Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Count Yourself Lucky
     … So take your desire for immediate happiness and focus it right here. We talk about the path having a goal, but it doesn’t save all of its good things for the end. As the Buddha said, the path is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. That means that—given your physical condition, given the state of your … 
  3. Ingenuity
     … Where are the cool sensations in the body? Focus there. Give all your attention to that cool sensation, and let everything else go. Then think of the coolness spreading. When you’re feeling dizzy and faint, focus on the solidity of the body. Where do you feel solid sensations? The heavy sensations? Focus there. This is useful not only when you’re feeling dizzy … 
  4. When This Is, That Is
     … Instead of focusing on the breath, you focus on your desire. That’s not in the meditation instructions. The second reason is that when the desired results don’t come, you start getting frustrated, disappointed, impatient. But if you focus your desire on the causes, there’s no problem. Make up your mind to stay here with every breath. If you slip off, just … 
  5. Exploring What You’ve Got
     … Well, do you have any warm sensations in the body? Where are they right now? Focus on them and think of the warmth spreading from those sensations. Don’t focus on the cool sensations. You’ll find that that changes your experience of the present moment. If you’re feeling heavy and listless, think of the energy that’s flowing through the body. There … 
  6. Staying True
     … You can focus right there. And be careful as you focus to allow that spot to feel open and relaxed. All too often when you focus, everything gets tensed up, everything gets tightened around the spot where you’re trying to maintain your focus. But that makes it unpleasant, makes it easy for the mind to slip away because it doesn’t like being … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. Intro to Breath Meditation
     … You can focus on the breath at any one point in the body where it’s easy to stay focused. It can be the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, or any place where you can easily sense the process of breathing, where you can keep your focus comfortable and that spot of the body comfortable as you breathe in, breathe … 
  9. A Skillful Attitude
     … In the beginning, you don’t have to focus on them. Try to focus on the comfortable sensations in the body instead. Think of the pain as somebody shooting at something else, and you don’t have to get into the line of fire. You can stand off to the side. In other words, as long as you don’t think of the pain … 
  10. Working with Nature
     … You can trust things best if you focus on the causes. Those are things you can know about. If your mind is with the breath, you know. If it’s not with the breath, you know. You bring it back. And you bring it back again. And bring it back again. You find over time that it gets more and more inclined to come … 
  11. Self-Healing
     … We focus on these activities because, as the Buddha said, this is how we put together our experience in general. Experiences don’t come ready-made. There are potentials that come in through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, but on their own they don’t make sense—just sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas. If we want to function in … 
  12. Mental Balance
     … All the Buddha’s teachings are meant to focus your attention right here on what you’re doing right now—both what you’re doing and the results that are coming from what you are doing. The teachings on emptiness, not-self, all of what seem to be more abstract teachings, are ultimately meant to focus your attention back here. Where’s the stress … 
  13. The Food of Feelings
    They’ve said that when people remember their previous lifetimes, they tend to focus on two things: the food they ate, and their experience of pleasure and pain. And when you think about it, that’s how many of us identify ourselves in our present lifetimes. You don’t have to look back to past lifetimes. What we eat, what we feel: Those, for … 
  14. Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One
     … Then choose any spot in the body that feels easy to focus on, where the mind seems naturally to want to center. Focus there and then from that spot spread your awareness out to fill the whole body, so that you’re aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out, with a sense of ease and well-being. Then try … 
  15. A Unified Committee
     … This is why the breath is such a good topic to focus on. It deals with your sense the body here in the present moment, and makes that the main focus. In other words, you don’t want to be focused on just one spot in the body. You want to be aware of the entire body—as Ajaan Lee says, out to every … 
  16. Ups & Downs
     … So you try to focus right here. Then the questions become, “How much pressure should you put on the focus? How should you conceive the breath? And where in the body are you going to focus?” Those are areas where you have a choice. How much do you want to experiment with the breath and how much do you just want to let it … 
  17. Harmony Inside & Outside
     … As long as there’s going to be craving, focus your craving on the path, on what you can do to observe your precepts, what you can do to get the mind concentrated, what you can do to start analyzing what’s going on in the mind. Focus your desire, focus your craving there. That way, you’ll be able sort out what kind … 
  18. Taming the Elephant
     … This afternoon, we talked about a tightness in the chest, a tightness in the stomach that comes when you focus in on the breath. There are different ways you can deal with that. One is that you can change the focus. Focus someplace else. Or try to focus in a way that doesn’t squeeze things. All too often, we think that “If I … 
  19. Focal Points
     … One of the ways we gain a sense of the three-dimensionality of space around us is in changing the focus of our eyes and seeing what comes into focus, what goes out of focus. Do that for a while and you have a sense of what’s near and what’s far. So when you think about focusing on the breath, you may … 
  20. Terror & Revulsion
     … If the range of your focus is too narrow, it’s very easy, once the breath gets comfortable, to fall asleep or to start just drifting off—or in and out of focus. So make sure that once there’s a sense of ease, you allow it to spread like melted butter spreading over toast, seeping down into the holes in the bread, saturating … 
  21. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … It’s learning how to focus your efforts. Einstein once theorized about why most advances in theories of physics are made by young physicists and not by old ones, and his conclusion was the old physicists see many possibilities and many issues all at once that are interesting and might lead to new insights, so that they can’t follow any one thing, whereas … 
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