Search results for: "Focus"

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  2. The Buddha’s Compassion
     … his teachings. Now, for us, we don’t know. As long as we’re practicing and haven’t encountered any of these things, we just file them away for future reference. Focus on what you’re doing right now, but file them away with a sense of appreciation that there is someone who actually went to all the trouble to discover all this and … 
  3. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … Was it not comfortable enough, or was it so comfortable that you began to lose focus? Be careful about the comfort that comes up in the meditation when you finally get a sense of ease. Don’t just wallow in it. Remember you’ve got work to do. So you’re going to use the ease to give the mind a more solid foundation … 
  4. Cleansing the Mind
     … Our society makes us focus on things we don’t have, the things we lack, to spur us on to work harder. But the Buddha has us spur ourselves on with goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy. Empathetic joy’s not to make you feel lazy. You see other people doing the good things leading to happiness, and that should be an inspiration for you … 
  5. Doubting the Buddha
     … As when you focus on the breath: Try to be very sensitive to how the breathing feels, figuring out which way of breathing feels right coming in, feels right going out, and then try to maintain that. It’s the maintaining that’s going to let this very ordinary-feeling breath become more and more refreshing. Try to breathe in a way that doesn … 
  6. Elemental Energy
    When we get in touch with the breath, we’re getting in touch with the spot where the mind and the body meet, which makes it a really good place to focus. You look in one direction, and there are physical events; you look in the other direction, there are mental events. You see how they come through the breath to each other, how … 
  7. Frustrated Desires
     … One lesson you could learn from that is that you’ve got a goal to have a quiet mind, and if you try to focus on the goal, you are going to get frustrated. So don’t have a goal about a quiet mind, just let it naturally settle down on its own, if it’s going to. But again, that’s not what … 
  8. Arising & Passing Away
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has us focus on just arising and passing away; what’s immediately apparent, immediately present to the mind without going into the stories of whether there’s something behind it out there, or something experiencing it, or some agent in here that’s experiencing it and reacting to it. Just look at the sensations coming … 
  9. Acceptance Isn’t the Issue
     … That’s what the Buddha would focus on. Think of him coming from his awakening: One of the first things he saw as he surveyed the world was that beings were on fire with the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion. So he didn’t see it as his duty to accept them. He saw it as his duty to make a change so … 
  10. Something Good to Cling to
     … Like right now, as we’re meditating, we focus on the breath in the present moment and see what we can do to make it comfortable, to have a sense of well-being right here. The pleasure of the breath may not be all that great, but the pleasure of a mind that’s able to settle down in a place that it knows … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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