Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 90
  2. A Culture of Restraint
     … You’re trying to focus on one thing, and you can stay there because you’re used to exercising restraint in a healthy way: knowing how much you can rein the mind in, when you have to give it a little extra leash, so it doesn’t feel too confined, too cooped up, but at the same time knowing how much is too much … 
  3. One Thing Only
     … suffering and the end of suffering.” The fake part is the “one thing and one thing only.” He did say, “All I teach is suffering and the end of suffering,” but people tend to focus on the “one thing only.” I’ve read some teachers interpret this, saying that there’s a subtle teaching here: that suffering and the end of suffering are the … 
  4. The Middle Way
     … So there comes a point in the meditation where you simply have to put the instructions aside and just focus on what feels really good right now as you breathe in, what feels really good as you breathe out. Expand your imagination as to different ways you can experience the breath in the body. Explore that right here right now. That kind of pleasure … 
  5. The Heightened Mind
     … You can focus most clearly on it with your eyes closed—or if you meditate with your eyes open, it doesn’t really matter, but the important thing is that you remember that this is the big problem. And part of the suffering comes from the fact that we squeeze ourselves into little becomings. It’s like trying to put an elephant into an … 
  6. Resilience Plus
     … It’s all too easy to focus on the misbehavior of others, and then to use that as an excuse for our own misbehavior, which simply adds more fuel to the fire, more weight to the oppression, more stress to the stress test. Here’s where it’s good to think about the Buddha’s instructions on how to respond to what he calls … 
  7. Truths Noble in the Heart
     … You can focus directly on the mind. But simply time, or time put in, doesn’t guarantee anything. Even if you put in 10,000 hours, it’s not a guarantee that you’re going to come out really good at the practice. It requires that you observe and that you pay really close attention to this issue: Where is the stress? What are … 
  8. Sweat the Small Stuff
     … This is why the Buddha—when he was about to teach his son, Rahula, how to meditate, even before he taught him the steps to breath meditation—told him to focus on the inconstancy of things so as to undercut the conceit, “I am.” In other words, as you look at your own mind, you begin to realize that there are good intentions mixed … 
  9. From Compunction to Release
     … When you find that you can breathe in ways and focus your breath in ways that do give rise to a sense of well-being, you have a new standard for pleasure. As the Buddha said, most people see no other alternative to pain besides sensual pleasure. So in spite of the drawbacks of sensual pleasures, they keep going back. Whereas when you do … 
  10. The Community of the Wise
     … Those are going to affect the way you practice, what you focus on, what you ignore. So it’s important to reflect on your values. See what your mind is really telling you. You may hear things in Dhamma talks that sound good, but when you’re actually sitting on your own, sometimes the Dhamma talk isn’t there at all. Other values you … 
  11. A Good-Natured Attitude
     … So you learn how to develop those inner resources, develop a sense of how you can feel at ease with yourself—by the way you breathe, by the way you focus in the body, by the way you think about your meditation topics. And notice what you can do without in your surroundings. When you realize there’s a lot you can do without … 
  12. To Sustain Your Practice
     … You can hear the instructions and focus on the breath—and anybody can focus on the breath. What makes the difference is the maintaining. How do you stick with it? This question applies not only to concentration practice, but also to the practice as a whole. We live in an environment that’s not all that friendly toward Dhamma practice. It’s almost as … 
  13. Truth with Boundaries
     … re convinced that it really has to be true, ask yourself, “Have you found the fifth noble truth?” The obvious answer is No. In that case, you can’t really believe it 100%. You’ve got to find out where that other percentage is, the percentage where it’s not true or not beneficial. Focus your attention there, and that helps get you out.
  14. In Touch with Your Fabrications
     … You focus on the breath and you talk to yourself about the breath. That’s two fabrications right there. The Buddha gives you some ideas on how to fabricate, how to talk to yourself, how to breathe. Breathe, he says, in a way that’s conducive to pleasure. Breathe in a way that’s conducive to rapture, try to be aware of the whole … 
  15. Ideals
     … Then you focus your attention there. You’re motivated by considerations like the simile that the Buddha gives of the spears. As he said, if you could make a deal: They would spear you three hundred times a day—one hundred times in the morning, one hundred times at noon, one hundred times in the evening—every day for a hundred years, but you … 
  16. How the Tree Leans
     … But what you choose to focus on, what you choose to feed on, what you choose to encourage: That’s your present karma. All too often, a thought comes into the mind and we treat it like a little package—a potential present. What’s in here? We open it up and then we fall into the box. You have to stay outside the … 
  17. Control
     … One of the very basic lessons Ajaan Lee gives is that when you’re sitting down to meditate and there’s pain in some part of the body, you don’t focus on the pain. There will be parts of the mind where the alarm bells are going off, the red lights are flashing, alerting you to the pain, but you have to ignore … 
  18. An End to the Stories
     … When you realize that, you have to develop equanimity so that you can focus on what the real issues are: the ways in which you keep on churning up more issues inside. As the Buddha said, the craving that makes for becoming is a big issue. You make something from that becoming and then you become a being with needs to feed. You live … 
  19. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … The skills are primarily in the three kinds of fabrication—bodily, the way you breathe; verbal, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental, the perceptions and the feelings you focus on. They’re all important. For instance, with the breath: When a strong emotion comes on, you can’t just talk yourself out of the emotion. You have to realize that the … 
  20. A Post-goodness World?
     … All the more reason to focus on basing our practice on the practice of merit, and seeing acts of merit as a necessary part of the training of the mind.
  21. Sensitive in Seven Ways
     … How much desire should you have, and where should you focus it? If you don’t have enough desire, you sit here and daydream. If you have so much desire that you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, that becomes a problem, too. You have to learn how to modulate that, and again, how do you know? Well, with practice. What … 
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