Search results for: "Focusing"
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- All Three Functions of Mindfulness… When you’re focusing on the breath, you start out by just discerning when it’s long, when it’s short. Then you consciously try to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, breathe out. From there, you calm bodily fabrication which, the Canon tells us in another place, means getting the mind into the fourth jhana. That doesn’t happen …
- Desires Have Their Reasons… A lot of our desires are focused on a very narrow perception of things— blocking out huge areas of our experience. We take it for granted that there’s going to be a lot of stress and a lot of pain in our search for pleasure, and we learn how to turn a blind eye to it. But the Buddha’s basically saying, “No …
- Protection… Right now, you need to get focused on the breath, or as the Buddha calls it, “the body in and of itself.” In other words, look at the breath on its own terms. You don’t even need to think about who you are or where you are. It’s just breath coming in, breath going out. You want to make it smooth and …
- The Lessons of Good Kamma… In another place where the Buddha introduces kamma, the main emphasis is on generosity and gratitude, focusing on the fact that people do have choices they’re responsible for, and because we have choices we’re responsible for, generosity means something. A lot of people don’t like the idea of responsibility. They’d rather have kamma-free zones in large areas of their …
- Reflect on What You’re Doing… You’re trying to get your judgments more mature, more focused, more useful. Instead of simply saying, “Well, my powers of judgment are harmful,” you realize they may be immature, but you work on them because you’re going to need them. After all, the ultimate judgment in all these things is: “This activity I’m doing, is it worth it?” With virtue, concentration …
- Training Your Selves… As for you, you’re the one focusing, and you’re the one who’s enjoying the sense of ease that comes when you do it right. But you’re also the one who comments on when it’s not going well, why is it not going well? You’ve got to train that commentator, because otherwise the commentator can make life miserable. Sometimes …
- Habits of Perception… This is what focuses you on the real job at hand. You start seeing the fabrication of worlds in the mind, realizing that the world as you perceive it out there is really your own mental construct. You have lots of different mental constructs about the world out there. Sometimes you think about the world in geological terms, sometimes in cosmic, astronomical terms, sometimes …
- Breath Meditation: The First Tetrad… Then, on the night of his awakening, he sat down under the Bodhi tree and focused on his breath as a way of stilling the mind. Again, why he thought of that, we don’t really know. But it’s something to be grateful for, the fact that he was able to find this path, something so simple, something so accessible to all human …
- Fully Here… On the one hand, you’ve got your one point that you’re focused on, but at the same time you also have a larger frame of reference: the body as a whole, from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes. Sometimes you’ll find that you’re more in the one-pointed mode, and other times you’re …
- You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening… Notice that when the Buddha defines right effort, he focuses on the effort to get rid of unskillful mental qualities and to develop skillful ones in their place. In other words, the effort has to do with the mind. It’s not simply a matter of sitting long hours. It’s a matter of being consistently on top of your mind to deal with …
- The Path of Mistakes… It does affect you to be constantly focusing on other people’s bad habits. It’s like that New Yorker cartoon of the two female poodles sitting at a bar with grim, sneering looks on their faces, saying, “They’re all sons of bitches.” When everyone is a son of a bitch, what does that make you? So try to think about the situation …
- Sensitive to Fabrication… Now, when we’re focused on the breath, we’re in touch with all the different kinds of fabrication. There are three in all. There’s bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath itself; verbal fabrication, what the Buddha calls directed thought and evaluation. To put that in simple terms, it’s the mind’s conversation with itself: all the voices of …
- A Well-Thatched Roof… the ability to keep the mind focused on the breath and the right attitudes that allow us to see these affairs of the world for what they are. They’re not really us, not really ours; they’re just part of the world. They’re like money. You may have money in your pocket, but it’s not really yours. It’s printed by …
- Acceptance… How much time should be devoted to fixing up the monastery, and how much time should be devoted to just focusing on the monastery inside you? And what’s the right time for all your various activities? What’s the time to talk? What’s the time now to talk? That you learn by trial and error. Then there’s having a sense of …
- Training the Mind to Train the Mind… Learn how to make that your default reaction, so that whenever something—anything—threatens to come up while you’re focusing on the breath, threatening to entangle you and pull you away, you can cut through the tangles pretty quickly. This doesn’t settle those issues once and for all, but it does enable you to clear some space in the mind where you …
- Mental Stirrings… You start out in that process by actually not paying attention to the thought and by paying attention instead to the breath, focusing on the breath as your object of concentration. The thoughts that come into the mind you leave aside. Just don’t pay them any attention. As soon as you’ve noticed that you’ve paid attention to them, come right back …
- A Rite of Passage… I kept thinking, “Here I am, just focusing on my own breath, being very selfish.” But I began to realize that the voices in my head that I’d come to identify with were voices I’d picked up from different people. This voice was the voice of my mother, that voice was the voice of my father, telling me I shouldn’t be …
- Feeding your Attack Dogs… As you look and listen and think in the course of the day, ask yourself, “Is this really helping in the practice, or am I feeding these attack dogs?” Years back, when Ajaan Suwat was asked about how to bring meditation into the course of your daily life, he focused on the issue of precepts and virtue: Sila is the Pali word. Ordinarily when …
- Life in the Context of the Practice… of our actions, our intentions, which are shaped by our views. Once he saw the pattern, then he could focus in on the present moment to see the same pattern there. Focusing on the larger pattern took a lot of the personal sting out of the particular problem or issue in the present moment. The same applies to you. After thinking about the happiness …
- Even Animals Can Be Trained… Well, choose whichever of those spots that seems easiest to stay focused on. Then think of the energy flowing smoothly out from that spot, so that there’s no obstacle, nothing getting in the way. And try to notice where in the body you’re especially sensitive to the flow of the energy. For some people, it’s right around the heart. For other …
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