Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 92
  2. To Disturb Your Complacency
     … Which is why when the Buddha talks about things in space and time, he tends to focus on the negative—because there’s something better. He’s not being negative just to show how negative he can be. He’s negative with a purpose—for you to want to find a happiness that’s better than this, a happiness that’s not subject to … 
  3. Protection Through the Practice
     … The focus is not just on the dangers. It’s also on the potential for your actions to make a difference, to offer you protection. If there are nothing but dangers and you couldn’t do anything about them, then heedfulness wouldn’t make any difference. It’s because you can make a difference by developing good qualities, skillful qualities, solid qualities, inside, that … 
  4. Taking the Long View
     … So, paradoxically, by taking the long view, the focus gets focused right back here, right now. But then again, that’s how the Buddha gained his awakening. He took the very long view. He saw the cycles of rebirth that beings can go through. Then his immediate reaction was to turn around and look at the mind right here in the present moment, realizing … 
  5. After the Fire
     … It’s only when you find the mind is really lopsided in one direction that you really have to focus your attention on either the more active side or the more passive side. But once things have been brought more into balance, you want to have all seven of the factors of awakening present. Sometimes you see them presented in such a way that … 
  6. On Your Own Two Feet
     … So it’s not a Catch-22, it’s simply that these two faculties of the mind—the ability to watch things and observe and come to reliable conclusions; and your inventiveness in trying out different ways to experiment with the breath and the way you focus on the breath—go hand-in-hand. They develop together. After all, a lot of things are … 
  7. A Practice, Personal & Social
    When you focus the mind on the breath, you’re focusing on an area that nobody else can know: how you experience the breath from within, how you experience the movements of your own mind from within. People could look at you from the outside and see the rhythm of your breathing and they might notice expressions flitting across your face, but how you … 
  8. Grace & Dignity
     … When we think about heedfulness, we tend to focus on the dangers around us, dangers inside us, because they’re there. We have greed, aversion, and delusion, and there are parts of our minds that really like greed, aversion, and delusion. That’s a danger. As the Buddha once said, the mind is capable of almost anything. Think of all the animals in the … 
  9. Good Eating
     … Your main focus should be on the practices themselves, and the sense of well-being that comes from them. The sense of “I am” that develops around these: Eventually you’re going to have to let that go. In the meantime, though, you’ll find there are skillful and unskillful identities that you can develop around this kind of meditation-eating too. The skillful … 
  10. All Your Old Baggage
     … You could focus on the breath in a particular way, you can breathe in all kinds of different ways. You can do long breathing or short breathing; warm, lukewarm, cool, cold breathing; fast or slow; deep or shallow; broad or narrow. And there are all kinds of ways you can conceive of how the breath energy’s coming in and out of the body … 
  11. Wandering On, Shooting Arrows
     … Which is why our focus has to be continually inside, inside. We look around at the world, and the best lesson to gain as you look around at the world is to see that there’s so much suffering, there are so many people squabbling over the best way the world should be run—and the squabbling never ends. I know a monk in … 
  12. Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity
     … As for your dealings with other people, you focus on the people you can help, saving equanimity for cases where you can’t. So all the brahmaviharas, all the sublime abidings, require understanding so that they really lead to the happiness we want. And the happiness we want is one that spreads itself around. It’s not like the happiness of the world—based … 
  13. The Wall of Discernment
     … When you focus on the space, you can get into formless states, which are even more refined than the states that depend on the breath. You keep following this process until you get as far as you can in terms of concentration. It’s because you’re using your discernment as you get the mind focused that the mind can settle down like this … 
  14. Make a Difference
     … So you focus on three things: renunciation, non-ill will, and harmlessness. Renunciation here means putting aside all your thoughts about sensuality, your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures: that you’d like them this way, that way, or maybe no, you’d like them some other way. You can think for hours in these ways, but when you realize it’s going to … 
  15. Producing Experience
     … You can develop skill in the way you focus on the breath, the way you adjust the breath, the way you develop sensitivity to what’s going on in the body. These are all things you do as a producer of experiences, and you can learn to do them more and more skillfully to create a sense of wellbeing in the present moment. Even … 
  16. Cutting Edge Perceptions
    When you focus on the breath, it’s important to take it one breath at a time. If the prospect of sitting here for a whole hour focusing on the breath weighs you down, remember it’s only one breath at a time. This breath right here. This breath coming in; this breath going out. This helps keep you focused and doesn’t weigh … 
  17. A Heart Bigger Than the World
     … When you want to nourish your heart so that it’s easier to develop thoughts of goodwill, you focus on their good side. That doesn’t mean that you pretend the bad side isn’t there. It’s just that that’s not where you should go for your food. All too often, the mind will nourish itself on other people’s bad qualities … 
  18. Contentment in the Practice
     … This is why it’s so important that before you start working with the breath here or there, adjusting it here or there, you find at least some spot where it’s comfortable and focus on that. To make another comparison, it’s like starting a fire on a windy day. You have your tiny little flame, so you cup it in your hands … 
  19. Skillful Fear
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, one of the reasons why it’s so important that we have a sense of well-being that comes as we focus inside on the breath. It takes strength to go against our immediate knee-jerk reactions and to think about the long term. So to sustain yourself as you’re waiting for the … 
  20. Self-starting
     … We can’t do much about the past intentions, but we can focus on and change the present ones. And we have to realize that they’re important. We can’t just slough them off. If you find yourself getting lazy or discouraged in the practice, you’ve got to find ways of picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and asking yourself, “Do you … 
  21. At Normalcy
     … But if you learn how to stay with the breath and see that your focus on the breath is the cause of the rapture, the rapture will come when you need it and go when you don’t need it. You’re more in control. You’ve been able to maintain your normalcy—and at the same time, you learn how to observe. The … 
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