Search results for: "Focus"
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- Lust… Think of how much you lie to yourself, how many areas of the mind get shut down as you focus on liking this, wanting that, and totally ignoring all the consequences. The narratives you build up in the mind are total fantasies. To be attractive, they rely on huge blind spots. Large parts of the mind simply get shut down. Your reality principle goes …
- Nobility Through Inner Strength… If you find that you’re losing your focus, you bring the mind back to the breath, and then you try to figure out how to keep it here the next time. If there’s an impulse to go away, how do you say No to the impulse? How do you learn to keep the mind here with a sense of well-being? That …
- If These Walls Could Talk… So we learn to use the requisites of life, not to stoke our greed or stoke our pride, but to be content with what we have so that we can focus on the areas where we should not be content. This has to do with the fourth of the customs of the noble ones, which is to delight in abandoning and to delight in …
- Alone at Death, but Not Lonely… So we focus on the breath, we focus on our mind in the present moment, because this is the starting point of so much of our suffering. We want to understand why: what’s causing us to act in ways in the present moment that are causing suffering now and on into the future. After all, it’s our intentions that shape our life …
- The Real Thing… Is there anything he says that’s there in the body that’s not in the body? And are any of those things clean? The question is, why do we focus on this? Because we ordinarily don’t look at what’s right here. We keep making things up. Ajaan Suwat once said that this is one of the big problems of the mind …
- The Skills of Truth & Calm… If you look at dependent co-arising, even before there’s sensory contact, there are some factors that we actually focus directly on as we meditate. Under the factor of fabrication, you’ve got the breath. Okay, we’re focused on the breath. You’ve got direct thought and evaluation, which means you’re talking to yourself. Well, you’re talking to yourself about …
- Analysis of Qualities… That thought helps to focus you. Where are you going to look for true happiness? You have to look inside. Every happiness based on things that you see and hear and smell and taste and touch and think about eventually has to change. If you place your happiness there, if you identify with those things, your happiness is going to have to change in …
- Non-Reactive Judgment… Mental covers the perceptions you hold in mind—the labels you put on things—and the feelings you focus on. These are the elements that go into how you shape your present experience. And where are you going to learn about these things? Through the practice of concentration. You focus on the breath: bodily fabrication. You talk to yourself about the breath to make …
- Trading Up… That’s what we have to focus on. Which means we have to give up a lot of other opinions about a lot of other issues. We have to give up a lot of the ideas about who we are. We take that question ‘who we are’ and we put it off in brackets. Then we look simply at our sense of self as …
- Dharma Medicine… At that point, you want to focus on how constant you can make your state of mind, how pleasant you can make it, and how much you can bring it under your control. When the Buddha talks about issues of self, we tend to think of the self as a thing, but he saw it more as an activity. You make a sense of …
- Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening… What would it be like if you didn’t have to suffer from these things? What would that mean? How would you go about that? That becomes the focus of your practice. If you believe it’s simply a matter of accepting what’s there as a given that you can’t change, that totally limits the way you might practice. Or if you …
- Why Train the Mind… We’re doing this because we want the results, but we know that if we want the results, we have to focus on the causes. And the main cause is very simple: You stay with the breath. Focusing on the breath is not all that hard. The hard part is going to be staying. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out …
- A Meditative Life… Be careful not to focus on things that will give rise to greed, anger, or delusion. If you’re careless in your looking, careless in your listening, it’s very difficult to be careful about your thoughts, because thoughts are so much more subtle. This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply …
- Three Levels of Evaluation… So you focus on trying to keep the mind with one object. You direct it, say, to the breath. And the really important factor in all of this is evaluation, learning how to gain a sense of what’s just right for the body, what kind of breathing is just right for the mind; what, when you’re out of balance, can bring things …
- Things Aren’t as They Should Be… In the beginning, the focus is mainly on the breath. As you get more skilled at that, then that focus turns to: What is the mind doing around the breath? You’re committing yourself to this practice and then you reflect. All around. That way, you start seeing things about the mind that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, when the mind wasn’t …
- Basic Breath, Basic Insight… You may want to focus most of your attention on one spot. It could be at the tip of the nose, the middle of the head, the middle of the chest, at the abdomen. But at the same time, you want to be aware of the whole body—all through the in-breath, all through the out-. If it’s hard to stay aware …
- Alone with Your Mind… Notice where in the body it’s most congenial to focus and notice that the focus does really have an impact, in the kind of mental state it induces. Focusing up in the head tends to be more energizing; focusing down toward the stomach tends to be more relaxing. You have to ask yourself, “What do you need right now?” Learn how to get …
- Purifying Gold… Can you see those? Can you see any of them? As the Buddha pointed out, there are many steps leading up to craving, and if you see any connection between one and another, focus on that until you get a strong sense of dispassion around it. Then you see that all the things you create in terms of your self-identity, your sense of …
- All-around Eye… You keep it clean; you keep it neat; but you focus your discontent on the fact that there’s still suffering in the mind. As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he didn’t allow himself to rest content with skillful qualities. Even though he had developed powers of jhana, he didn’t stay there. He didn’t stay right …
- Dhamma Medicine for Free… As soon as you focus on the breath, you can find a sense of well-being at least someplace in the body. As you get more and more familiar with the breath, you notice, “This kind of breathing is too long; this is too short.” You know because you’ve been experiencing these things. You’ve been watching them, observing them, taking notes, developing …
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