Search results for: "Focusing"
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- The Kamma of Concentration… The editor of the magazine said he was surprised that I’d focused on kamma as the missing factor. He was expecting something more along the lines of emptiness, say, or the bodhisattva vow that you shouldn’t be looking for happiness anyhow. But I was surprised that he was surprised, because from the very beginning, the teaching was all about happiness, and it …
- Emotion… When there’s lust, exactly what are you looking at? What are you focusing on? What are you talking about and what are you saying? What narratives are you concocting that make the object of your lust appealing? You can start with your own body. There are times when you hate your body; there are times when you love your body. Okay, notice what …
- Working at Home… The four noble truths are a problem-solving approach, focused on the problem of stress and suffering as a whole, and offering a solution to the problem. As you first start applying this approach to the obvious issues in your life, you learn to develop maturity around the application of this teaching. The work then gets more and more subtle, to the point where …
- Breath, Tranquility, & Insight… But what you really find as you try to focus on the breath is that you’re working on many of the processes at the same time, simply that you’re going to be focusing on different aspects. When you’re with the breath, feelings and mind-states are right there. When you shift your attention to feelings, it’s very much connected with …
- The Dhamma Eye… You’re focused on the breath so you can anchor the mind in the present moment, because if you want to understand your own mind, you have to watch it in the present moment. If you try to watch it in the past or in the future, what are you going to watch? You watch your memories, you watch your anticipations, and you don …
- Fear of Concentration… It’s simply that, by focusing on the breath, things get more and more calm, more and more still. You’ve got to spread your awareness to fill the whole body. Otherwise, you’re going into what they call “delusion concentration,” where you just zone out. Here it’s helpful to have the perception in mind that there’s breath energy filling the body …
- A Warrior’s Strengths… If anything, “I’m a meditator, I’m the person focusing on the breath,” but these other thoughts are something else. Learn not to identify with them. When they’re too strong to deal with, you just let them go, let them go, let them go. No matter how enticing they may be seem, how real or important they may seem, you have to …
- The Buddha’s Eight Principles… You don’t have to go squirming and wiggling and trying to get more, because the more time you spend on trying to fix up the world around you to be comfortable, the less you’re focusing on your mind. Now, it’s important to realize that contentment doesn’t spread to everything. Some people think that contentment means that whatever happens in your …
- Justice vs. Skillfulness… Instead of running around trying to right all the sufferings caused by the injustices of the world or the structure of society, he focused on one type of suffering: the suffering we each cause ourselves, through our own craving, through our own clinging, through our own ignorance. When we put an end to that suffering, we don’t suffer from anything outside at all …
- Becoming… And the reason the Buddha focuses on these and not on other issues is because the nature of action is important for understanding why we suffer and how we can stop suffering. There’s the kamma that leads to suffering; there’s the kamma that leads to its end. So we’re here trying to understand what action is all about, what action does …
- How to Be Alone… What kind of mood would take me further?” There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about a meditator who finds, as he’s focusing on the breath, that there’s a fever in his mind. So he needs to change his topic for the time being, to find something more inspiring, more uplifting. That could include reflecting on the Buddha, the Dhamma, the …
- Practicing for Dispassion… It’s the acts of discernment focused on the drawbacks that help give rise to dispassion for all the things that would pull you back, pull you back. So we practice virtue, concentration, and discernment, for the sake of dispassion. That’s when we’re using them rightly. We don’t practice virtues to think that we’re going to be better than other …
- Pride in Your Craft… This is why the breath-meditation method of Ajaan Lee taught focuses on breathing in a comfortable way. At the same time, you learn from what you’re doing. You can observe your breath and you can learn from uncomfortable breathing. Fortunately, there’s no moral stigma attached to the fact you’ve been breathing in an uncomfortable way. It’s simply a practical …
- A Committed Relationship… And as you’re focusing on the breath, learning how to meditate, you have to make some other sacrifices in life as well. It’s the same as when you’re having a relationship with another person. You’ve got to give up some aspects of your relationships with other people. If you really want to get to know the breath, you have to …
- How to Use the Teaching on Kamma… This is why we’re focusing on the breath in the present moment. We want to catch the mind in the present moment because that’s the source of all our karma. People in the time of the Buddha had lots of different teachings about karma. One of the prevalent ones was that the most important karma was what your body was doing, and …
- Faith in the Practice… As the mind begins to settle down, you really do find a sense of pleasure that comes from simply sitting here still, focused on a very comfortable sensation in the body and learning how to maintain it without squeezing it and cutting it off, or just blissing out: as Ajaan Fuang used to say, “just letting your hands and feet go limp” and just …
- Maintaining Goodwill… But to get the best use out of the meditation, you have to be good at focusing the mind, and then maintaining that concentration. Because in the maintaining comes the steadiness that you’re going to need in order to see things. When something moves in the mind, you don’t have to move along with it. When you can learn that skill, you …
- Intelligent about Change… The focus strengthens the breath, and then as the breath gets more consistently comfortable, you find that it gets easier to stay focused. The two qualities help each other along—strength of focus and strength of body—but the preliminary strength comes from your concentration. So remember that strength of mind is what matters most, much more than the strength of the body. Because …
- Selves with Skills… To begin with, you’ve got the breath that you’re focusing on. Where in the body are you feeling it right now? Focus your attention there. Try to keep it there. That’s going to require that you talk to yourself about it. In other words, if you notice that the mind is wandering off, you remind yourself to come right back. Then …
- Read the Breath… So we’re sitting here focusing on the breath not simply because the breath can become a comfortable place to stay—although it is a good place to hang out, with a sense of ease in the present moment. The Buddha said that is one of the rewards of concentration, but you can’t just sit there and eat up the rewards. Ajaan Lee …
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