Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Page 88
  2. What to Tolerate, What Not
     … Where were you focused? You don’t know. Were you awake? Well, not really. Were you asleep? Not really. That kind of concentration doesn’t accomplish anything. You want to be clearly aware. One of the ways of making sure that you don’t slip off into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration is to try to keep your awareness of the body as … 
  3. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … How are you using the five aggregates to put together your experience of pain? You start off by focusing on the pain itself, but then you begin to realize the pain is not so much the problem. The problem is the perceptions and thought constructs that go around it: how you talk to yourself about the pain, the images you have in mind about … 
  4. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … You keep focusing on the fact that you’ve got to return to what you’re doing right here, right now. And you want to make sure you do it skillfully. That’s the meaning of the not-self teaching. A lot of people are scared off by the teaching on not-self. It sounds like the Buddha’s saying we have no self … 
  5. Creating a New Self
     … This is one of the reasons why we emphasize that it’s really important to have a sense of ease and well-being as you’re focused here. Because as we all know, when you’re hungry, things don’t look the way they really are. Everything becomes a potential food. You start seeing things in a distorted way. So try to feed the … 
  6. Understanding Pain
     … The second step is that if the pain has actually arisen, don’t go focusing on the pain quite yet. Gather your forces. Find a part of the body that’s not in pain and allow your attention to settle there. It doesn’t have to be intensely pleasant but just pleasant enough so that you feel at ease settling there. Meanwhile, the mind … 
  7. Mature Strategies
     … And there may be a few cases in life where that works — where focusing on your pains makes them worse — yet there are so many cases where it works only for a while and then it breaks down. But because we’re used to this approach, used to this strategy, we feel a lot of resistance to even listening to the Buddha’s first … 
  8. Persistence
     … But there is a mental effort, in trying to stick persistently with what you’ve decided you’re going to stay focused on. In the beginning, it seems to require a lot out of you, but you gradually find with practice that you can stick with it for the sake of the long term much more easily. This is another aspect of the wisdom … 
  9. Parsing Out Suffering
     … We’re not focused only on the pleasant feeling of fullness that comes when the food is down in the stomach. There are other aspects of what we find enjoyable about feeding as well. One is that we get to use our body. If we didn’t have food, the body wouldn’t work. Then we like to get good at understanding, perceiving what … 
  10. Useful Thinking
     … Why are we focusing on the present moment? Because the way we fabricate the present moment is causing suffering. We want to be able to see that clearly, see both where the suffering or the stress is—because sometimes it’s blatant and sometimes it’s more subtle—and to see the fabrication of what we’re doing. So that’s why we’re … 
  11. Responsible for Your Goodness
     … Because by focusing on them, you can find something really good in the mind. When you’ve got that real goodness, then you don’t have to create all the artificial forms of goodness that we build around ourselves, our self-image, our idea of how important we are in this way or that. This then gets reflected in the way we’re generous … 
  12. Taking Responsibility
     … How can I get the mind to be more still? How can the mind be focused? How can it be settled down? These are useful questions to ask for the purpose of gaining tranquility. For the purpose of insight the questions are: How should fabrications be regarded? How should they be analyzed? You get some answers but then again you have to take those … 
  13. Skills for Living & Dying
     … This is one of the big skills you have to develop as you’re focusing on the breath. All too often we define our sense of the body by the pains that tell us, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” We even get to the point where we use the pains to breathe, which is a huge mistake. The meditation helps … 
  14. Active Truth
     … Right Concentration, putting the mind in a state of ease, even rapture, focused on one thing. This gives the mind a sense of power, a sense of safe haven, a safe place to go. When you have this sense of safe haven, you can begin to probe into things that you’d normally be afraid of. To make another comparison, it’s like fighting … 
  15. To Delight in the Path
     … When the Buddha describes the stages of focusing on the mind as you meditate, the first thing you have to do—once you learn how to observe your mind—is to try to gladden it. And you don’t wait until you’ve been meditating to gladden it. Try to gladden it first by the way you live your daily life—by being generous … 
  16. Mindfulness Defined
     … That involves the desire to do it, persistence, keeping at it, being really intent, focused on what you’re doing, and using your ingenuity: using all of your powers of intelligence. This doesn’t mean book intelligence. It means your ability to notice what you’re doing, to read the results of what you’ve done, and to figure out ways of doing things … 
  17. Train Hopping
     … Your eyes are focused on one spot in the picture, but you can see the whole picture. Try to see the whole picture the body; inhabit the whole body. One of the advantages of whole-body awareness is that it makes you too big to hop on any trains. Trains go right through. As long as your awareness is enlarged like this, you can … 
  18. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … One of the Buddha’s basic definitions of wisdom is knowing which tasks are really your business and which ones aren’t, and then focusing on the ones that are your business and avoiding the ones that aren’t. It sounds simple and basic, and it is. But if you really carry through with it, the implications can take you far. What are your … 
  19. Sensitive to the Breath
     … He said, “You’re focused on the earth element; focus instead on space.” That solved the problem right there. So sometimes our problems are due to things we don’t really know we’re doing. I was holding the perception of earth someplace in my head, and that was getting imposed on the body. And thinking of the body as really solid, it seemed … 
  20. Guardian Meditations
     … So, if you find that sitting down and focusing on the breath just doesn’t capture your imagination, doesn’t capture your mind, try some of these themes until you get the mind into the state where it really is willing to settle down and learn about itself in the present moment. That’s how these themes guard you and offer protection.
  21. Restraint
     … The post, the Buddha said, is mindfulness immersed in the body, which means that when you’re meditating, focusing on the breath, you’re not in a different place from where you should be for the rest of the day. This is where you should stay as you get up and leave the meditation and go back to your resting place. Continue meditating as … 
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