Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Things that Arise & Pass Away… It’s right here that insight can come, and it’s focused on just that issue: Can you detect something changing in here? If you can, then the next question is: What did you do to cause the change? Notice that you’re looking into your mind for the cause. There’s a Dhamma talk where Ajahn Chah is talking to a group of …
- Grounded in the Breath… If your awareness is too narrowly focused, it may be good for concentration sometimes. Sometimes it is necessary to start out with a smaller focus. But if you want to gain some insight into the mind, you have to expand the range of your awareness. It’s like a theater. If there’s a spotlight on the stage, it brightens up that one spot …
- The Meaning of Insight… These are all means to a goal, although you don’t get to the goal by focusing on the goal or trying to clone the goal. You get there by paying attention to the means and doing them really carefully. Still, it’s good to have in the back of the mind the realization that the practice does serve a purpose, and to have …
- Guardian Meditations… So when you broaden your view here and don’t insist on focusing just on the things that are exciting or lust-provoking, you begin to realize that this is not anything really worthy of lust. Then you start turning around to look at the mind: What is it that the mind needs or wants to use for some immediate pleasure? Can you provide …
- Exploring Fabrication… the feelings of rapture and pleasure you’ve been inducing, and also the perceptions by which you can stay focused on the breath. What affect do those have on the mind? Then you try to calm that affect. In other words, you move from rapture to ease, and then finally to equanimity. With the perceptions, you try to find ways of perceiving the breath …
- From Dependence to Independence… You’re sitting here meditating and focusing on the breath, and the mind doesn’t seem to get anywhere at all. Sometimes it seems to be getting worse. Or things can be going really well, and you start getting complacent, not realizing that you’ve still got things coming in from the past that you don’t know about. This is where it’s …
- The Safety of Dualities… So, although there were some dichotomies or dualities that the Buddha avoided—he called them extremes—he focused on teaching the dichotomy and duality of suffering and not suffering, what should be done, what should not be done, what is skillful to do, what is not skillful to do to put an end to suffering. Those are important dualities to keep always in mind …
- Not Swept Away… You’re after the mind, and you’re going to learn a lot of interesting things about the mind as you try to stay focused here. Other thoughts are going to come up for sure, and you need skill in learning how to not get sucked in by them. Sometimes you can simply notice the fact, “Oh, here comes another thought.” That in and …
- 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 …
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