Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Dhamma Medicine
     … The problem too often with our effort is that we’re focused on the results. We think, “I want this, I want this, I want this,” but we don’t stop to think about what’s going to be needed in order to get what we want. We put all our energy in trying to clone what we want without looking after the real … 
  3. As Days & Nights Fly Past
     … the ability to stay focused, the ability to detect unskillful currents in the mind and then say No, the ability to maintain your right view, that your actions really are important.” And you remind yourself: Even though you may have some bad karma from the past, it doesn’t have to take over. Some people, at the moment of death, see bad places opening … 
  4. The Dhamma Wheel
     … So right now, we’re developing concentration, focusing on the breath. That’s working on the duty with regard to the fourth noble truth. Everything in the path can be found in the four noble truths and their duties. Simply knowing about the four noble truths—even though we may know them thoroughly and say, yes, it’s true what the Buddha said—is … 
  5. Patience & Tenacity
     … At first you have to be focused on doing this in spite of all the other noise and all the other stuff that’s going on, but as you are really single-minded in pursuing this, things really do begin to quiet down. If there’s pain in the body, you have a place to focus that’s not in pain. As for the … 
  6. Self-Reliance
     … This is one of the reasons why we meditate, focusing on the breath. That gives you a place to step back. When you’re with the breath, you’re outside of all the words flying around in your head. If you can establish this as a good solid basis, you’re less likely to get sucked in by the more seductive ideas. So focus … 
  7. The Freedom to Give
     … It focused on how much you can understand about a society by the way people give gifts, the gestures with which they give gifts, the expectations that surround gift-giving. It tells you a lot about how that society is organized. The same idea applies with the principles of the Buddha’s teachings. He created a culture of gifts so that the practice of … 
  8. Perception
     … Instead of focusing on the mist, you can focus on the space between those little bits of sensation, and all of a sudden you’re with “space.” If you can hold onto that perception of space long enough, it’s going to change your experience of the present moment, your sense of what it’s like to have a physical body here. The potential … 
  9. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … When you’re focusing on the breath, the very first question is: Is the breath comfortable or not? That’s asking you to see: When does the comfort come, and when does it go? In what ways, what kind of desire to make it comfortable actually is going to make it less comfortable? In what way do you focus the desire to make it … 
  10. The Stakes Are High
     … This is why we meditate focused on the present moment, so that we can see the mind in action, see what it’s doing, and learn to do it more skillfully. When you stay here with the breath, it’s a kind of karma. If you develop the right attitude as you’re working with the breath—the patience to sit with things for … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Strength for Your Goodness
     … That’s why this practice, even though you’re focusing on your own mind, is not a selfish practice. The strengths you develop here, you can carry into the world, and they provide the foundation so to make sure that your goodness survives the world. Not only survives, but thrives.
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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