Search results for: "Attention"
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- Approaching the four noble truths… The other two qualities that you’re supposed to bring as you listen to the Dhamma are appropriate attention and singleness of mind. Appropriate attention is when you ask the right questions: How does this teaching relate to how I’m suffering? How I can put an end to suffering? And you’re really focused. The term for singleness of mind—cittass’ ekaggata—is …
- Around in Circles… Most of the time, you don’t see anything because you’re not paying careful attention. But that’s the whole point. You’re trying to develop your powers of attention, your powers of awareness. Instead of simply trying to stuff in a lot of information, which is the way we tend to approach education, we’re trying to get familiar with this territory …
- Chew Your Food Well… The more attention you pay to the breath, the more you can feed off it, the more solid your foundation is, then the more trustworthy your raft. So think back on any skill you’ve ever developed in the past and apply the attitudes that worked there to this skill, here. Pay careful attention to what you’re doing. Try to notice even the …
- Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal… You want your attention to be gathered around one thing when you’re listening to a Dhamma talk; the kind of concentration where you can focus on the talk and apply appropriate attention. In other words, you can ask yourself, “What does this talk teach me about my own suffering and the way I can handle it, deal with it?” That’s appropriate attention …
- Emptiness… If you don’t give your full attention here, bits and pieces of your attention are going to slip out and start picking up the load you laid down again. So you want to be as absolutely attentive to the present moment as possible. This is why there’s so much emphasis in the training on doing everything you do mindfully—you want it …
- Respect for Concentration… Your attention is with the stillness. You give it space. You pay attention to it. You’re careful about it. There’s the word citta in Pali. One meaning is “mind” but another meaning is “intent.” You’re really intent on these things. Focus your attention on the still moments. Give them your full attention. Give them space to grow so you don’t …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… Name and form are crucial here, particularly name, for it includes feelings, perceptions, intentions, attention, and the contact among these things in the mind. This is why the Buddha focuses the practice of the path right here, at the processes of name. You’ve got to change your intention. You’ve got to change the way you understand things, which things you pay attention …
- Single-minded… You notice that if you’re not paying careful attention to it, then as soon as your attention slips off someplace else, especially outside to other things, your spot will get squeezed off. This is an old habit of ours. We want to pay careful attention outside, so we feel instinctively that we’ve got to squeeze off all the input from inside the …
- Full Attention… You can give it your full attention. There are no devices beeping at you, no screens to pull your attention away. This means you can really have the chance right now to get to know the body as it feels from within: just the body in and of itself, the breath in and of itself, on its own terms. Stay with it and ask …
- Time Well Spent… He said that all good things that the mind can do come back to this ability to just keep the mind coming back, coming back, coming back to what it wants to focus attention on. So try to have a continuous attention, try to have a continuous practice, developing your attention. Mindfulness is an essential to that in the sense of keeping something in …
- 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 …
- A Multilingual Mind… This set of distinctions tends to point our attention away from what we’re directly experiencing. The things we experience: 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 …
- Refreshing… Usually, when we focus our attention on something, we not only focus attention, but we also seem to screw up tension right around our eyes. That’s not necessary. When a camera focuses, though, there’s no tension in the camera. There’s no weight to the light. It just gets focused. Try to have the sense of just-rightness in your focus here …
- One Point, Two Points, Many Points… As for the other leaves in the forest, you can pay attention to them after you’ve got this specific disease cured. So everything you need to know is right here. It’s simply a matter of paying attention. See which perceptions work, which perceptions don’t work, which ways of paying attention work, and which ones don’t, which intentions work, and which …
- An Inner Revolution… Some of these things include feelings and perceptions; what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation—the way you frame an issue in your mind and think about it; attention—the things you pay attention to and what framework you put around them; your intentions—what you want out of all this. All these factors are at work. So we need to learn how …
- The Four Bases of Success… This requires that you be very attentive to what you’re doing. If you simply follow the steps that you’ve read in a book without applying this quality of attentiveness, you never develop your own discernment. Simply going through the motions doesn’t do it. You have to watch. You have to make the practice your practice through your quality of attention, intentness …
- Wise Endurance… But prior to that, you have the factor of fabrication, but also name-and-form—particularly intentions and “attentions,” acts of attention. Again, what are the intentions you have with regard to this situation you find so difficult? Can you change your intentions? If you’re dealing with pain in the body and your intention is to make the pain go away and yet …
- Joyous Discernment… On the internal level, there’s appropriate attention, learning to ask the right questions: framing your mindfulness in such a way that you don’t miss what’s going on, that you really can be alert. On the external level, there’s the voice of another person, someone who calls attention to the fact that you’re not paying appropriate attention. This can be …
- What You Bring to the Meditation… You really pay careful attention to what you’re doing and what’s going on. You’re not just going through the motions. Try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breath feels, as sensitive as possible to how the mind is comfortable or uncomfortable with the breath, whether it feels well-settled or doesn’t feel well-settled. You have to …
- Standing Outside Your Thoughts… The image for the third method, simply not paying attention to the distracting though, is of a person who sees something he doesn’t want to see and so just turns his eyes away. In this particular case, you’re not trying to exert any power over the thoughts. You let them be, but you don’t have to pay them any attention. As …
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