Search results for: "Focusing"
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- Full-Body Breath… You come out of delusion concentration and say, “Where was I? What was I focused on?” Not anything in the body, not anything you could really put your finger on. It’s pleasant. It’s nice. But it’s delusion concentration. To stay firmly planted in the present moment, it’s good to establish full-body awareness. It’s as if you nail your …
- An Auspicious Night… If you keep focused on doing your duty ardently here in the present moment and stopping every now and then to gauge how well you’re doing, you’re following the Buddha’s example. That’s how the Buddha gained his awakening. Nobody taught him the path to awakening. He found it by doing the best things he could imagine doing and then looking …
- Thinking Seriously about Happiness… We’re using the body, focused on the breath, as our object of meditation, trying to feel the body, the entire body, from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes, as we’re grounding the mind. So even though the body does have its limitations, it does have its uses as well. It’s just that you have a …
- Perceiving the Breath… Your best way of dealing with them is to give the mind something really interesting to focus on, something to explore here in the present moment, whatever feels good and gives you an immediate sense of reward for focusing in a particular way and just staying right here. Having this good place to come back to is one of the prime ways of training …
- Beyond Inter-eating… And it focuses your attention on the right place: that regardless of the conditions of your life, if you focus on acting skillfully, things are going to improve. But conviction also strengthens you in the sense that it alerts you to the fact that there’s a danger here as well. If you look at your intentions in your untrained mind, then you realize …
- The World Is Swept Away… This is called focusing on the pleasure of form—the body as you feel it from within. When we talk about meditation, we usually don’t refer to the fact that this is a kind of renunciation, but that’s what it is. People don’t like the word renunciation, it sounds like you’re being deprived of something. But actually it means you …
- Mindfulness the Gatekeeper… You keep focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The “body in itself” here means the body simply as its sitting here right now. You don’t think about the body in the world, because that would give rise to other duties: Is your body attractive enough? Is it …
- The Best News in the World… After all, the Buddha was focusing on his breath the night of his awakening. There’s no difference between his breath and your breath. The difference lies in the qualities of mind he brought to the breath. And you can develop the qualities that he did. So it’s good to think about how he developed those qualities. By all accounts, he was a …
- How to Straighten Out the World… But to get there, first you have to have at least a spot in the body where you’re focused and try to maintain that focus through time. Try to develop a oneness through time. This is the function of mindfulness and alertness. You keep the breath in mind and you keep watching. There may be thoughts in what seem like other parts of …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… We’re focusing not so much on the air coming in and out of the nose as on the feeling of movement and energy that goes along with the breath. And that breath energy exists on many levels. There’s even a still breath inside, a level of energy that doesn’t move. You can access it in certain spots in what Ajaan Lee …
- An Environment for Practice… In this environment, it’s because they’re focusing on their minds. It’s understood that that’s okay. Not only okay, but actually desirable. Back when I was living in Thailand, most of the time I was the only Westerner. Toward the end of Ajaan Fuang’s life, we had a French monk come and stay with us for three months. One morning …
- Lessons from Jhana… And just being with the perception, just the one word—instead of speaking in sentences and questions, you’re just saying that one word over and over, breath, breath, breath and focusing on one sensation—can seem a little threatening, a little difficult. But if you can convince yourself that this is what the mind can do and it will have a good effect …
- Friends with The Breath… Then you can choose any part of the body on which you’d like to stay focused. Allow your attention to settle there. It’s interesting that in Pali they talk about the object of the mind not being a focal point but being a support. So allow the breath in any spot in the body to be a support for your mind, a …
- Wake Up from Addiction… All too often, when you get focused on something like this—be it anger, lust or whatever—your awareness narrows down and seems to be surrounded on all sides. But if you can open up your awareness, give it a foundation here in the body, and then take all these different things apart, then you see that—as they’re taken on one by …
- Training in Commitment & Reflection… Over time, you begin to gain a sense of when the breath is too heavy, when the breath is too light, when the mind’s focus is in the wrong place, when it’s focusing too hard, or its focus is so one-pointed that it’s actually disturbing the flow of energy in the body. You begin to notice these things and then …
- Acceptance… This is why the Buddha focuses so much attention on the issue of happiness, because all of our activities, all our selves, are aimed at happiness in one form or another. They have different understandings of what it might be, different strategies for how to get there, but they’re all aimed at the same place. A large part of the practice is learning …
- In Training… gladdening it to make it happy to be here, getting it more concentrated, steady, still, focused, centered, so that it doesn’t wander off. If other thoughts do come into the range of your awareness, you get so that you’re just not interested in them. You train yourself to release yourself from them. Those are the basic steps. There’s more, but these …
- The Uses of Right Concentration… He mentioned the eight factors of the path but then focused just on the first factor, right view about suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. That was enough for Ven. Añña Kondañña to experience the Dhamma eye, the first level of awakening. We can assume that Añña Kondañña followed through from right view to develop the other factors of …
- Audacious & Undaunted… This is why, when we meditate, we’re focusing on the present moment, what we’re doing right here right now—not because the present moment is a wonderful place to hang out, but because the present moment has power. If you’re alert, mindful, and ardent in what you’re doing in the present moment, you can have an impact right now on …
- Feeding on Right Resolve… Instead of getting upset about what he or she cannot do, the good doctor focuses on what he or she can do to make sure the patient has, say, as little pain as possible and doesn’t develop any additional diseases. So this equanimity isn’t the equanimity that gives up on things—it’s the equanimity that puts aside things that are impossible …
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