Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Judging Your Meditation
     … They’ve got this level of concentration; you don’t have that level of concentration. You have to remember: That person’s mind is that person’s mind; your mind is your mind. It’s like comparing yourself to other people in the doctor’s waiting room. There’s no contest as to who has the most interesting disease, or who has the most … 
  3. Beyond Nature
     … There’s still going to be a subtle level of suffering in the breath even when you’re concentrated on it. The breath can get very subtle and very pleasant, even rapturous, but there’s still an element of stress there. But for the time being, you’re going to use that as a path. In fact, you put all three types of fabrication … 
  4. Willing to Question Yourself
     … You don’t want the Dhamma talk to get in the way of your concentration. If you pick up something that strikes you as relevant to what you’re doing, there is a process where you have to think it through. Try to figure out what it means, how it fits in with the Dhamma that you already know. As the Buddha said, when … 
  5. Radiating Goodness
     … That’s why we work on developing a sense of well-being with the breath, along with the qualities of mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment that go with staying with the breath; the ease and well-being that come when you get a sense of being at home with the breath, understanding the way the breath energy flows in the body and using the breath … 
  6. The Buddha’s Qualities
     … There’s a little bit of concentration or a little bit of mindfulness. Don’t be careless with those things. If you tend to them, they grow, they get stronger. And this is a path of developing strength. Often we tend to forget that here in the West. A lot of the Dhamma is expressed in really nice, fuzzy ideas; soft, warm ideas. But … 
  7. A Post for the Mind
     … If the mind is well fed with concentration, well fed with breath energy, and if you learn how to protect it, then you’ve got something good to feed on. Then when you see the other animals wanting to feed here or feed there, you ask yourself, “Where are you going? What are you going to gain from this?” And as long as the … 
  8. Inner Worlds
     … We get a taste of this when the mind settles down, even just in concentration and you can give all your attention to this world inside. If you do it well, then as far as you’re concerned, the world outside doesn’t even have to exist. It doesn’t matter. You need a space in the mind where things outside don’t matter … 
  9. Right Learning
     … This technique not only helps you get into a good state of concentration but, once you’re there, it also helps you to realize that your concentration is composed of many different elements. After a while, some of the elements start seeming unnecessary and they, too, become disturbances. The Buddha talks about directed thought and evaluation in the first jhana. You direct your thoughts … 
  10. Respect, Confidence, & Patience
     … Ajaan Fuang once noted that when someone is having trouble in concentration practice, or the concentration of the practice is getting out of balance, it’s usually because one of these factors is lacking. So it’s not that you blindly follow steps one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You find which aspect of the mind is out of balance and then focus … 
  11. Mind in & of Itself
     … That’s how right resolve leads to right concentration: the concentration that allows you to do this work with more precision, in more places where you hadn’t been able to do it before, so that you can bring the path into your life, so that your life becomes the path. That’s when it gets results.
  12. In Your Power
     … mindfulness, alertness, concentration—all the factors for awakening. As you create more knowledge, you also create less and less suffering. The knowledge you want is specifically in terms of the stress, the cause of stress, and what you can do to stop that cause. Those are the truths you want to see. That’s what it means to have appropriate attention. You can learn … 
  13. Thoughts with Fangs
     … There’s a passage where the Buddha mentions that it’s a sign of an untrue person who, on gaining strong concentration, uses that attainment to measure himself against other people. “I’ve got this attainment; they don’t have this attainment. I’m better than they are, I’m a better meditator.” That right there blocks the insight that could come from that … 
  14. Go Out of Your Way
     … The Buddha talks about how it’s important to have a sense of well-being, a sense of joy, for the mind to settle down in concentration. One of the sources of joy is that you’re in a community where everybody has the same views, everybody has the same virtue on the level of the noble ones, and we’re all generous with … 
  15. Strength of Conviction
     … strength of conviction, strength of persistence, strength of mindfulness, strength of concentration, and strength of discernment. These are the things that carried them through. Whatever the difficulties they had to face—and there were many—these were the strengths they were able to fall back on, and able to develop, all the way to the point of the deathless. There’s that passage where … 
  16. Taking Responsibility
     … This is, on the one hand, why we practice concentration: to give the mind a sense of pleasure so that it’s not desperate in its movements, so that if something new comes up, you won’t just go running for it just because you want anything but where you are. You want to put yourself in a good place. Focus on the breath … 
  17. The Perception of Space
     … If you’re going to get *any *kind of concentration, you have to be able to let go of everything that comes up. Don’t make a little mark that says, “I want to get back to that later.” Just let it go, let it go. The Buddha made a statement one time when he’d given up his wish to continue living. Ven … 
  18. Quiet in Every Way
     … In fact, you find that a lot of the progress in concentration practice comes from noticing even more subtle levels of chatter and letting them go. Then you run across an even more subtle level. You keep peeling away, finding all kinds of crazy things being said in the mind. But you let them go, until it’s just the chatter that keeps the … 
  19. Cooking with Kamma
     … You just learn how to make use of them and turn them into your concentration food: the sense of rapture, the sense of well-being that comes when the mind gets settled down like this. The Buddha describes this in his analogy of being a meditator as being like a good cook who learns to read his master’s desires. Sometimes the master will … 
  20. Judicious vs. Judgmental
     … Our concentration practice gives us a comfortable center in our awareness where we can rest, where we feel less threatened by things. When we feel less threatened and less oppressed, we have the resilience to be more patient, to look into what’s going on in the mind, and to develop the proper attitudes toward what is skillful and what isn’t. This is … 
  21. On Idle Chatter
     … That’s a bad habit to develop if you’re trying to become a meditator, both in terms of trying to get the mind into concentration and just learning how to watch your own mind. If you’re used to just talking all day, then when the time comes to sit and meditate, the mind says, “Hey, I’ve been churning out thoughts all … 
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