Search results for: "Focus"
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- Determination… How much are you going to focus on that goal? What other goals are you going to have in the meantime? Once you’ve chosen your goal, though, you have to figure out what’s the best way to reach it. Say you want to find happiness. Well, you have to make sure that your quest for happiness doesn’t cause any misery to …
- Saṃvega & Pasāda… This is the way out: “However difficult it may be, this is where I’m going to focus my efforts.” You come into the present moment, and what have you got? You’ve got the pains of the body sitting here. Those can be adjusted, though. You can work with the way you breathe, work with the way you conceive of the breath. Think …
- How to Fall… I’m here to focus on the breath.” Simply leave those other things and come back. Learn how to do it without tying your mind up in knots. In our modern educational system, we’re quickly channeled into the activities where we have a natural talent. As a result we don’t learn how to become good at things that don’t come easily …
- Right Resolve, Right Concentration… One is to focus on thoughts of goodwill as a topic of your meditation. You wish for your own happiness; you wish for the happiness of others. True happiness. Because the principle of karma is that no one’s going to find happiness unless they learn how to act skilfully. When you wish for people’s happiness or the happiness of animals, or whatever …
- Truths of the Will… in the way. You’ve got to learn how to give yourself pep talks, give yourself encouragement, keep your values clearly in mind. Don’t let the setbacks get you down. Focus on the things that you do right when you need that encouragement. This is how truths of the will actually become true. The path, after all, is something fabricated. It’s something …
- Determination… So you focus on those. Learn how to maximize those. Get them on your side. When they’re strong, you try to use them to see how much you can dissolve away the different shells of tension you’ve built up around the pain. There is that instinctive reaction: When pain comes, you try to contain it. You tense up around it to make …
- Cheating the System… Find the comfortable parts and focus there. Find a way of breathing that feels good there, then let that sense of comfortable breathing spread through other parts of the body, so that you feel surrounded by a good feeling. And then you can look into the pain. Ask yourself what kind of perceptions you have around it. Is it a big monolithic block? Is …
- The Anatomy of the Present… You don’t know how much time you have, but you do know you have this present moment, so you focus on the work you can do right now. This implies, of course, that the present moment is not totally determined by the past. If it were, you wouldn’t be making any decisions. You wouldn’t have any choice as to what to …
- Noble Priorities… So even though the precepts are focused on what you do in terms of your speech and your physical actions, the real focus is on the mind, so that you get to know your intentions. This gets you ready for concentration practice. They also promote right view in the sense that you realize that your intentions are going to be really important in determining …
- Expanded Possibilities… So his focus was on skills, what a human being can do. And that’s where we expand our possibilities: realizing that we can develop skills that can take us beyond where we are right now. This opens a wide world of possibilities. It also places a lot of responsibility on us. That was the scary part of meeting Ajaan Fuang, realizing that there …
- Turning Anxiety into Heedfulness… Given that human life is so hard to come by, what are you going to do?” Of course, the king gives the same answer: “Calm the mind; practice the Dhamma.” That’s where our focus should always be, because that’s where our true wealth is. That’s where our true safety lies. And it doesn’t matter which mountain moves in first, the …
- Comprehending Clinging… When we hear that, we tend to focus on the aggregates—that we need to comprehend them. Which is true, we do, but we also have to comprehend clinging. In fact, clinging is the real problem. That’s the activity that’s suffering. The aggregates on their own aren’t the problem. The clinging makes them a problem. So it’s good to think …
- Alertness: What Are You Doing?… That’s the focus right now. As we’re meditating, it’s the same sort of thing. What you’re doing right now is the directed thought and evaluation. You use those mental activities to shape the breath, to shape your experience of the breath. If you shape it well, then there’s going to be a sense of ease and well-being, a …
- The Values of Stillness… Meditation is not just a matter of knowing what to do with the breath or knowing where to focus; it’s also a matter of reminding yourself of the importance of why we do this. When the Buddha taught the four noble truths the very first time, when he taught the noble eightfold path the first time, he started out with the motivation, “Why …
- Brahmaviharas & the Breath… You focus on one spot in the body to see how the breath feels at that spot and then you breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of ease there. You’re not pinching the breath off, either at the end of the in-breath or at the end of the out-breath. Think of the ends of the breath as …
- To Make Suffering Crumble… For instance, when you’re driving yourself crazy talking about certain things in your mind, focus less on the content of what the mind is saying, and more on the process of how the mind talks to itself, and how it uses perceptions to stab itself, and how it doesn’t really have to—or, how it focuses on certain feelings in the body …
- Training Heart & Mind… When they arrived, he said, “Okay, close your eyes, focus on your breath.” They said, “No. No, we can’t do that.” “Why not?” “We’re afraid that we’ll get stuck on jhāna, and then be reborn as Brahmās.” His response was, “Well, what’s wrong with being reborn as a Brahmā? Non-returners”—people at the third level of awakening—“are reborn …
- Inner Poise… So, as the Buddha said, “Will the man let himself get distracted by the woman or the crowd? No, he’s got to stay focused on the oil.” Try to have that same sense of focus and the same sense of the preciousness of your concentration. Try not to spill a drop. Try to keep your poise. After all, that’s what concentration is …
- To Discern Suffering… You can focus on the sensation of the breathing anywhere that’s comfortable. You can explore different parts of the body to see where your comfortable spot is. Then ask yourself, “How can the breath be adjusted to keep this spot right here comfortable?” Learn how to maintain that sense of comfort while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, when things are …
- Learning Right Speech… What you really want to focus on is being truthful about your intentions, making sure you don’t do anything harmful. If you see that you intend to do an act that will cause harm, you don’t do it. Then, while you’re doing it, you’re truthful about watching it: What are the actual results coming from what you’re doing? When …
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