Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads… You can release it from your lust, you can release it from your anger, you can release it from your laziness, you can release it from all sorts of unskillful things just to get it into concentration. Once you’ve got it in concentration, then you want to look more carefully: What things are you still holding on to? Some of the things you …
- Slowing Down to Look… This is why you need mindfulness practice, why you need concentration practice, to put your mind in a laboratory. You’re going to stay right here at the breath. You can’t wander off, can’t go anyplace else. And like the elephant with its forest memories and forest desires, the mind is going to stray. But if you treat it right, if you …
- Strategies for Generosity… One of the roles of concentration is that it gets things really, really quiet and really, really still. You become more and more sensitive. It’s like listening to a piece of music. If you’re humming to yourself inside, you don’t hear a lot of the subtleties in the music. But if you make yourself very, very quiet inside, some of the …
- The Craft of the Heart… The doing is creating a state of concentration; the observing is watching yourself as you do it, both to make sure that your mind does settle down as you want it to and to see what other things you learn about the mind in the course of getting it to settle down. So you’ve got to develop these two faculties together, to make …
- A New Framework… things like conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. You have to be very alive to the difference that your choices make. This is where we push ourselves out of the bell curve: by being very careful about what we do. Ardent: This is usually translated in terms of right effort. You recognize what’s skillful, you recognize what’s unskillful, and you do what you …
- Respect for the Breath… As Ajaan Suwat once said, a well concentrated mind is both soft and hard: soft in the sense that you’re very sensitive to your object, very sensitive to how the body feels and how the mind is relating to the body; but hard in the sense that you’re not going to waver. You’re going to stay just with this whole-body …
- True Freedom of Speech… So you’re training your directed thoughts, you’re training your acts of evaluation, in preparation for the practice of concentration. As we sit here meditating, we have to talk to ourselves. For the concentration to go well, we have to engage in right speech inside, too: telling ourselves things that are true, telling ourselves things that will not divide the mind as it …
- Holding on Strategically… In fact, ideally, as you’re getting into concentration, you want to have a sense that the body, the mind, and the breath are all one. The breath fills the body; the mind fills the body; the mind is one with the breath. They’re all sitting here together. Then you can use this sense of you inhabiting your space when you’re dealing …
- Focused on the Breath… After all, we’re here not just to rest in concentration. We’re here to learn about the mind. And one of the best ways of learning about the mind is trying to keep it in concentration—at the same time learning how not to be deceived by thoughts that’d pull you away. There’s a part of the mind that wants to …
- Take the Buddha Seriously… The concentration allows you to go deeper. After all, as you’re meditating here, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself talking to yourself about the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that you have around the breath. What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed …
- Thinking & Not Thinking… That way, the mind begins to settle down and get concentrated. Ultimately, you want the breath filling the body, a feeling of ease filling the body, and your awareness filling the body—all together. Then you put some thinking into maintaining that sense of altogether just right. But then you hear that there are higher levels of concentration where there’s no directed thought …
- Working from the Inside… There’s a slight of loosening in your concentration, or there’s a little bit of questioning or antsiness. Sometimes the decision to leave is made before you actually leave—on an underground level. You want to be alert for that. If you catch the mind loosening up like that, try to breathe in a way that’s really comfortable so that the mind …
- Disenchantment… This is what the practice of concentration is all about. You start by focusing on one object, like the breath, and then you stay with it long enough that you start developing a sense of oneness with it. Your awareness of the breath and the breath itself seem to become one and the same thing. There’s a sense of unification — ekodi-bhava — which …
- Steal the Dhamma… That was how he was able to get his mind into good concentration. After all, we’re following the path called the Middle Way. Extremes are easy. You just go for the extreme, as extreme as you can. With the Middle Way, though, you have to be sensitive. What kind of middle is the Buddha talking about? One extreme is indulgence in sensuality. The …
- Mindreading… We were talking this afternoon about patience, and one of the important qualities that helps patience is having a good state of concentration that feels good, so that when you’re being patient, developing powers of endurance is not a matter of simply gritting your teeth and putting up with things. You give the mind a good place to stay, so that whatever the …
- Goodwill & Kamma… Either you lose your concentration or you goes into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where everything is pleasant but there’s very little definition of any kind at all. And you come out wondering, “Well, where was I just now? Was I awake? Was I asleep?” You weren’t asleep, but you’re at a loss to say where you actually were. The …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… What qualities do you want to develop in the mind? Virtue, concentration, discernment, mindfulness, alertness, patience, endurance? This is where you develop another level of refuge, when you start to take the Dhamma inside and you turn yourself into a more reliable person. If you work on developing your mind through mindfulness, you find over time that it really does make a difference in …
- Doubt… But if you get it focused and you start wondering, “What is concentration like? When they talk about the refreshment or rapture that comes from concentration, or the pleasure that comes from concentration: What is that like?” Then you know where to go. As Ajaan Lee says, the pleasure and rapture come from directed thought and evaluation centered on one object. So you do …
- Gratification… And if it so happens that virtue, concentration, and discernment are not your forte, then you’re really stuck, because these are skills that everybody needs. So be the sort of person that takes pleasure in learning, takes pleasure in meeting a challenge. If you don’t conquer the challenge right away, okay, just keep trying different angles, different ways. Find some enjoyment in …
- Levels of Truth… This is for use when your powers of concentration get better and you can start analyzing things simply in terms of stress, the mental movements that are causing the stress, and what to do so you can see those mental movements and see the stress, and learn how to put an end to the stress by putting an end to the cause or the …
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