Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Taking Responsibility
     … How can I get the mind to be more still? How can the mind be focused? How can it be settled down? These are useful questions to ask for the purpose of gaining tranquility. For the purpose of insight the questions are: How should fabrications be regarded? How should they be analyzed? You get some answers but then again you have to take those … 
  3. Skills for Living & Dying
     … This is one of the big skills you have to develop as you’re focusing on the breath. All too often we define our sense of the body by the pains that tell us, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” We even get to the point where we use the pains to breathe, which is a huge mistake. The meditation helps … 
  4. Active Truth
     … Right Concentration, putting the mind in a state of ease, even rapture, focused on one thing. This gives the mind a sense of power, a sense of safe haven, a safe place to go. When you have this sense of safe haven, you can begin to probe into things that you’d normally be afraid of. To make another comparison, it’s like fighting … 
  5. To Delight in the Path
     … When the Buddha describes the stages of focusing on the mind as you meditate, the first thing you have to do—once you learn how to observe your mind—is to try to gladden it. And you don’t wait until you’ve been meditating to gladden it. Try to gladden it first by the way you live your daily life—by being generous … 
  6. Mindfulness Defined
     … That involves the desire to do it, persistence, keeping at it, being really intent, focused on what you’re doing, and using your ingenuity: using all of your powers of intelligence. This doesn’t mean book intelligence. It means your ability to notice what you’re doing, to read the results of what you’ve done, and to figure out ways of doing things … 
  7. Train Hopping
     … Your eyes are focused on one spot in the picture, but you can see the whole picture. Try to see the whole picture the body; inhabit the whole body. One of the advantages of whole-body awareness is that it makes you too big to hop on any trains. Trains go right through. As long as your awareness is enlarged like this, you can … 
  8. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … One of the Buddha’s basic definitions of wisdom is knowing which tasks are really your business and which ones aren’t, and then focusing on the ones that are your business and avoiding the ones that aren’t. It sounds simple and basic, and it is. But if you really carry through with it, the implications can take you far. What are your … 
  9. Sensitive to the Breath
     … He said, “You’re focused on the earth element; focus instead on space.” That solved the problem right there. So sometimes our problems are due to things we don’t really know we’re doing. I was holding the perception of earth someplace in my head, and that was getting imposed on the body. And thinking of the body as really solid, it seemed … 
  10. Guardian Meditations
     … So, if you find that sitting down and focusing on the breath just doesn’t capture your imagination, doesn’t capture your mind, try some of these themes until you get the mind into the state where it really is willing to settle down and learn about itself in the present moment. That’s how these themes guard you and offer protection.
  11. Restraint
     … The post, the Buddha said, is mindfulness immersed in the body, which means that when you’re meditating, focusing on the breath, you’re not in a different place from where you should be for the rest of the day. This is where you should stay as you get up and leave the meditation and go back to your resting place. Continue meditating as … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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