Search results for: "Focus"

  1. Page 93
  2. Insight from Developing Concentration
     … Ajaan Lee recommends that you use, not the perception of air coming in and out of the lungs, but the perception of the energy in the body as your main focus. Think of the breath as going throughout the body, the energy throughout the body. Hold that perception in mind. Note the words in those instructions: attention, intention, feeling, perception. Those are mental actions … 
  3. Feeding While You Work
     … So you focus on the breath and learn to how to enjoy the pleasure at the same time. When things aren’t quite balanced, you bring them back into balance again. This requires a lot of attention, a lot of concerted intention. The best parallels are with manual skills: playing music, creating a piece of carpentry or joinery like a set of drawers. You … 
  4. Awaken to Your Potentials
     … It may depend on how you breathe, where you focus in the body, or what image you have of the breath. After all, perception plays a very important role in concentration. Everything up through the dimension of nothingness, the Buddha calls “perception attainments.” So what perception would be best right now? You’re getting the mind to settle in with a sense of awareness … 
  5. Ask Yourself the Buddha’s Question
     … But if you think in terms of “What am I doing?” then you can focus on the actual causes of your problems. Your sense of “you” is too large and vague to tackle. But an action, a thought, a word, a deed: Those are things you can look at. You can break them down—and you can change them. So follow the Buddha’s … 
  6. Relating to Kamma
     … You focus on the practice. You may not be able to get all the way to nibbana in this lifetime, but your efforts are not wasted. You can pick up in the practice again; you can create the conditions for being able to pick it up again after you die. So there are lots of ways you can learn how to get a better … 
  7. Coping & Beyond Coping
     … We create that place by giving the mind something good to focus on, something nearby—the breath, the way you feel the body from inside. When we talk about the breath, it’s not the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s more the feeling of energy that flows through the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out. It … 
  8. Licking Yourself Clean
     … Your focus isn’t interfering with it. You feel good just sitting here. The amount of pressure you put on the present moment is just right: not too light, not too heavy. That’s something that comes with practice. So, pay careful attention to what you’re doing, because that’s how you learn. That’s how the meditation becomes your own.
  9. Visakha Puja – True Homage
     … suffering and how we can learn how not to cause suffering. Those are the symbols, but we don’t want just the symbols. We want the reality. So let’s meditate. Focus on your breath. Know when the breath is coming in, know when it’s going out. They say that the Buddha, on the night of his awakening, was focusing on his breath … 
  10. Non-Verbal Discernment
     … Get a sense of what kind of breath feels right for settling the mind, where you want it focused, how broad you want your focus to be. Some people will verbalize this more than others, but the important thing is the skill. And remember, it took a Buddha to come up with the vocabulary that we use for our meditation. There have been a … 
  11. The Psychology of Virtue
     … We focus on something we really want, and then we take on an identity as the person who might be able to get that and will enjoy having it; and then there’s the world in which that, whatever it is, is going to be located: That’s becoming. So you’ve got to learn about how to undo these things—not so much … 
  12. Duties
     … It’s simply a question of where you focus your desires. That determines what duties you have to take on. And although the path may seem long, the not-path is longer. The Buddha’s image is of a person driving a cart. As long as you stay on the road, the cart will be okay. When you get off the road, you break … 
  13. Loving Yourself
     … The trick is not to let yourself get depressed or down about your unskillful intentions—whether past or present—but to focus instead on the fact that you do have skillful intentions in here, too. And the more you follow those skillful intentions, the stronger they’re going to get. They may seem artificial sometimes. You might find yourself saying, “That’s not the … 
  14. Endurance & Equanimity
     … You’ve got your point of focus. So try to use some discernment in your restraint. Realize that you don’t want your goodness to depend on the goodness of other people, because their goodness is an extremely undependable support. You want to depend on your determination. Remember we’re here to develop the perfections, and the perfections have to be developed by determination … 
  15. The Language of the Breath
     … The act of evaluation builds on that as you learn how to adjust, to see what’s working, see what’s not working, first as you try to get the mind to stay with its object, and then as you learn how to adjust both your focus and the object. In this case, the object is the breath. The breath is one of those … 
  16. Two Roads to the Grand Canyon
     … How much pressure do you have to put on the concentration to maintain it, to keep your focus steady, to keep mindfulness continuous? And how much effort is actually getting in the way? In many ways, practicing concentration is like relaxing into a yoga pose. When you first get into the pose, you feel a little stiff because of the patterns of tension going … 
  17. Skillful Thinking
     … So you find other topics aside from the breath in the present moment to focus on. If you’re really having trouble focusing on the present, think of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. Those topics help foster conviction in the path and in your own ability to practice the path. After all, the members of the noble Sangha are human beings just … 
  18. How to Read Yourself
     … You can focus your mind in the right way. Both Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Maha Boowa, when they wrote their books on meditation, would talk about using your discernment to get the mind willing to settle down. In fact, in Ajaan Maha Boowa’s case, that was the name of the whole book: Discernment Fosters Concentration, pointing out that some people find it difficult … 
  19. Balancing Effort & Patience
     … So you focus on what you can do. From that point, right view takes on another level: seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, which are not particularly beliefs, but are categories for sorting out your experiences. Which experiences are suffering? Which experiences are the cause of suffering? Usually we have these things all mixed up. Which things you do are the … 
  20. In the Land of Wrong View
    Focus your attention on the breath. Notice, when you breathe in, where do you feel it? You may not be feeling it primarily in the areas where you think you should. But that doesn’t matter. In fact, when you notice that the breath is doing things you don’t expect, that’s when you know that you’re really watching it. Because the … 
  21. Friends with the Dhamma Wheel
     … Usually, we tend to focus on the suffering, say we don’t like it, and try to get rid of it. But we’ve got to comprehend it first. What we get rid of is the craving. And here again, there’s a problem because craving is our friend. As the Buddha said, it’s been our companion since who knows when. We have … 
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