Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Into the Cave with the Tiger
    As you focus on the breath, you want to be alert to what you’re doing. You want to be sensitive to the fact that you are doing something right now. The mind is not totally passive. It’s an active principle. The fact that we experience the present moment comes from fabrication. If it weren’t for the fabrications we’re doing right … 
  3. Seriously Happy
     … Breathe comfortably, allow the comfortable breath to spread through the body—or focus on whatever other topic of meditation attracts you right now. This is one of the reasons why it’s good to have a stable of practices, or a whole repertoire. Something that the mind is happy to do tonight, it may not be happy doing tomorrow morning. But that’s okay … 
  4. Questions of Skill
     … The Buddha wants you to focus on what you’re doing in the present moment and the results you’re getting. Then, as part of your desire to do this well, you ask yourself: Are you getting good results? If not, what could you do to change? That’s where ardency comes in. These are the questions you ask: how to approach suffering so … 
  5. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … So you focus on arising and passing away, but with a specific purpose. When those moments of stillness come, you want to understand why. What did you do? When they go away, you want to understand: What did you do? You’re not just watching them arising and passing away, and leaving it at that; you also have an agenda. Once you begin to … 
  6. Mindfulness of Death
     … If you can maintain your focus, then the Buddha has you focus particularly on the issue of feelings in the body, because those are the things that’ll stand out most at that point. If there’s a feeling of pain, he has you reflect on the fact that this feeling of pain is dependent on what? It’s dependent on the body. Is … 
  7. Three Recollections
     … He says either there’s a fever in the body that comes when you try to focus on the body, or the mind is sluggish and just doesn’t want to go there. Or it gets scattered around. As soon as you focus on the breath, it’s like trying to balance a needle on top of a ball-bearing: It slips off. Or … 
  8. For Goodness’ Sake
     … The primary case of renunciation is just sitting here giving up your sensual thoughts, learning how to focus on the breath, to focus on the sense of the body as you feel it from within, and learning how to find pleasure there. Because that search for pleasure really is strengthening and is totally harmless. The search for pleasures outside, or the fascination of thinking … 
  9. Bare vs. Appropriate Attention
    As you focus on the breath, it’s important that you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels—in particular, to which ways of breathing feel comfortable, and which ones don’t. Observe the breath carefully with that question in mind. When you find yourself stuck in uncomfortable breathing, experiment with other ways to see if you can make … 
  10. Lust
     … Think of how much you lie to yourself, how many areas of the mind get shut down as you focus on liking this, wanting that, and totally ignoring all the consequences. The narratives you build up in the mind are total fantasies. To be attractive, they rely on huge blind spots. Large parts of the mind simply get shut down. Your reality principle goes … 
  11. Nobility Through Inner Strength
     … If you find that you’re losing your focus, you bring the mind back to the breath, and then you try to figure out how to keep it here the next time. If there’s an impulse to go away, how do you say No to the impulse? How do you learn to keep the mind here with a sense of well-being? That … 
  12. If These Walls Could Talk
     … So we learn to use the requisites of life, not to stoke our greed or stoke our pride, but to be content with what we have so that we can focus on the areas where we should not be content. This has to do with the fourth of the customs of the noble ones, which is to delight in abandoning and to delight in … 
  13. Alone at Death, but Not Lonely
     … So we focus on the breath, we focus on our mind in the present moment, because this is the starting point of so much of our suffering. We want to understand why: what’s causing us to act in ways in the present moment that are causing suffering now and on into the future. After all, it’s our intentions that shape our life … 
  14. The Real Thing
     … Is there anything he says that’s there in the body that’s not in the body? And are any of those things clean? The question is, why do we focus on this? Because we ordinarily don’t look at what’s right here. We keep making things up. Ajaan Suwat once said that this is one of the big problems of the mind … 
  15. The Skills of Truth & Calm
     … If you look at dependent co-arising, even before there’s sensory contact, there are some factors that we actually focus directly on as we meditate. Under the factor of fabrication, you’ve got the breath. Okay, we’re focused on the breath. You’ve got direct thought and evaluation, which means you’re talking to yourself. Well, you’re talking to yourself about … 
  16. Analysis of Qualities
     … That thought helps to focus you. Where are you going to look for true happiness? You have to look inside. Every happiness based on things that you see and hear and smell and taste and touch and think about eventually has to change. If you place your happiness there, if you identify with those things, your happiness is going to have to change in … 
  17. Non-Reactive Judgment
     … Mental covers the perceptions you hold in mind—the labels you put on things—and the feelings you focus on. These are the elements that go into how you shape your present experience. And where are you going to learn about these things? Through the practice of concentration. You focus on the breath: bodily fabrication. You talk to yourself about the breath to make … 
  18. Trading Up
     … That’s what we have to focus on. Which means we have to give up a lot of other opinions about a lot of other issues. We have to give up a lot of the ideas about who we are. We take that question ‘who we are’ and we put it off in brackets. Then we look simply at our sense of self as … 
  19. Dharma Medicine
     … At that point, you want to focus on how constant you can make your state of mind, how pleasant you can make it, and how much you can bring it under your control. When the Buddha talks about issues of self, we tend to think of the self as a thing, but he saw it more as an activity. You make a sense of … 
  20. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … What would it be like if you didn’t have to suffer from these things? What would that mean? How would you go about that? That becomes the focus of your practice. If you believe it’s simply a matter of accepting what’s there as a given that you can’t change, that totally limits the way you might practice. Or if you … 
  21. A Meditative Life
     … Be careful not to focus on things that will give rise to greed, anger, or delusion. If you’re careless in your looking, careless in your listening, it’s very difficult to be careful about your thoughts, because thoughts are so much more subtle. This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply … 
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