Search results for: "Focus"
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- Friends Inside… Without his teaching us the path, would you have ever thought to sit down and close your eyes and focus on your breath that it would accomplish anything? Very few people in the world realize that true happiness doesn’t come from getting things or having nice friends. It comes from training the mind. Nice things and good friends are good, but your real …
- Pride… When we’re proud, we tend to focus on our strong points, but as for our weak points, we tend to hide them—from others and from ourselves. There was a student of Ajaan Fuang’s who was a little mentally unbalanced. He was very intelligent and very proud of his intelligence, but there were other aspects in his character that were extreme weaknesses …
- Ven. Ananda’s Awakening… In other words, you focus your desires on the causes—what will take you there. So here we are: Sitting in meditation, but not thinking about awakening. We’re thinking about our breath, because thinking about the breath gets the mind to settle down with a sense of ease in the present moment, which is where the work is to be done. Wanting to …
- The Form of the Body… That’s what we’re trying to focus attention on, and that requires looking at the body in such way that its importance can begin to fade. It looms less and less large in our concern. But that requires a lot of work. We have to chant that chant every day. We have to contemplate this issue every day, every day. “This body of …
- Mindworms… tell yourself: That’s not-self now. You’re not responsible for that any more. What you are responsible for is your present karma, the decisions you’re making right now. Focus on to those decisions, abd in particular hold on to the decision to stay back, to stay out. That’s something you want to hold to really strongly. Then you remined yourself …
- Forging a Path… This is why we focus on the breath. Of all the various elements in the world, it’s the closest to our awareness, and it’s one of the functions in the body over which we actually have some control. You can try long breathing, short breathing, heavy, light, shallow, deep. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best right now. This does …
- Meaning & Happiness… And give your life a focus that really does give it meaning. You can think of the Buddha. He worked all those many, many lifetimes to become Buddha, not only for his own purpose but also so that he could teach. But there was a fascinating incident right after his awakening. He began to have second thoughts about that teaching career. This got a …
- Sit with It… There’s got to be some place where you get the mind to settle in so that you can practice this strength of mind, so that someday when you actually are dying and there is no place in the body where you can focus, the mind doesn’t lose its bearings and doesn’t forget the lessons it learned from the meditation. So as …
- Awakening Is in the Details… In other words, there’s an image you’re holding in mind someplace, either a word or a picture, that you fasten on, that you focus on. That’s what enables the mind to stay in placel. Try to hold on to an image that allows the mind to stay with a sense of well-being, a sense of groundedness. It feels good being …
- Effortlessness Through Effort… What does it need, in terms of the breath? Get used to looking at the particulars as you focus on the breath. And then you’ll start getting used to looking at the particulars of the thoughts that pull you away. This will take a while, which is why we practice. We have to spend so much time because the mind is very complex …
- The Awful Truth… So right here is the point where you have to focus, because this is the important point: how your mind is moving around right now, and the skill with which it’s moving around. We’ve got the meditation technique as an initial guide: Stay with the breath. If the mind wanders off, bring it back to the breath. In the beginning, you want …
- Skillful Distress… The way out is to focus on renunciate distress as a motivating factor, like the string on the bow of a bow and arrow. You pull it back. There’s more tension, but then when you release the string, the arrow propelled by it goes far. If you don’t pull the string back, or if you don’t even string the bow, the …
- Recollecting the Buddha… and at that point, when you need your meditation object most, it’s not going to be there.” But that ignores the point that when the Buddha teaches breath meditation, the focus is not just on the breath. Breath is, of course, the bodily fabrication kaya-sankhara, but his instructions also tell you to be sensitive to citta-sankhara or mental fabrication, which are …
- Indulge in the Pleasure of Jhana… a boundary between the two of them? In other words, your body is willing to have you be aware of it and it’s not going to freeze up when you focus your awareness on it, and your mind is willing to let the body come in. It’s willing to be very, very sensitive to it. Some people find that it’s easier …
- All-around Alertness… Where do you not ordinarily focus on breath sensations in the body? Have you ever spent much time with your right flank, or your left flank, or your tailbone? Give them some time, give them some space, give them some attention. They might have some potentials you haven’t thought of before. Then, from the sense of well-being in the body, it begins …
- Fire… Then when things really are connected, all you have to do is to focus on one spot and develop a feeling of connectedness throughout the whole body. You don’t have to keep tracing things here, tracing things there. You’re just present in one spot, and the awareness spreads from that spot. Ajaan Lee’s image is of cutting a whole series of …
- Cleaning Out the Stables… As we go through life, we focus on wanting this, wanting that, and then getting a sense of the different worlds we would have to inhabit in order to gain those things and the different kinds of people we would have to become to get them. Sometimes we go for the object and sometimes we decide it’s not worth it. But over time …
- The Long-Distance Meditator… So you need this quality of continuity in your focus, continuity in your attention, if you want to see the things going on inside. After all, everything you need to know is happening right here. It’s simply that you’re not watching carefully; you allow yourself to get distracted. The mind puts down a curtain, and you’re content to be blinded to …
- The Gift of Discernment… So it’s by getting you to focus your attention inside, on the activities of the mind, having the mind watch its own activities: That was the Buddha’s gift. That was his primary expression of compassion so that you *can *look after yourself with ease.
- To Depend on Yourself… That goodwill and compassion will focus you on the problem of how to put an end to suffering, which points you to right view. So those two discernment factors help each other along. As you exercise them together, they get stronger and stronger. So as Ajaan Suwat used to say, if you don’t believe anybody, at least believe the Buddha, because his intentions …
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