Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. A Slave to Craving
     … Now, that could mean focusing on the breath, it could mean going through those 32 parts of the body, realizing you’ve got this human birth, you’ve got this human body, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to let it be a tool for your sensuality, or are you going to learn to look at what you’ve … 
  12. Fabrication Theory
     … Even though you’re focusing on the breath, you’re actually training the mind, training it to be more mindful: in other words, more able to keep one topic in mind continually. And more alert, noticing what you’re doing, along with the results of what you’re doing. But what makes all the difference is ardency, which is the attempt to do it … 
  13. Heedful of Death
     … Or if there’s a pain in one part of the body, and focusing on the pain or trying to bring the breath to the pain doesn’t seem to help, bring your focus to the breath to the opposite side of the body. Or you may notice that some parts of the body are doing all the work in your breathing, and they … 
  14. Self-Control
     … Because we are so busy focusing on other things, we neglect the true power in our lives. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha teaches us not-self, to tell us to look around to see what really does lie under our control, because the sense of control or the idea of control is essential for our idea of who we are … 
  15. Interested in the Breath
     … When you’re focusing on the breath, how much pressure is just right? How much is too much? How much is too little? If it’s too little, the mind just slips off, slips off. If it’s too much, the breath is going to feel confined. How do you know what’s just right? There’s no meter to measure it. You have … 
  16. The Challenge of Right View
     … All the stages of concentration up to dimension of nothingness are all called perception attainments—as when you’re focusing the body right now. Learn how to perceive the sensations of the body as breath sensations and view how they relate to one another in that sense. All the way down to the little physical sensations: See them all as breath, look at their … 
  17. Infinity
     … So it was with that understanding that, in the third watch of the night, he focused on his present mental actions. What kind of views, what kind of intentions would lead outside of the cycle? As part of his second knowledge, he had seen that the cycle just goes around and around. It’s not really a circle. It has a lot of complex … 
  18. Animals in the Mind
    As we sit here focusing on the breath, we’re developing what’s called mindfulness immersed in the body. You keep the body in mind and you try to fill the body with your awareness, allowing your awareness to spread out and be filled with body. Don’t squeeze off your awareness of the body, which is something we normally do an awful lot … 
  19. Skills to Make a Difference
     … You learn how to vary your offerings. ** So as you’re sitting here meditating, focusing on the breath, notice what kind of breathing you like. And remember that the breathing you like right now may not be the breathing you’ll like in five minutes, so keep on top of it. Another image the Buddha gives is of an archer who’s able to … 
  20. Against the Stream
     … If you’re focusing on that energy, it’s there in the body already. All you have to do is to tend to it, and if it feels like it’s full and it doesn’t feel like it needs to breathe, you’re okay—the perception allows this to happen. So that’s a perception you want to hold onto. What you’re … 
  21. Monotasking
     … If you find that focusing on one spot in the body is not enough, focus on two at the same time. I knew a retired schoolteacher in Thailand whose technique for getting into concentration was to, as she said, “Think of hooking up a battery to two spots.” One spot was in her head; the other spot was in her tailbone. And it was … 
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