Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. Savor Your Breath
     … Those are the parts you should focus on. Those are your sensitive parts. For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the chest, in the area around the heart. Or it could be behind your eyes, in the middle of the head, or in the throat. So explore for a while where your spots are. Pay special attention to the in-breath, because … 
  3. Goodness
     … You’ve got to straighten out this one, that’s your main focus. You want to strengthen this mind, so that the goodwill you have for yourself and the goodwill you have for others will have a better and better foundation, a better chance to be brought into being or to show its influence. So think about these five strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration … 
  4. Harmony
     … You go back and you can focus straight on what needs to be done inside. It’s in this way that our friendship becomes admirable friendship, one of the factors most conducive to finding the noble paths. Think about that. We can help one another here attain something noble by little acts in the course of the day. So see their importance, take it … 
  5. A World of Limitations
     … Renunciation means learning to work intelligently from within those limitations to get beyond them, realizing that you don’t have time for everything, so you want to focus your efforts on what’s important and give up whatever is not, whatever is going to get in the way. The final quality is calm. This functions in two ways. One, on the path, you learn … 
  6. Judging the Dhamma
     … The way to do that is to focus on the present moment. You notice in the Buddhist teachings that there are no grand narratives about how the world came into being or where are worlds going to go. The Buddha taught more how to get to know the present moment, how to recognize what’s good in the present moment, what skillful and what … 
  7. Recognizing Fools
     … The books tend to focus on the true visions, giving the impression that the ajaans believed everything they saw in their meditation and ran along with everything that came up in their meditation. If they’d done that, they would have gone crazy. The unfortunate thing is that we don’t get to read about, or learn about, the times when the visions or … 
  8. Meticulousness
     … But if you learn how to adjust your focus and look around, you can gain some of the insights that can really make a big difference in the mind.** So don’t overlook the little things. Your ability to catch a little bit of craving or a little bit of clinging before it gets large and obvious will be one of the most important … 
  9. High Level Metta
     … Directed thought is when you make up your mind as to what topic you’re going to focus on. Evaluation includes all the comments and questions you address to yourself about that topic. So you ask yourself, “What kind of breathing feels good right now? Does this breathing feel good or does that breathing feel good?” That’s directed thought and evaluation. And when … 
  10. Imagine Your Breath
     … If there’s something the mind says is in the back, focus on perceiving that particular knot of tension as in the front. That might help it dissolve. Remember, when the Buddha describes breath meditation, it’s an opportunity to learn about fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. We’re here not only to see how the breath goes, but also how you talk to yourself … 
  11. Mistakes
    Focus your attention on the breath and look after it: both the breath and your attention. Looking after the breath means noticing where you feel it, how it feels when it comes in, how it feels when it goes out, and checking to see if you can figure out what kind of breathing feels good, what kind of breathing is best for the body … 
  12. Taking Apart Suffering
     … So focus on the ones that you can make comfortable and stay there. So even just dealing with the body, you’ve got to learn how to take it apart: which sensations are breath sensations, which sensations have the potential for ease, which ones have the potential for pain. You’ve got to learn how to analyze things if you want the mind to … 
  13. Change
     … Are they really good? Are they really reliable? All too often, we focus our sights on something and then we blind ourselves to everything else, such as the fact that what we want is going to change. Or we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter. Or we tell ourselves, “I’ll deal with that when it happens. I’ll go for the pleasure … 
  14. Renunciation Isn’t Deprivation
     … So, when thoughts of sensuality seem attractive, you have to remind yourself that there’s a better way of finding pleasure. And it’s right here, right here with your breath: Focus on the breath, keep your thoughts on the breath, keep your thoughts on nothing but the breath. And evaluate it: “How’s it going right now? What could I do to make … 
  15. Wilderness Wealth
     … Yet there’s even a state of concentration that doesn’t focus on those themes at all. It’s totally independent: No object whatsoever, but awareness is concentrated. But even that, he says, is fabricated. When you realize that—that there is even an element of effort that goes into that, that it’s inconstant, stressful, not-self—you can let go of that … 
  16. A Good Buddhist Ego
     … There’s one where he says you put aside thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, concerns for the future, and you focus on what’s arising in the present moment. Why do you do that? Because you have to do it today. If you don’t do it now, it’s not going to get done. Tomorrow you may die. In other … 
  17. Accepting the Buddha’s Standards
     … As you learn through observing the precepts to cause less and less harm, your focus moves to more subtle levels of stress in the mind, learning how to drop whatever it is that you’re doing to cause them, until finally you come to the subtlest disturbances, caused by the concentration itself. In each case, you want to accept, one, that the stress is … 
  18. The Sublime Attitudes in Context
     … That way you don’t waste your strength on areas where you can’t make a difference, and you can focus your strength on areas where you can. Another principle that’s useful to understand when you’re developing these attitudes is that, particularly in the context of compassion and empathetic joy, when you see somebody who’s poor and miserable and suffering in … 
  19. Learning from the Precepts
     … That’s when you begin to focus on the Buddha’s teaching about where craving is located, which is basically the same as, “Where is the allure of these things that would pull you away?” What do you like about them? As the texts say, the allure could be anywhere. It could be in a perception, it could be in a thought construct. You … 
  20. A Culture of Self Reliance
     … That way, you’re free to focus more of your attention on developing your inner refuge. The freedom that comes from contentment with external things also gives you perspective on what work to take on to make your living. You just need enough in order to be able to practice. Most of the jobs that go beyond that also take a lot of time … 
  21. Understanding Aggregates
     … Here again, you’ve got form (the breath); feeling (the feeling of dis-ease you might encounter when you first try to settle down, and then the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop); the perceptions that you keep in mind about how the breath goes, where you can focus on the breath, your relationship to the breath. Fabrication starts out especially with … 
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