Search results for: "Focusing"

  1. Focus on the Precepts
     … It focuses your mind on your intentions, which is where concentration practice comes in. And it keeps you focused on your actions, so it helps you understand right view. After all, right view focuses on suffering and its causes. And what’s causing suffering? What you’re doing. Right view deals in actions, and right view itself is a type of action. It starts … 
  2. Mindfulness of Death
     … The Buddha doesn’t mention verbal fabrication in his sixteen steps, but the examples he gives of telling yourself to breathe in and out focused on pleasure, focused on rapture, focused on mental fabrication, “I will breathe this way. I will breathe that way”: Those are examples of verbal fabrication, examples of how you should be thinking. Like breathing in and out focused on … 
  3. Free to Do the Right Thing
     … You can’t do anything about past actions, but this explanation really focuses you on what you’re doing right now. So those are the kind of narratives and worldviews that really are helpful, really are beneficial, and are right for right now. They keep you focused here. Once they’ve got you focused here, then you can drop them, because the creation of … 
  4. All Eye
     … This counters our usual tendency, which is that when you’re focused on one spot in the body, you tend to tense up around it. You want to think the opposite. Wherever you’re focused, things are wide open—free, with a sense of energy radiating from the spot where you’re focused. And again, think of the image of the eye focused inside … 
  5. The Importance of Being Focused
     … You can experiment with focusing on the breath in different parts of the body, to see which part of the body seems most congenial to stay focused on. If something else comes into the mind and says, “You’ve got to think about this. You’ve got to think about that,” you say, “No, right now the breath is more important.” Other issues that … 
  6. Focusing on the Breath to Learn about the Mind
  7. Focused on Results
    Focused on Results March 1, 2016 Sometimes you hear that when you practice you shouldn’t be focused on getting results. The extreme version of that idea is that meditation should be totally purposeless, totally useless. Of course, when you hear people saying that they meditate without any purpose, without any sense that it’s going to be good for anything, they’re hoping … 
  8. Location, Location
     … You may have a desire for a person and think that the desire is focused on the person, but maybe it’s focused on your perception or on the way you talk to yourself about the person. Or your idea of how you look when you’re with that person. Maybe that’s the real allure. This is one of the reasons why interpersonal … 
  9. Reading Your Meditation
     … Focusing on the mistakes we made in the past and getting depressed about them is really not helpful, because when you start focusing on your own negative activities, after a while you get tired of focusing on your own negative activities, and you start focusing on the negative things that other people have done as well. That puts you in a downward spiral. So … 
  10. The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha
     … This is because your hopes for happiness are focused on something outside. But when your desire for happiness is focused inwardly, you place less of a burden on things outside. You need less from the outside world, which means your compassion for other people can be more clearheaded, balanced, and fair. In this way, the pursuit of happiness through developing strong concentration for the … 
  11. Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention
     … So learn how to keep your intentions properly focused, to figure out why, after all the things the Buddha learned in his awakening, this was the issue he focused on teaching. Everything in his teaching revolves around this topic. It’s not like suffering was the only thing he mentioned, but everything he talks about, he deals from this perspective – how to understand the … 
  12. Abandoning Effluents (1)
     … Once you’re focused on the four noble truths, then you’re going to be focused on the duties appropriate to those truths. And in carrying out the duties, all the other ways of dealing with the effluents get covered as well.
  13. Circumspection
    One of the most striking things about the Buddha’s teachings is how little he deals in abstractions, and how much he focuses on particulars, techniques, and strategies. Instead of talking about the wonders of oneness, emptiness, or nibbana, he tells you how to get to nibbana, to true happiness. He focuses on very particular things. His thinking was strategic. He saw that you … 
  14. Bases for Success
     … Once there’s the desire, then you have to make sure it’s properly focused. You want it to be focused on the causes rather than on the effects. If you sit there simply thinking about how much you’d like to get the mind quiet but without actually doing the work that needs to be done, the desire becomes an obstacle. So focus … 
  15. Perceptions for Training the Mind
     … It’s not the external wind element that we’re focusing on. It’s the internal—in other words, breath in its aspect as proprioception: breath as you feel it in the body. We’re not focusing on the passage of air through the nose or on the upper lip. We’re focusing on the internal wind element as you feel it inside, going … 
  16. How the Breath Helps You to Die Well
    There are meditation traditions that have you look directly at your mind and they say of those of us who are focusing on the breath, “You’re going to spend all of your life focusing on your breath? What are you going to do when you die? When you die, the breath’s going to leave you. And you’ll be left with nothing … 
  17. Distinctions That Make a Difference
     … When you get to know them in a hands-on way like this, then you can be more precise in noticing: “Where are you focused?” Are you focused on the breath? Or are you focused on the feeling you associate with the breath? This will have an impact on how your concentration goes. If, when the breath gets comfortable, you focus on the sense … 
  18. Focal Points
    Focal Points September 7, 2012 Try focusing on a new spot tonight—one that you haven’t focused on before. Find some out-of-the-way spot in the body that’s been neglected and place your attention there. Whether or not you feel the breath there isn’t the issue. Just remind yourself that there is breath there, so whatever you feel there … 
  19. Always Looking Inside
     … The issue is that you’ve got this mind running around making comments on things all the time, liking this, not liking that, focusing its awareness outside, so that it’s hardly aware of what it’s doing. And yet it’s the big troublemaker. There was another time when we got a letter from a meditator in Singapore. He was explaining to Ajaan … 
  20. Subduing Greed & Distress
     … One is remaining focused on a particular frame of reference in and of itself. Like right now we’re focused on the breath: That’s the body in and of itself. The second activity is subduing greed and distress with reference to the world. What that means is that if any thoughts come up that are related to the world, you subdue them. You … 
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