects of the process of fabrication that go along with it. The Buddha outlines three altogether. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication, which is, in technical terms, directed thought and evaluation. In simple terms, it’s basically the way you talk to … 
  17. Close to What You Know
     … As you meditate, you want to keep your focus that clear, that close. What are you doing with the breath? What are you doing with the mind? What assumptions are you using about the breath and the mind? And what results do you get? Sometimes you find yourself creating a sense of self around the breath. As you get more and more used to … 
  18. To Know the Noble Truths
     … You focus on the body in and of itself—in other words, the body as it is right here, right now. You can focus on one aspect of it, like the breath. When you breathe in, know you’re breathing in. When you breathe out, you know you’re breathing out. You keep following the breath in and out, in and out, and you … 
  19. Perceptions for Training the Mind
     … In other words, you focus on the drawbacks. This can be something as simple as observing that this thought, whatever it is, is dealing with something that’s inconstant, stressful, not-self. If it’s about sensuality, you can think about the drawbacks of focusing on the body, or whatever the sensual object is, and how foolish your obsession with sensual thoughts is. The … 
  20. Victory
     … That’s where we focus our attention, that awareness from within. And for most of us, this is an area we’re not all that familiar with. We don’t have much of a vocabulary for this dimension in English. The Buddha talks about four elements, and to us it sounds like a kind of primitive chemistry. Actually, it’s a description of how … 
  21. Generating Power
     … I’m going to focus on doing what needs to be done right now and I’m not going to try to provide for alternative things to fall back on.” In other words, when the time comes to be focused and concentrated, that’s all you do. Give yourself to it totally. Have a sense of conviction, a sense of confidence in the practice … 
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