Search results for: "Focus"
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- Karma for Freedom… You focus on the breath in a certain way, and it doesn’t take that much time to see results, either good or bad. If you have skill in the present moment, you can shape things really nicely. If you lack skill, then the range of what you can do is limited. This is one of the reasons why we meditate, and why the …
- Hypocrisy… This is why, when the Buddha formulated the customs of the noble ones, three out of the four focus on very everyday issues: what you wear, what you eat, where you live. Not only that, but how you approach what you wear and eat, where you live. In other words, eat just enough to get by. You’re content with what you get. You …
- A Healthy Body Image… What’s really good about it? What’s useful about it? What’s it useful for? What’s the best use of it? Focus on that. That’s your positive healthy image. Back when Ajaan Mun was teaching the monks and nuns in Thailand… You have to remember they were mainly sons of peasants, daughters of peasants, people whom the rest of society tended …
- Take Care… If you focus on the wrong kinds of things, they can give rise to anger, greed, delusion; and then the ripple effect goes rippling out. So, we’re learning a very important skill here as we’re meditating: being very careful to stay with the breath, not letting the slightest thing pull us off, not letting the slightest thing interfere. This is precision work …
- Little Things… But if your range of awareness is broad and yet your attention to the details of your focus is precise and sharp, that state of awareness is not just easy to sustain. It sustains itself and becomes a source of strength for the mind. In that way, it sustains you. You want to apply this same attention to detail to all aspects of your …
- Success with Breathing… You have to focus your desire on the causes, trying to pay attention to what will actually lead to the results you want. Then you stick with it. Anything that gets in the way of what you want to do, you try to abandon it. Anything that’s going to help, you try to develop it. Intentness: You pay careful attention to what you …
- Ugly Body, Happy Mind… You’ll notice when you’re focused on the body as being attractive, you usually focus on certain details that set you off. You have to narrow your vision to a really narrow tunnel vision to do that, because the things you find so attractive are right next to things that are not attractive at all. Just go down beneath the skin a tiny …
- Training the Committee… The issue of what things you focus on is really important in life, what things you are going to give your time to right now. One of the contemplations he recommends is—every morning at dawn, as the sun rises—to remind yourself: “This could be the last time I see the sunrise. There are so many easy ways I could die.” People die …
- Contentment… So this is where you focus your energy. Look at the mind. What is the mind doing that’s causing suffering? What could it do to cause less suffering? To see this clearly, you’ve got to get the mind very, very still. And whatever way you get the mind to settle down in the present moment clearly, with mindfulness and alertness, try to …
- A Multilingual Mind… Do they really exist? Do they not exist? In other words, is there something lying behind them? Is there nothing lying behind them? This kind of questioning pulls our attention away from what we’re experiencing to focus on what we assume is either out there behind it or not out there behind it. We find ourselves placing our trust in things we don …
- Self-reliance… But the Buddha’s focus is right here, and his analysis comes down to the fact that you can do something about suffering because you’re causing it. So you have to look inside. And the reason you’re causing it is not because you want to. It’s because you’re ignorant. The word for ignorance, avijja, can also mean lack of skill …
- Respect for the Training… So try to focus on what you need to do in order to respect the training, what the training requires of you, and be willing to learn the lessons it’s going to teach you. Often there are lessons you don’t like to learn, there are lessons you didn’t expect you had to learn, but they’re there and they’re good …
- Facing Danger & Hardship… So it goes beyond whatever those dangers were as long as you don’t focus on the dangers, making a big issue out of them and letting the state of your mind fall because of them. So to recollect the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha is basically to take on a fighter’s attitude—the attitude of a warrior. And a warrior wants …
- A Full Life… The Buddha says also to delight in seclusion—the opportunity you have to focus direct attention on your mind with a minimum of distractions. That, too, is part of the skill of a good life. Then there’s the meaningful life: The last two objects of delight, the Buddha said, are delighting in the unafflicted and delighting in non-objectification. These are two names …
- Equanimity when You Care… We see that not all of them are going to act in skillful ways, so we focus on areas where we can have an influence. If there are areas where we can’t, we have to let them go. It’s a matter of priorities—realizing that our goodwill may be unlimited, but our resources and abilities are limited. You have to use your …
- Helping Others… and say, “I don’t have any time to practice at all.” They’d respond, “Well, do you have time to breathe?” “Yes.” “Okay, then you’ve got time to practice. Focus on your breath when you can.” Remember what the Buddha had to say on the topic: As you do your practice, you’re like an acrobat who can maintain his or her …
- The Flood of Views… We need to focus on the views that will get us across: such as the view that skillful actions need to be developed, that unskillful actions need to be abandoned. Suffering and stress should be comprehended, their cause should be abandoned, their cessation should be realized, and the path to their cessation should be developed. Those are the views that get us across. As …
- A Clear Sense of Priorities… It’s for people who want to stop and evaluate their lives, to see what really is important and what’s not—and to focus more and more of their time on the areas that really are important, that really deserve top priority. When you begin to ask those questions, you find that the practice starts making deeper inroads in the mind and really …
- Breathaholic… But to get the mind settled down, you focus your attention completely on the breath to begin with. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about meditation if you want to do it well.” You really have to be addicted to it; you want to cling to it for a while. They say that alcoholics, when they walk into a …
- A Good Example for the World… We can either make that a source of suffering or we can decide that we have to accept that fact and then focus on what we can accomplish. After all, the Buddha couldn’t teach everybody. There were lots of people who would listen to him and didn’t agree and went off their own way. But he did something really remarkable. Instead of …
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