Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 79
  2. A Haven for Inner Wealth
     … So whatever qualities help us focus on creating more of this good food for the mind, those are our treasures, and those are the things we want to protect as well. The Buddha has a list of seven treasures, and they all focus on what’s necessary to protect the intentions of the mind. The list starts off with conviction, i.e., conviction that … 
  3. On Not Twisting the Cow’s Horn
     … All your directed thoughts and evaluations focus right there. You think of the breath and you comment to yourself on the breath: How is the breath going right now? Is it good? Is it not? Is it comfortable? If it’s not comfortable, what can you do to change it so that it is comfortable? Make it longer? Or shorter? Or should you make … 
  4. The Skill of Restraint
     … If the mind is in a mood for a little bit of anger, you focus on the things that would provoke the anger and then you can elaborate on it, proliferate as much as you like. Those are where our skills tend to be. We’re great at proliferating. But if you think of input at the senses as a kind of food for … 
  5. The Meaning of the Body
     … He couldn’t focus his mind on the breath, all because he had developed unrealistic expectations about the body’s potential for health. But if you learn to expect that the body’s going to grow diseased no matter how well you care for it, disease is not such a shock or a problem when it actually comes. This is one of the reasons … 
  6. Respect for the Path
    Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Watch the breath coming in, all the way in, all the way out. Try some deep, long breathing to begin with. Think of the breath energizing your entire torso. And if deep breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Try shorter breathing, or in short out long, in … 
  7. Ironies
     … Its habit is to focus on something for a little while and then to focus on something else. It very easily slips from one thought to another. So part of the training here requires that you keep remembering: Stay with the breath, stay with the breath. Keep that thought in mind. As for watching the breath, in the beginning it’s pretty simple: Just … 
  8. Metta Metacognition
     … That’s why the Buddha has you focus on the present moment. But you’re focusing on the present moment because what you do in the present moment has long-term consequences. So it’s not just the present moment for its own sake. It’s the present moment as it leads into the future. You realize you’ve got to learn the skill … 
  9. Interdependence & Death
     … You have to learn to think in ways that can cut all those ties, shave all the hooks off the Velcro, and focus more inwardly at your awareness. That’s what you want to work on. But it’s good to have some values that remind you of why this is important—like those pair of chants we had just now. First: “The world … 
  10. At the End of the Day
     … If there’s a pain in the back and you find that focusing on the back makes it worse, then focus on the front of the body. The important thing is that if there are pains in the body, you don’t let them get you down. Because the pains in your body when you’re meditating are nothing compared to the pains that … 
  11. Not-self as a Raft
     … We’re not here even to focus on the question of whether this is or is not a self. We’re focused on the question of “Why is there suffering? What am I doing that’s causing suffering? What can I do to stop?” because this is the big problem in life. We’re constantly acting, constantly making choices, all for the purpose of … 
  12. A Sense of Yourself
     … And then focus on the practice.” Then he’d have them ask themselves questions that would gain insight into what was actually going on in their minds. The questions were actually based on the suttas, based on the Dhamma, just that the way that the Dhamma was being presented in Thailand at the time was pretty off course. But you had cases of, say … 
  13. Overwhelmed by Freedom
     … So use these thoughts to focus your mind on the present moment. You’ve got this moment right now. Don’t waste it, because you don’t know how many more present moments you’re going to have. You sit down and think about a whole day with nothing to do, and the mind begins to fill up the day with all of its … 
  14. Fabricating with Awareness
     … This is why Ajaan Lee has you focus on the breath energy in the different parts of the body. The Canon doesn’t speak about breath energy very much. It simply notes the fact that there is a type of wind element or wind property that goes throughout all the organs of the body. It talks about the diseases that come when that wind … 
  15. Fears
     … And yet the texts don’t treat fear all that much, largely because there are many different kinds of fear — fear associated with greed, fear associated with anger, fear associated with delusion — and the texts focus more on the emotions behind the fears than on the fears themselves. The implication here is that if you want to understand your fears, you have to understand … 
  16. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … So when you’re willing to put up with whatever happens to come in terms of food, clothing and shelter, you’re free to focus on your real duties. Again, this is something I learned in my experience as a new monk. The cook we had in the kitchen was miserable. I had learned how to cook before I ordained and it was always … 
  17. Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing
     … These mind-states will be related to the way you breathe, they’ll be related to the way you think to yourself about things, the way you talk to yourself about things, and the perceptions and feelings you focus on. All these things are what the Buddha calls fabrication. He says we engage in fabrication in ignorance, which is why we suffer. But when … 
  18. Questioning Your Unconscious Actions
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has you focus on this as bodily fabrication. He tells you to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, breathe out. As you do that, you begin to notice that there’s more going on than just the air coming in and out of the lungs. There’s a movement of energy … 
  19. To Comprehend Suffering
     … We tend to be leery of staying with the body because sometimes we focus on the body and there’s a pain here and a discomfort there and we don’t like it. And the mind is immediately ready to go off and create an alternative world for itself where it can think about other things and just drop the body for the time … 
  20. Moving Between Thought Worlds
     … We focus on certain things in the world around us, certain ideas about who we are in that world, and everything else gets filtered through that particular picture. Other people’s actions, for example, get filtered in this way, so that someone acting with perfectly good intentions may seem to be evil, sneaky, unreliable. Or vice versa. They actually may be evil, sneaky, and … 
  21. Hold on for All You’re Worth
     … Where is it most prominent right now? Focus your attention there. Then the next question is: Is it comfortable? Watch it steadily for a while, and sometimes simply watching it steadily will make it more comfortable. Sometimes not, in which case you consciously ask yourself: Would longer breathing feel better? Or shorter? Deeper? More shallow? Focus your effort on the in-breath. Let the … 
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