Quotes About Concentration

The Essential Discipline for Daily Use," written by the Buddhist monk Doc The from Bao Son pagoda

When you use concentration to run away from yourself or your situation, it is wrong concentration. Sometimes we need to escape our problems for relief, but at some time we have to return to face them. Worldly concentration seeks to escape. Supramundane concentration aims at complete liberation.

What most people call power Buddhists call cravings. The five cravings are for wealth, fame, sex, fancy food, and lots of sleep. In Buddhism, we speak of the five true powers, five kinds of energy. The five powers are faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, and insight. The five powers are the foundation of real happiness; they are based on concrete practices we will learn in this book.

Eating well is an art. It doesn't require fancy cooking, but it does require practice and concentration. Your body is not just yours. It is a gift and a responsibility. To keep it healthy, we need to know how to eat.

Anapana means breath and sati means mindfulness. Tang Hoi translated it as "Guarding the Mind." The Anapanasati Sutra, that is, is the sutra on using one's breath to maintain mindfulness.

Concentration, samadhi in Sanskrit, is a powerful force that you can generate to make a breakthrough, to see clearly what is there and understand its true nature.

The mind tends to dart from one thing to another, like a monkey swinging from branch to branch without stopping to rest.

When we're first learning sitting meditation, it can be useful to count our breaths. Count one for the first in- and out-breath. Count two for the second, and so on. If your mind wanders and you lose count, go back to one and begin again. This exercise helps develop concentration. You may think counting to ten is easy, but counting to ten while breathing mindfully takes a lot of focus.

When people in intimate relationships have mindfulness, concentration, and insight, their relationships have an element of holiness. Sexual intimacy shouldn't occur before there is communion, understanding, and sharing on the emotional and spiritual level.

the first six months, try only to build up your power of concentration, to create an inner calmness and serene joy. You will shake off anxiety, enjoy total rest, and quiet your mind. You will be refreshed and gain a broader, clearer view of things, and deepen and strengthen the love in yourself. And you will be able to respond more helpfully to all around you.

With mindfulness, concentration, and insight, we can free ourselves from feelings of restlessness and craving, and realize that, right now, we already have more than enough conditions to be happy.

When you hold your cup and drink your tea in mindfulness and concentration, it's like you're performing a sacred ritual, and that is a prayer.

We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing

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He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.

He follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any, and one of the trains is always for his own amusement.

But then he came across a long chapter that he read from the first word to the last, with his lips tightly closed, his eyebrows pursed, concentrating—his face registering a total, almost deathlike look of earnest concentration—oblivious to every trace of life stirring around him. This chapter was entitled: "Concerning Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our Essential Nature." He

How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don't concern you!

Meditation for them consisted in making the words of the Bible their own by memorizing them and repeating them, with deep and simple concentration, "from the heart." Therefore the "heart" comes to play a central role in this primitive form of monastic prayer.

As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man.

my train of thought. "Look

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

Do you know what accounts for most research delays? Interruptions that have nothing to do with the research whatsoever.

You had to be fundamentally stupid , I sometimes thought, to become the sort of academic specialist that hiring committees liked. You had to be thick somehow. You had to block out all the other things in the world to focus on one narrow, particular thing.