Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Page 89
  2. Alone at Death, but Not Lonely
    It’s amazing how rarely the Buddha talks about being in the present moment, given that so much of the meditation is focused here. When he talks about how important it is to be here, it’s always with the reflection that there’s work to be done here and you don’t know how much time you have. So we focus on the … 
  3. The Need for Agency
     … You’re sitting here focusing on the breath. Other thoughts may come into the mind, but for the time being you say, “Nope, not going there.” You do your best to make the breath interesting and to make the skill of meditation interesting—to get some satisfaction, not only out of the comfort of the breath, but also out of the fact that you … 
  4. Ingenuity
     … Ananda for a fire escape, as he felts as if he were in a house on fire. “Please show me the way to get out of the house.” So Ananda described eleven ways of focusing the mind—basically, the first seven of the eight jhanas, and then the four limitless or immeasurable states—and how to use any one of those as a basis … 
  5. The Wisdom of Self-regulation
     … So when you find yourself doing something unskillful, either in the way you’re focusing or in the way your mind is talking to itself, and you get upset about what you said to yourself and then get upset about that and then, it just keeps snowballing: You’ve got to learn how to put a stop to that. Learn how to step back … 
  6. Isolating the Aggregates
     … There’s focused consciousness that spotlights specific sensations and mental activities, and then there’s a background awareness that’s already there throughout the body. When we talk about spreading your awareness, it’s primarily a question of letting your spotlight concentration get in touch with the awareness already filling the body. This background awareness doesn’t have to exert any pressure on anything … 
  7. Trust in Heedfulness
     … In other words, when you see that the way you’re focused on your object is causing stress, learn to focus in a way that’s less stressful, that causes less disturbance to the mind. You can pursue this principle all the way through the various levels of concentration, even to the objectless concentration of awareness, where you’ve let go of the oneness … 
  8. Right View
     … These are the locations that the mind focuses on. And we suffer from this because none of these locations can last; none of these positions can last. Whatever we latch onto as a self, it just keeps melting away. The world around us just keeps melting away. Then there’s craving for non-becoming, the desire to destroy whatever you’ve got, whatever you … 
  9. Bases of Success
     … So these contemplations are meant to give rise to a sense of desire, to motivate us to want to practice, to be willing to give ourselves to the practice, focusing on where we can make a change. This is not one of those experiments where you set up the equipment and then sit back and let the experiment do its own thing. You have … 
  10. Trading Up
     … When things are stripped down like this, you find that the sense of well-being that can be developed as you stay focused can grow really, really intense. Establishing mindfulness, you get into concentration, thinking about the breath, evaluating the breath, making it more comfortable and letting that sense of comfort spread throughout the body. That’s a sense of comfort that doesn’t … 
  11. Limitations
     … Think of Ajahn MahaBoowa, with the different questions he asked about his pains, focused how he perceived them. Does the pain have an intention? Does the pain have a shape? Is it the same thing as the body? Strange questions. But you begin to realize that we have some strange, subconscious ideas about pain, and they’re not going to come out into the … 
  12. Breathing Skillfully
     … This is why our skill starts with focusing on the breath and then looking at how we’re talking to ourselves about the breath. Usually, in the very beginning, your mind will be talking about other things. It drops the breath and goes running after whatever comes past. You’ve got to learn how to drop those other things and come back to the … 
  13. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … So this quality of faith and conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is an important element in keeping you focused on where the important issues are in your life right now, where the important issues in your practice are right now, so that you can take advantage of this opportunity really to find what freedom is like. It’s good to contemplate on these … 
  14. A Heart Wider than the World
     … As Ajaan Lee says, “Before you make yourself large, you have to make yourself really small, focused inside. What’s happening right here with the breath, at the mind? What’s happening in the mind, right at the breath? Looking at the details, because the details will grow into larger things. You’re making your choices. That present karma, where you have the freedom … 
  15. A Meditative Life
     … Look at the parts that aren’t attractive, to balance out the one-sided view that simply focuses on a few attractive details here and there and tends to blot out everything else in order to give rise to lust. After all, the body is not what produces lust. The mind produces lust. The mind starts hankering to feel lust and so it goes … 
  16. When Attacked by Distractions
     … If you spend your time focusing on the mud around it, you’re never going to get the water. In other words, our main perception there should be that you’re willing to slurp the water up from the cow’s footprint because you need the water, even though you have to get down on all fours to slurp it up. You probably wouldn … 
  17. Stepping Out of Yourself
     … When we focus on the breath, that’s what we’re focusing on: the feeling of the process, and not so much the air coming in and out through the nose. As the breath gets very subtle, we reach a point where we can’t feel the air, but there’s still a movement of energy in the body. So focus there and then … 
  18. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … You can take something simple like this—the fact that you’re talking to yourself about the breath, focusing on the breath; you have a perception of the breath, an image of how the breath flows in the body; you’re trying to create a feeling of well-being: Okay, that’s the activity. You can watch yourself doing that activity and you’ll … 
  19. The Pain of Conviction
     … Just the way you breathe, sitting here focusing on your breath, makes a difference in the mind’s sense of well-being. And it’s potentially always there. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a mood that takes a while to get back there, but it’s there. The more quickly you can tap into this sense of well-being, the easier it is … 
  20. In Line with the Dhamma
     … It’s imagination focused on thinking of what you can do with your raw materials. You’ve got the breath. You’ve got the body. In the past, you’ve made a lot of unskillful things out of it. How can you now make something skillful out for it, something that actually leads away from suffering? Let that challenge capture your imagination until the … 
  21. Not-self, Not No Self
     … That makes it easier to stay focused. If the breath is uncomfortable, you’re going to find a lot of other things to do pretty quickly. Think of the breath as the whole body of energy. When you breathe, the whole body’s breathing in, the whole body’s breathing out. You can breathe in a way that’s tight and restricted, or you … 
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