Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Stay… Try to find a spot in the body where you feel most easily able to stay focused. Then, as you focus there, you’ll find patterns of tension building up as you try to keep it there. Okay, learn what you can let go of without losing your focus. When the Buddha talks about spreading ease and rapture through the body, sometimes it’s …
- The Story behind Impatience… What I have brought out to teach is like the leaves in my hand.” And he focused on the four noble truths as being the leaves in his hand. There are other passages where he boiled down the basic insight he gained in his Awakening even further: It’s a simple principle of causality. When you think of all the amazing things he could …
- Inner Discontent… You may wonder, “What am I doing here, just working with the breath, keeping my mind focused on this one little thing, when there are so many bigger issues in life?” Well, you need a mind well trained in order to deal with those bigger issues. Remind yourself of that. You need more mindfulness, more alertness. So you just keep coming back to the …
- Investing in Noble Wealth… Shame here is the healthy sense of shame that focuses on realizing that dishonorable action is something that you would be ashamed to do. That sense of shame is wealth. It’s not saying that you’re ashamed at yourself for thinking of it, or that you’re a bad person because you may have thought of it. But you realize that it’s …
- Head, Heart, & Gut… And the mind all too often focuses on seeing this as a deprivation. You hear the word “renunciation,” and you think of being imprisoned, starving. But it’s better to see it as a trade, and it’s a trade up. We’re trading things of lesser worth for things of greater worth. There’s that passage in the Dhammapada where the Buddha says …
- Respect… And what are those blind spots? What are they but ignorance? So we use the breath to open up to the entire body, and then we use the process of staying focused on the breath, being alert to the breath, to open ourselves up both to the body and to the mind. Simply on the level of concentration, that’s quite a lot right …
- Don’t Clap Hands with Pain… She focused on the space around the body, the space inside the body. When you hold this perception in mind, there may be sensations of body, but you don’t have to be there to meet them. You know that Zen image of the clapping hand? Usually a sensation comes up and our awareness goes right to it. That’s the sound of two …
- Sensuality… When you’re focusing on something you really like about a sensual object or a person, you tend to focus on certain details, and you have to block out lots of other details. So there is a built-in blindness in the act of indulging in that kind of pleasure. Whereas the pleasure of jhana doesn’t have any drawbacks, it doesn’t harm …
- Seeds of Becoming… So, this is why we keep focusing back in at the present, the present, the present. We talk sometimes about the future, we talk sometimes about the past, but the main point is to focus on what you’re doing right here, right now. Everything you’re going to need to know is right here, right now, so really get to know this spot …
- Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse… Ajaan Suwat introduced the topic by talking about a woman who had studied with Ajaan Funn and was meditating, repeating the word “Buddho” to herself and focusing on her breath. All of a sudden, she had a vision of a corpse lying right in front of her. She didn’t want to be near the corpse so she moved back. The corpse moved closer …
- Dissolving Narratives… Then focusing on the back of the neck, go down through the shoulders, out to the tips of the fingers. Then go down the back and out the legs. Get really acquainted with the body right here, because it’s right here that you’re going to learn how to see the movements of the mind clearly if you maintain this frame of reference …
- Right Action… This focuses you on the two big hindrances, to remind you that you don’t want to go there, because if you’re going to get the mind in a good solid state of concentration, then, as the texts say, you have to be secluded from sensual passion, be secluded from unskillful mental qualities. Sensual desire and ill will are the two big unskillful …
- Putting Aside the World… As the formula says, you remain focused on the body in and of itself—that’s the breath—ardent, alert, and mindful. Mindful means you keep remembering to stay here. Alert means you watch what’s going on. And ardent means that you want to handle this well, you want to handle this with skill. You’re not just watching willy-nilly whatever comes …
- Understanding Happiness… The Buddha focused on suffering because if you want to be happy, you have to understand suffering. And if you want to be happy, you have to understand happiness. We have so many misunderstandings around these things. But if you understand them, then you can find true happiness in the midst of all the aging, illness, and death in the world. The causes of …
- Damming & Diverting… Do you want to do that? How else can you look at the situation? What else can you focus on? If you’re focusing on how horrible that person is, change the focus. Look for that person’s good qualities. And the Buddha gives you a perception to help with that—lots of different ways of perceiving it, actually. One of them is that …
- Meaningful Freedom… So right now, you’re focused on the breath. You’ve noticed that holding certain perceptions in the mind will have an immediate impact on the breath. With other perceptions, you hold them in mind, and it takes a while for the effect of the perception to take hold. So you’re working with causes of both kinds. And that’s a lot of …
- The Fetter of Perceptions… All too often, we’re not really clear about where our clingings and cravings are focused. The Buddha notes that your craving is located at a particular point. It may be located on a sensation, or on your perception of the sensation, or maybe on your thoughts about the sensation, or on your evaluation of the sensation. There’s a lot going on here …
- Pro-self, Pro-help… Avoiding the issue of whether there really is or is not a self, the Buddha focuses on when it’s skillful to assume a self, as when you want to take responsibility for your actions, take responsibility for* improving* your actions. Again, this is the other side. Accepting unskillful qualities is not in any of the factors of the path at all. You really …
- Breath vs. Distraction… And you can move your awareness fully into the body itself, this breath that we’re focusing on. What is the breath? Viewed from the outside, people say that it’s the air coming in and out through the nose, going into the lungs, and then coming back out again, but how does it feel to you inside?—like that old Peanuts cartoon where …
- Basic Meditation Instructions… In the course of focusing the mind on the breath like this, you’re developing good qualities of the mind that will help in this direction. The very first one is mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping the breath in mind, and at the same time you’re keeping in mind the idea that you want …
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