Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 81
  2. The Particulars of Your Suffering
     … You don’t want to focus on the particulars. You want to focus on a different kind of detail: the universal details. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has us develop the brahma-viharas: realizing that everybody is suffering and it would be better if we could all find a way to true happiness; feeling compassion for all those who are … 
  3. In Line with the Truth
     … All sorts of good qualities get gathered together here if we focus properly on the breath. Try to focus with a sense of ease, as a way of showing compassion to yourself. We all want happiness, and this is a good place to find it, because the breath is always there—and the happiness we find from the breath is something that we don … 
  4. Friends Inside & Out
     … You’ve got to focus your desire on staying safely on the road. That’s how you harness your desires and harness your cravings. As for the cravings that would pull you aside: Learn how to put them aside for the time being. They’re like people coming along and saying, “Hey, let’s go out and have a little fun here.” You can … 
  5. Habits of Perception
     … So as we’re practicing meditation, remember that perception and attention — the way we perceive things, the questions we ask about the things we perceive — are the two main issues we have to focus on. This is one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on concentration, for the levels of concentration are perception attainments. Can you hold onto a particular perception so … 
  6. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … We also focus on other passages that portray the path as one nice step after another nice step, without much difficulty. That’s ignoring huge parts of the Canon. Even the passages saying that if you start with admirable friendship, everything follows naturally, will admit that admirable friendship is not easy. Finding a good person, someone you trust, and then emulating that person’s … 
  7. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … I can step out of it.*” *Now, you’ll have to have a place to step out to, which is why we have the breath as our focus. The breath is basically a physical phenomenon, but it’s very close to the mind and it’s your mind’s anchor in the present moment. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re … 
  8. Staying Still
     … In other words, if you’re feeling heavy, what would lighten your sense of the body right now? What sensations in the body already there are already light? Focus on those. If you’re feeling cold, what sensations are already warm? Focus on those. See what happens. As for the lightness or heaviness of the body, there are times when you really get sensitive … 
  9. The Taste Is Release
     … by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the feelings you focus on, and by the perceptions you keep in mind. These are the processes by which you fix your food. It’s not as if the food just magically appears. You play a role in finding it and fixing it. The question is, is it worth the effort … 
  10. Indecision
     … That’s the first area that you have to focus on. Some of our actions may ripple out into the society in ways that are really hard to track down and hard to anticipate, and if you get too concerned with the widespread ripple effects, you tend to miss what you’re actually doing and what you’re actually telling other people to do … 
  11. Fire Prevention
     … Now, because mindfulness tends to focus so much on the present moment, we tend to forget that right effort also includes preventing things that are not there yet. This covers two things: prevention and then snuffing out things that arise. It’s like preventing a forest fire or a wildfire. Well before a fire starts, you want to do some preparatory actions. If there … 
  12. The Ennobling Path
     … You focus on these things and sometimes it gets dry, and he says, there’s a fever in the body, or a fever appearing in the mind. Even though these are the themes of right concentration, you’re not finding them very easeful or rapturous. So he says to focus on a topic that you do find inspiring. It might be the Buddha, the … 
  13. The Saints Don’t Grieve
    The Saints Don’t Grieve January 28, 2005 One of the most difficult but important principles in the practice is what the Buddha called, “Learning to see renunciation as freedom.” For most of us renunciation seems to be a restriction — as when you’re getting the mind to focus on the breath. Before you make up your mind to do that, the mind doesn … 
  14. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … And then rearrange your perceptions around that, so if it feels like the breath begins in the navel, okay, focus on its beginning in the navel. You don’t have to think about the air coming in and out of the nose. Or if it feels like it’s coming from around the area of the heart, think that breath energy is flowing from … 
  15. Noble Happiness
     … for the mind, though, there’s a question: Does it have to feed or can it be independent? So we look inside to see. We start out with something really basic. Focus on the breath. Notice when the breath is coming in; notice when it’s coming out. Think about the breath. Keep the breath in mind. That’s mindfulness. And then be alert … 
  16. Expanding Your Awareness
     … When you focus on looking at things in such way as to give rise to lust or anger or greed, you narrow your awareness down to very small details, the little things that excite lust, the little things that provoke your anger. You lose sight of the larger picture. Expanding your awareness helps to keep that larger picture in mind. At the same time … 
  17. Why We Train the Mind
     … Where does it feel good? Focus on that and see if you can stay there. Ardency is what helps keep you there. Ardency is another term for right effort. Right effort has many aspects. As the Buddha said, it starts by generating desire to do away with unskillful mental qualities and generating desire to develop skillful ones. The quality of desire there is important … 
  18. Appropriate Attention
     … In the Forest Tradition, they focus a lot on perception, because the labels we apply to things really color everything else in the mind. So you might want to start with that. See if there’s some way that you can develop dispassion for the things you’re clinging to. So this principle of appropriate attention starts with the ordinary, everyday issue of skillful … 
  19. It’s up to You
     … Or you can focus on the perception of breath. Think of the breath energy spreading everywhere. Or think of the fact that everything all around you is earth. Just earth. You don’t have to think of its being trees or rocks or whatever. Just the earth property. Those perceptions of breath and earth have a lot less of disturbance than the perception of … 
  20. Ingenuity
     … This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Lee would focus on getting the spine cleared up as the first order of business. If energy does come up the spine, it doesn’t get blocked, it doesn’t get diverted off to one side or another. At the same time, you’ve got to keep that sense of the energy coming down through the … 
  21. Growing Up Inside
     … But the task here gives you some focus: how to get the mind to settle down, and step back from its thoughts. This is an important part of growing more mature. You see certain identities that you’ve been taking on, and you step back from them, and say No. A while back I was reading a book by a psychologist who had focused … 
  22. Load next page...