Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Skillfully Shaping Your Life
     … So simply the way you focus on the breath, the way you pay attention to the breath is going to create feelings, and you want to use that fact to create feelings of well-being. Then there are the perceptions. These are the mental labels you apply to things: the pictures or words you use to depict things to yourself. In this instance, it … 
  3. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … If you pay close attention to it, you realize that it does different things in the body, moves in different ways, and after a while you began to gain a sense of which kinds of movement in the breath are good for you and which ones are bad. There are unhealthy ways of breathing, unbalanced ways of breathing. But sometimes an unbalanced way is … 
  4. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … And it’s the body’s doing of the breathing that we want to pay attention to. So when the impulse comes to breathe in, where does it start? Different people will sense it in different places, and often as your mind settles down, you’ll get more and more sensitive to where that impulse starts, to how it flows through the body, and … 
  5. Happy to Be Here
     … So even if the mind is ready to settle down and devote its attention to developing the potentials of happiness that are here inside, then to whatever extent the weeds have grown up and things need to be fixed. That’s what your directed thought and evaluation are for. In other words, they’re for getting the mind together with the breath, adjusting the … 
  6. Indecision
     … With their support—and with a quality the Buddha calls appropriate attention, i.e., looking to see things in terms of the four noble truths, where you’re causing unnecessary stress, and how you can stop: Those two qualities will take you far. They can cut through a lot of indecision as to what to do with your life. So even though the culture … 
  7. Working with Fabrication
     … When the skillful ones have done their job, you turn your attention on those until you reach the point where you realize you don’t need to take on those identities anymore. Then you’re totally free. When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, one of the statements he made that really attracted me to his teaching was that he said the … 
  8. The Dead Snake Around Your Neck
     … He’s saying that the process of paying full attention to developing the path is where you’re going to realize the goal, the cessation of suffering. It’s all right here. It’s just a question of learning how to be content to stay right here and to be stable enough right here so that you can really see what’s happening right … 
  9. Stake Out
     … intention, attention, perception, feeling, directed thought, evaluation, and even the way you breathe. If you take these things simply as events in and of themselves, you begin to see there’s not much there. That’s the level that the Buddha wants you to operate on, before these things have a chance to become a state of becoming, because as you get a sense … 
  10. The Chess Game
     … In other words, it’s the first thing we really should pay attention to, to understand—and not because he’s gloomy or pessimistic, but he’s just realistic: This is the way most pleasures end up: The things you cling to, no matter how nice they may be, change into something else, and when they change into something else, there’s going to … 
  11. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … Or they’re voices that you picked up while you were a kid, and they seem to be hanging around—and they can hang around only because you’re not paying them full attention. So, it’s a combination of discernment working together with concentration, based on the knowledge that the way things are is better understood as the way things function. In other … 
  12. Feeding your Attack Dogs
     … But the practice has lots of ins and outs, because past and present karma interact in lots of complex ways, requiring that we give them our full attention if we’re really serious about finding true happiness for the mind. And after all it is your true happiness that you’re after here. It’s not like you’re being sucked into some brainless … 
  13. It’s up to You
     … They apply what’s called “appropriate attention.” They take what they learn from the talk and then they apply it to the issue of, “What am I doing right now that’s causing stress? What am I doing that I don’t have to do that’s causing stress?” As a result, they gain different levels of awakening. Other people listening to the same … 
  14. The Kamma of Concentration
     … You never know what’s going to come up—and that’s because you’re not paying careful attention to what you’re doing, in your physical, verbal, and mental actions. But the meditation gives you a sensitivity to your mental actions while you meditate, and to all three kinds of action as you go through the day. And the teaching on kamma reminds … 
  15. Respect for the Precepts
     … After all, if you’re going to be mindful and alert, you have to be very attentive to your actions and their results. Holding strictly to the precepts is a very good way of getting practice in that kind of mindfulness and alertness. In fact, as the Buddha said, one of the bases for establishing mindfulness is that your precepts are pure. You’ve … 
  16. The Path of Happiness
     … The more attention you pay to them, the more fully present you are here, the more you have a voice in what’s being decided. The breath is a good anchor for the present moment because you know that as long as you’re with the breath you’ve got to be in the present moment. You can’t focus on a past breath … 
  17. Healing & Protection
     … Wherever it seems most prominent or easiest to follow, focus your attention there. Then notice if it’s comfortable. At what point does the breath get too long? Or when does it feel too short? You can experiment. There are lots of ways to experiment. You can make it long in and short out, or short in and long out, and then tweak the … 
  18. Look at Yourself
     … So when you see someone else’s unskillful behavior, reflect: “Do I have that kind of behavior in my repertoire?” If you know that you do, okay, now you’ve got something to learn from, an area to focus your attention. If you don’t have that kind of behavior in your repertoire, spread a lot of goodwill to that person, a lot of … 
  19. The Ennobling Path
     … They’ll draw your attention away. As long as you realize that it’s just a signpost and don’t let yourself get tricked into looking in line with the arrow, you’re okay. It comes and goes. You’re aware of it as an event, not as a world you want to get into. So we’re sitting here watching events in the … 
  20. Dwellings
     … The fact that you’re paying attention and being alert to the breath can create some really pleasant sensations inside. So how do you change the sensations? How do you change your perceptions? And what happens when you do? This is how you learn about cause and effect, because even this dwelling of concentration that you enter in, that you dwell and remain in … 
  21. Creating Your Environment
     … You give all your attention to being right here, being present to what you’re saying. That way, your speech becomes a part of your practice, a part of your training of the mind. Sticking with the precepts is another basic principle that creates a good environment. This moves out from speech to the other aspects of your actions. Make sure you’re not … 
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