Search results for: "Attention"
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- The Dhamma Wheel… And again, the news tends to focus our attention on things that we’re not responsible for, trying to make us feel guilty because we can’t do anything about them. But then if you actually try to do something about them, you find a lot of people who would push back, because you get in the way of what they think is going …
- Full-Body Breath… As for any other thoughts that come nibbling at the edge of your awareness, you don’t have to pay them any attention. Keep telling yourself, “This is important. You need this. This is strengthening to the mind, being able to find a sense of well-being, a sense of pleasure, rapture or pleasure and refreshment, just by being with the breath.” You don …
- Walking Meditation: Stillness in Motion… You don’t have to pay attention to anything else at all. You can clamp down on everything and get very, very centered, very, very still. But while you’re walking, you still have to watch; you still have to move; there are decisions to be made even in the simple matter of walking. Where you’re going to place your eyes, where you …
- Admirable Intentions… focused on one thing, not paying attention to other things. Here again, we have the qualities of being ardent, alert, and mindful. In this case, mindfulness means keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. Alert means being alert to how the breath feels in the different parts of the body. Ardent means trying to do this well. If …
- Mindfulness the Gatekeeper… This encourages you to pay a lot of attention to how the breathing feels, and at the same time to work with it, to make it a good place to stay. This is the duty of mindfulness, to remember we’re not here just to watch things. We’re here to figure out cause and effect so that we can make the present moment …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… What can you do with it? If you bring awareness and attention to what you’re doing, you begin to find that you can rely on yourself—at the very least on the bodily side. And while you’re doing this, you’re talking to yourself about the breath. That’s what the verbal fabrication is: technically, directed thought and evaluation. Keep directing your …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… And then finally there’s the flood of ignorance, which covers all the other things that are going to come washing over you as you practice, all the wrong ways of paying attention to things that don’t view those things in line with the four noble truths. You’ve got to stand firm. Keep paddling away. You hold onto the raft. Of course …
- Lessons from Jhana… All you have to do is move your attention to a subtler level of energy in the body. And it’s there. It’s like tuning your radio to a different radio station. You’d been listening to heavy metal and now you move to something soothing that’s also been broadcasting all along, just that you weren’t previously tuned to it. It …
- Acceptance… This is why the Buddha focuses so much attention on the issue of happiness, because all of our activities, all our selves, are aimed at happiness in one form or another. They have different understandings of what it might be, different strategies for how to get there, but they’re all aimed at the same place. A large part of the practice is learning …
- Why We Meditate… Where is that feeling most pronounced, where is it strongest? Focus your attention there. Try to stay with the sensation of the breath all the way in, all the way out. You may want to use a meditation word along with the breath. Buddho is a traditional one. It means awake. It’s the title the Buddha earned on the night of his awakening …
- Watching Over Time… So the middleness of the middle way doesn’t mean that you just keep things at a middling level of effort, or a middling level of attention. It means you gain a sense of what’s just right for each particular imbalance—how to bring it back into balance—and once it gets balanced, how to keep it there. Once it’s in balance …
- Prepare to Die… There’s nothing that they have to worry about in this world, so they can really focus their attention on what they’re doing, how they’re going to go through the process of death and coming out to rebirth on the other side. The four fears the Buddha mentioned in that one sutta have to do with two kinds of attachments and two …
- Nuts & Bolts… It may be in an unexpected place, but wherever you feel it, focus your attention there. The breath is potentially a whole-body process. In the beginning, you want to focus on the parts that are obvious. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow. Try in long, out short …
- Acceptance Without Suffering… So, pay careful attention to the breath. It has a lot to offer in this skill of learning what to accept, what not to accept, and how not to suffer in either case.
- Persistence… Those are cases where a defilement comes into the mind and, because you’re not paying attention, the defilement takes over. But if you look at it straight, you realize how stupid it is. It’s as if it’s embarrassed and it’ll just stop. There are other defilements, though, that are not easily embarrassed. In other words, if you just look at …
- Intent… It requires that you pay a lot of attention and that you’re really intent on what you’re doing. This is what the quality of intentness is for, because it’s one thing to hear about these different ideas, but it’s something else entirely to actually see how they can best be applied right here, right now. That requires that you look …
- A Sense of Direction… Sometimes you can simply turn your attention back to the breath and that’s enough. Other times you need to do more work. You actually have to look at the drawbacks of those various hindrances and see what you can do to counteract them. For sensual desire, there’s contemplation of the body. What’s inside the body? Take it apart in your mind …
- Clinging & Feeding… Do you exist? Do you not exist? That’s part of the series of questions the Buddha says don’t deserve any attention: Do I exist? Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Then there are the related questions: When a fully awakened person dies, does that person exist? Or not exist? Both? Or neither? Those questions are based on …
- Determined to Stay with the Breath… When you watch it for a while, you begin to realize that if you allow yourself to pay attention to this and if you think of allowing the breath to move in different parts, you actually can make a difference. This is an important aspect of the Buddha’s teachings. He has you focus not only on things that you can immediately experience but …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… You have to focus your attention on the road. And even though the road doesn’t look like a mountain, it’ll take you there. So there’s work to be done on the path. We can’t let our impatience get in the way. This is one of the problems of our American educational system: It rewards people who get everything right the …
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