Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 94
  2. Feeling & Intention
     … You can practice with this in your concentration. You learn how to perceive the breath, to picture it to yourself, in different ways. This is something that’s very intimate. Just the way you picture the breathing to yourself can have a huge impact on how you actually feel the breath. And this will have an impact on the mind. If you can put … 
  3. Goodness
     … Let go of the hindrances, develop the factors for awakening, and you gain the strength of concentration. This is really what provides food for the mind, because it gives you a source of pleasure, a source of well-being, an inner stability that pushes against a lot of the limits you had on your mind before. And then there’s the strength of discernment … 
  4. Exploring Possibilities
     … So when a particular state of mindful alertness or concentration arises in the mind, it’s important that you try to maintain it in all sorts of different situations, for this helps you gain just that sort of insight: realizing that the habits you’ve found useful in one area of your life can be used in other areas as well. After all, you … 
  5. Harmony
     … That sense of joy then is more and more conducive to getting the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being, to get into good strong concentration—the kind of concentration where you can stay there in a stable way. We have to remember that harmony doesn’t just happen. Think about an orchestra practicing: They have to work, work, work to … 
  6. Change
     … The path requires not only discernment but also virtue and concentration, because any happiness that’s not based on these qualities is sure to fall apart. Even some of the happiness that comes with the path is going to fall apart if you let yourself just stop where you are and say, “Well, this is good enough for me.” You get a little bit … 
  7. Emptiness
     … For the time being, as you’re practicing concentration, just carry the present moment. Be responsible for the present moment, and look to see what you’ve really got going on right here—because when you focus too much on the past and the future, you miss the present. That’s the other side of the emptiness mode: missing out on things that are … 
  8. Craving & Desire on the Path
     … Well, that’s the five aggregates right there—creating right concentration. Then there are four forms of clinging around the aggregates. One of them you don’t use on the path, which is clinging to sensuality. But then there’s clinging to habits and practices, clinging to views, clinging to doctrines of the self. And those you do use. To begin with, you hold … 
  9. A Sense of Yourself
     … But at the beginning, you use it to disidentify with things that are not useful to identify with as you’re trying to settle down in concentration. And we have a lot of them, even before we let go of everything. There are a lot of things we should let go strategically. There are other things you want to hold on to strategically. After … 
  10. Learning from the Precepts
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation by developing mindfulness and concentration. That practice builds on the precepts but also turns around and helps us to be even stricter with ourselves in holding to the precepts. After all, the Dhamma eye has as one of its rewards the fact that your precepts now become pleasing to the noble ones. In other … 
  11. Your Higher Power
     … When the Buddha taught meditation, he didn’t teach just a concentration technique. He also taught right view, which involves understanding how your actions shape what you are: the identity you take on and the world that you assume, based on your identity. And you understand that these things come from your own desires. So he has you cultivate new, more skillful desires, and … 
  12. Safety All Around
     … Then there’s training in the heightened mind, which basically is training in concentration. You’re finding an escape from pain other than in sensuality. The problem with sensuality is that it sets you up for all kinds of dangers. Wherever you find your sensual pleasure, there’ll be other people who may want to find sensual pleasure in the same place, with the … 
  13. To Comprehend Pain
     … And here, we’re treating the pain with the breath, with the concentrated mind. To get the mind concentrated, you first have to focus on an area of the body that’s not in pain. That gives you a home base. Then you can work with the breath energy in that part of the body, to make it even more pleasant. It’s one … 
  14. Feeding on Ardency
     … right resolve, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. All these are based on intention. Basically the Buddha’s giving us something good to intend, something good to strive for. One of the big ironies about Buddhism, especially its history in Europe, is that very early on it was branded as passive nihilism, a belief there’s nothing worth exerting any effort for, so … 
  15. The Inner Monitor
     … He went into such deep concentration that he lost track of his body. When he finally came out of concentration, it was a long time afterward. He could tell because the moon had moved quite a way in the sky. But tiger was gone. The tiger felt no sense of threat from him as he was standing there watching his own mind. So he … 
  16. In the Context of the Path
     … You see that the path is made out of aggregates? Well, you’re supposed to let go of aggregates, right? That’s what discernment is supposed to do, right? Even before you’ve got the mind in concentration, you try to develop you’ve heard is discernment, and that can stop you from developing what you need to develop. Think of the image of … 
  17. Attention to Your Potentials
     … The remaining factors have to do with getting the mind into good concentration: rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. These are things you develop. You look for the potentials there in the mind for it to settle down—because the mind does have these potentials. The present moment as it comes is not just a finished product. It’s a work in progress. And there are … 
  18. Right Fear
     … It’s only when the practice makes demands in terms of virtue, the development of concentration, the development of discernment: That’s when you take risks. If you find yourself unwilling to take those risks, you have to ask yourself, “Where’s the attachment?” In this way, you get a really good take on where your defilements lie, where your attachments lie—issues you … 
  19. The Management of Suffering
     … When the Buddha described his path to the end of suffering, concentration lies at the heart. You may have noticed in the chant that describes the different factors of the path, the section on right concentration is the longest, because it’s the most complex and the hardest to master. But it’s also the most important, after right view. So try to have … 
  20. Stay Principled
    When we practice concentration or mindfulness, we tend spend a lot of time focusing on the technique: where to focus the mind, how to stay with the point of your focus or the theme of the meditation; how to work with it so that the mind can begin to settle down and stay settled down. There are even skills techniques how to leave meditation … 
  21. Feelings of Pain
    One of the definitions of concentration is a mind firmly established. We firmly establish it in the object of our meditation: in the breath, or in a meditation word, like Buddho. We try to make sure that it doesn’t fall down. If it falls down, we pick it back up; establish it again. It falls down again, pick it up; establish it again … 
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