Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Investing Your Happiness
     … And then from that sense of harmonious wellbeing, you focus on the breath. There should be at least some spot in the body where the breath feels good. Look for it, and then keep watch over it in such a way that you don’t spoil it. Sometimes when you focus on the body you tense up around the part where you’re focusing … 
  3. Your Secret Foundation
     … You can focus right in on the knee, focus on the breath sensations in the knee, and just put aside the pain sensations. Be very selective in what you focus on. That way you find that you can live with the pain and yet not be pained by it. That’s an important skill. And you begin to see how the process of perception … 
  4. A Pervasive Well-being
     … If you’re going to focus on the tip of the nose, stay right at the tip of the nose. If you’re going to focus on the middle of the head, stay right at the middle of the head. He has the image of sitting at the gate to a cattle pen, watching the cattle as they come in, as they go out … 
  5. A Mind Like Earth
     … Simply learn how to focus your desires, where to focus your desire, and where to focus your patience. You focus your desire on the causes, what you’re doing in the path. You want to be willing to stay with the breath not only while you’re here, sitting with your eyes closed, but also in all of your activities as continuously as possible … 
  6. Skills for Living & Dying
     … The Buddha says, in effect, “Let’s take that desire and focus it in the right direction,” i.e., looking at the causes for suffering, so that you’ll want to abandon unskillful qualities and want to give rise to skillful ones in their place. In other words, you learn how to focus your desires on the causes. And make up your mind to … 
  7. The Hedgefox
     … You focus on one breath and you just be with one breath, this breath right now, and get to know it really well. Actually, the Buddha discovered all those different Dhamma concepts that seem so very foxlike by starting out as a hedgehog: looking at his mind to see if there was still any suffering or stress in there. He focused on learning how … 
  8. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … It’s good, if one part of the body is especially ill, not to focus on that part immediately. If there’s a strong pain in some part of the body, find a part that’s not pained. Focus your attention there. And think of the breath flowing freely in that part of the body. Then as that little beachhead gets established, you can … 
  9. Endurance
     … In other words, focus on what’s good in the situation, what opportunities are open, and don’t focus on areas where the opportunities are closed. This topic has come up several times now as the quarantine begins to extend. It’s beginning to seem as if there’s no end in sight, and people make themselves miserable thinking about how long it’s … 
  10. Solid Inside
     … In meditation, we focus on the breath. The breath isn’t Buddhist, it isn’t Christian, it’s common property all over the world. In focusing on the breath, we get to know our own minds. Then we can talk about our own minds. We don’t have to bring in the terms Buddhist or Christian.” The first step in the meditation is simply … 
  11. For the Survival of True Happiness
     … We use it in our training in concentration as we focus on the breath, or as we focus on the movement of the body as it goes through the day, using the body as our place to be grounded. The final use is for the sake of discernment, because it teaches us, if we listen to it, that time takes things away. When we … 
  12. Everything Gathers Around the Breath
     … So it’s important that we never forget this, that this is where the focus can always go, whatever you’re doing in your practice. The other day I was talking to a monk from another monastery who was complaining that his practice had lost focus. He couldn’t figure whether to be doing tranquility practice or insight practice, and just didn’t know … 
  13. The Limits of Old Kamma
     … Make the most of your freedom to focus on your ability to expand skillful potentials. Occasionally you’ll find yourself running up against some blockages, or pains that, no matter how skillfully you breathe, are going to stay as pains. Or there may be some chatter away in the mind that won’t go away. You don’t have to focus on it; just … 
  14. True to the Practice
     … You can focus on any spot in the body and just watch how the breathing process feels there. Try to make your focus comfortable. In other words, don’t tense up the area that you’re focusing on. Focus on keeping it open and relaxed. If you slip off, come right back. Slip off again, come back again. This is a practice that takes … 
  15. Right Here, Right Now
    If ever you want to gain knowledge in your meditation, you’ve got to focus on what’s already right here. And it’s hard to get more basic than just the body sitting here and the breath coming in, going out, along with the awareness of the body sitting here and the awareness of the breath. You find that normally the mind has … 
  16. The Noble Path to Happiness
     … If you focus on trying to get to the true nature of things, you find it’s pretty elusive, because things have lots of different aspects to them. There are many levels of truth about things. It can be very arbitrary which level you’re going to focus on, unless you decide that the real problem is not so much the things in and … 
  17. Delusion
     … Just learning how to focus on that issue right there is really important. We’re concerned with our actions—where the actions come from, where they go—and one of the ways that the Buddha’s teaching is really distinctive is that it’s focused on seeing *everything *in terms of cause and effect, action and result. Even our beliefs about things—what we … 
  18. Present Kamma
     … In the beginning, it may not be all that still as you try to focus on the breath. But that’s the important place you want to focus right now. Put your attention on the breath and try to stay with the breath as much as you can. And whatever you need to do to stay there, that’s what you’ve got to … 
  19. Count Yourself Lucky
     … So take your desire for immediate happiness and focus it right here. We talk about the path having a goal, but it doesn’t save all of its good things for the end. As the Buddha said, the path is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. That means that—given your physical condition, given the state of your … 
  20. Ingenuity
     … Where are the cool sensations in the body? Focus there. Give all your attention to that cool sensation, and let everything else go. Then think of the coolness spreading. When you’re feeling dizzy and faint, focus on the solidity of the body. Where do you feel solid sensations? The heavy sensations? Focus there. This is useful not only when you’re feeling dizzy … 
  21. When This Is, That Is
     … Instead of focusing on the breath, you focus on your desire. That’s not in the meditation instructions. The second reason is that when the desired results don’t come, you start getting frustrated, disappointed, impatient. But if you focus your desire on the causes, there’s no problem. Make up your mind to stay here with every breath. If you slip off, just … 
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