Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 83
  2. Oppressed by Old Kamma
     … Here you have a real luxury—hours and hours and hours of time simply to focus on the mind—and what happens? You get bored or oppressed by the idea that you’ve got to fill up those hours with something. Well, why do you have to fill it up? There’s only one little simple task that’s being asked of you, which … 
  3. For the Good of the World
     … What the Buddha did teach, though, is to focus on what’s the most skillful thing we can do now, given the situation. That’s where the emphasis should lie. And one thing we can do is to help the world through our meditation. Many people think that to sit with your eyes closed like this is irresponsible, that we’re running away from … 
  4. Staying, Moving, & Neither
     … When you’re working with the breath, the second approach is your primary focus. You want your posture to be straight. You want the organs of your body not to be scrunched up against one another. But if you try too hard to straighten things out, you can actually damage yourself. Remember, we’re working with breath energy here. As Ajaan Fuang used to … 
  5. The Rewards of Stream Entry
     … When you focus on the breath, try not to tense up around the breath. Think of the spot where you’re focused as spreading out, spreading out. Whatever energy is there gets spread out, so that you can suffuse the body with a sense of well-being. Then try to maintain that. This is what we do with the path: We maintain it. As … 
  6. The Forerunner of All Things
     … I’ve heard sometimes people say “What are you going to do when you die? You’ve been focusing on your breath all your whole life, but the breath is going to leave you.” The reason we focus on the breath is not to get the breath itself, but because it’s so close to the mind, so close to the processes the Buddha … 
  7. Duties in the Present
     … You can focus your attention in any part of the body where it’s easy to see that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, and the mind feels comfortable being centered there. These are your resources. Try to keep them together: Keep your thoughts with the breath, keep thinking about the breath each time it comes in, each … 
  8. The Big Picture
     … But the big picture taught him that if you want to get out, you have to focus on what you’re doing right now, because the power of the mind in the present moment that can counteract the results of previous actions is quite strong. The question was, could he use that power to get out? And he found that he could. That was … 
  9. Staying Power
     … Then, when the initial enthusiasm breaks down or peters out, that’s when you’ve got to have other reasons to practice or to readjust your focus. I’ve been reading recently about the exploration of the Transantarctic Mountains. The story started simply with the fact that people discovered the mountains existed. Remember: Exploring the Antarctic wasn’t like Europeans exploring the rest of … 
  10. To Begin the Day
     … If there is, focus on relaxing the side that’s more tense to bring things into balance. This sense of balance will make you even more centered. When you’ve surveyed the body enough, then you choose any one spot in the body that seems congenial. Allow your attention to settle there and then—from that spot—to spread out through the whole body … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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