Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Nobody’s Servant… If you’ve got all your desires focused out in the world, then you become a servant to the world. But if your treasures are inside, you can be independent. One of the things Ajaan Fuang would say repeatedly was, “We’re nobody’s servant.” We’re practicing the Dhamma of our own free will, and we’re developing independence inside, but it comes …
- The Message of Mindfulness… Or a mental image of the spot where you want to stay focused. Or just the word, “breath.” At that point it’s not a full sentence, it’s just a word. It doesn’t count as verbal fabrication any more. It’s now just a mental fabrication. It’s a perception. And that becomes your marker, your reminder of where you are, where …
- Healing Skills… Think of comfortable energy radiating out from the spot that you’ve been focusing on, to the different parts of the body. If you feel any sense of blockage, think of that energy just going around it or permeating through it. In other words, you don’t have to force the energy out, just allow it to gradually make its way, until you feel …
- Opportunities Everywhere… They should be doing nothing but meditating.” So that’s what he tried to do, but as he focused solely on meditating, he began to find his mind was drying up. Now, Theravada does have that reputation for being selfish, but you look around the Theravadin countries, and there are very generous people. So he began to realize that his preconceived notion about the …
- A Mirror for the Mind… You’re focused simply on how the breathing feels right now in the body, the space of the body as you feel it from within, which is a higher level of pleasure. As you develop and work with the breath energy, you develop a sense of ease, well-being, pleasure, called sukha in Pali. Then there’s the word piti, which usually is translated …
- Believe in Your Actions… You can work with the mind, and that gives a greater sense of well-being as you learn how to stay focused and solid in the midst of all the changes that come your way. After all, we do live in a middle level of being. The Buddha talks about levels of being that are exclusively painful, those that are exclusive pleasant, and then …
- Stress… Are we focusing our efforts in the right place? Is the happiness we’re gaining what we want? The happiness we’re finding: Is it really happiness? Is it really pleasant, or does it hold some stress? If it’s got some stress in it, it’s not really happiness, especially if you’re measuring it against the Buddha’s standards: something that’s …
- Concentration Nurtured by Virtue… In other words, the images may be coming into your eyes, but your purpose in looking is going out your eyes, focusing on this detail, that detail, for the purpose of greed, aversion, or delusion. You’ve got to watch out for that. If you allow those things to take over your looking and listening, then they’re going to take over everything else …
- Motivation… So don’t think the meditation as simply the process of sitting here with your eyes closed focused on the breath. Part of the process is also talking yourself into sitting down here, especially when the mind is veering off in another direction. Everything you can do that can get you here, training the mind, is part of the training. Other people can give …
- Train Your Hunger (The Sea Squirt)… You’re finding that there is a sense of well-being that can come simply from sitting here focusing on the breath, allowing the breath to get comfortable, allowing that sense of ease and well-being to spread through the body. As you get more skilled at it, you find that you can tap into it whenever you need it. Then you can turn …
- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… memories. But when you leave here, I hope you take more than memories. I hope you take a skill, the skill of training your mind—like we’re doing right now: focusing on the breath, being mindful to stay with the breath, being alert to the breath, and developing a quality called ardency, in which you see the disadvantages of having an untrained mind …
- Training in Right Resolve… This is why the training focuses so much on the mind as we try to develop all the different factors of the path. The other discernment factor is right resolve, and right resolve here is stronger than “right intention.” As you go through the day, you have many different intentions, but if you think about resolve, it’s a longer-term project: your basic …
- Patient & Inquisitive… That’s where you use your ingenuity.” That’s where your curiosity has to be focused—because the suffering is in the details—and the solution is in the details. The purpose of the Dhamma as the Buddha set it out is to point your attention toward the right spots, and to get you to start asking the right questions. A famous author once …
- The Buddha’s Metaphysics… He focused on the metaphysical issues that you can actually put into use and that can actually be known through the meditation. It’s hard to imagine what kind of experience you have in meditation that would let you know whether things are empty or not, whether you have a permanent self or no permanent self, or no self at all, or how you …
- Strength from Within… This means not focusing on the values of the people around you. One of the values of our society is the desire to please people. There’s a tendency nowadays for people to think that Buddhism is all about adapting itself. Well, that comes from the fact that most of us have learned about Buddhism in school. And in schools what can they talk …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… to those results?” He found that that question gave a more useful answer, because not only did it give insight into the pattern of action in shaping the world, but also focused in on, “What am I doing that’s causing suffering?” That’s the beginning of the four noble truths. It’s not just actions from the past, it’s actions in the …
- Learning How to Learn… With desire, of course, the desire has to be focused on the results—what do you want out of this? But then, noting what results you want, the next question is, how do you get there? You have to turn around and look at the means: “What do I do to get to where I want to go?” This reminds you that concentration is …
- Cause & Effect… So this simple practice of focusing on the breath, making it comfortable, and once it’s comfortable allowing it to spread throughout the body, so that that sense of comfort saturates the body: It’s basic instruction in cause and effect. And it’s pursuing this practice to ever subtler levels of refinement that leads to the kind of insight that we want. Insight …
- The Not-Self Discourse… In the first part of the sermon, he focused on how none of the aggregates lie totally under your control. You can’t have them always be the way you want them to be. Now, you can control them to some extent, which is why we can turn them into the path. But even with concentration, where you’ve got the aggregates as solid …
- Off to a Good Start… If the pain gets really bad and you can’t avoid focusing on it, tell yourself, “Okay, I’ll sit with this for five minutes. Then I’ll change positions.” The five minutes is so that you can be mindful and alert, and not give in to your pains all the time. You also realize that the pain is not killing you. We haven …
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