How to focus, p.1
How to Focus, page 1
Parallax Press
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Berkeley, California 94710
parallax.org
Parallax Press is the publishing division of Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism © 2022 Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.
All rights reserved
ebook design adapted from print design by Debbie Berne
Illustrations © 2022 by Jason DeAntonis
The material in this book comes from previously published books and articles by Thich Nhat Hanh.
The Sixteen Exercises of Mindful Breathing, this page, follow the order found in Samyukta Agama 803 rather than that found in the Pali version, Majjhima Nikaya 118.
ISBN 9781952692178
Ebook ISBN 9781946764935
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022936119
a_prh_6.0_140427247_c0_r1
CONTENTS
Notes on Focusing
Practices for Developing Concentration
NOTES ON FOCUSING
The river must be calm to reflect the full moon.
The clear mind has insight into the true nature of things.
ATTENTION AND HAPPINESS ARE CONNECTED
Mindfulness is the miracle that can restore wholeness to our dispersed mind, calling it back so we can live fully each moment of life.
Mindfulness always brings concentration, and concentration brings insight.
When you drink your cup of tea, if you are concentrated and you focus your attention on it, then the cup of tea becomes a great joy for you. Mindfulness and concentration bring about not only insight but happiness as well.
CONCENTRATION BRINGS UNDERSTANDING
The more mindful we are, the more concentrated we are. The word for concentration in Sanskrit, samādhi, means steadiness, non-interruption, not wavering. The object of your concentration may be a cloud, a flower, or your anger. If your focus dies, and sometime later is born again, it’s not concentration. In the state of concentration, you keep your focus steady, even, and continuous. When our mindfulness and concentration are powerful, we can make a breakthrough and get an insight. Insight brings understanding and has the power to liberate us from ignorance, discrimination, craving, fear, anger, and despair.
TOUCHING LIFE DEEPLY
You can enjoy every moment of your daily life when you have mindfulness and concentration. When I walk mindfully from one place to another, I enjoy my in-breath, my out-breath, and my steps. When you are concentrated, you sink deeply into what is there. When you contemplate a flower, you get in touch very profoundly with the flower, which is a wonder of life.
When you hold your cup of tea and enjoy it, you get in touch deeply with your tea and enjoy the peace, joy, and freedom that is offered to you by drinking tea. Freedom is our practice. If you have some freedom and solidity brought to you by mindfulness and concentration, peace and joy are possible.
RETURNING TO OURSELVES
In everyday life we are often lost in forgetfulness. Our mind chases after thousands of things, and we rarely take the time to come back to ourselves. When we have been lost in forgetfulness for a long time, we lose touch with ourselves and feel alienated from ourselves. Conscious breathing is a marvelous way to return to ourselves. When we are aware of our breath, we come back to ourselves as quick as a flash of lightning. Like a child who returns home after a long journey, we feel the warmth of our hearth, and we find ourselves again. To come back to ourselves like that is already a remarkable success on the path of mindfulness, concentration, and insight.
TOUCHING THE WONDERS OF LIFE
With conscious breathing we come in contact with life in the present moment—the only moment when we can touch life. When you focus your attention on your breath, you find out very quickly that you are a living reality, present here and now, sitting on this beautiful planet Earth. Around you there are trees, sunshine, and blue sky. Mindfulness and concentration bring you in touch with the wonders of life and allow you to value and treasure these things.
FREEDOM FROM REGRET AND ANXIETY
To breathe with full awareness is a miraculous way to untie the knots of regret and anxiety and to come back to life in the present moment. If we’re imprisoned by regrets about the past, anxiety for the future, or attachment and aversion in the present, we’re not free to be in contact with life. We’re not really living our life. When we breathe in and out and follow our breath with attention all the way through from the beginning to the end, we’re already at ease, no longer dominated by our anxieties and longings. As we breathe with full awareness, our breath becomes slower and more regular; peace and joy arise and become more stable with every moment. Relying on our breathing, we come back to ourselves and are able to restore the oneness of our body and mind and become whole again. When body and mind are together, we are fully present, fully alive, and able to be in real contact with what is happening in the present moment.
FOCUSING BEGINS WITH THE BREATH
We make our breathing the first object of our concentrated mind. We put all our attention on our breath, so that mind and breath become one. After first focusing on the breath, we can then practice focusing on other phenomena. When we use our breathing to bring all the energy of mind consciousness to one point, our confusion stops, and we are able to sustain the energy of our mind on one object. As we continue to practice, the energy of concentration helps us penetrate deeply into the heart of the object of our focus, and we gain insight and understanding.
AWARENESS OF FEELINGS
We can speak of feelings as being pleasant, painful, or neutral. Practicing meditation, we discover how interesting it is to look into our neutral feelings. As we sit on the grass with our mind elsewhere, we may have a neutral feeling. But when we bring our awareness to the neutral feeling, we find that it’s really quite wonderful to be sitting on the grass in the sunshine. As we observe the river of our feelings with mindfulness and concentration, we find that many neutral feelings are actually quite pleasant.
MAKING DECISIONS
When there is anxiety, irritation, or anger in us, we cannot decide clearly what to do. When you come back to yourself and breathe mindfully, your mind’s attention has only one object: your breath. If you continue to breathe in and out mindfully, you maintain that state of presence and freedom. Your mind will be clearer and you will make better decisions. It’s much better to make a decision when your mind is like that rather than when it is in the sway of fear, anger, unclear thinking, and worry.
STOPPING
Meditation has two aspects: stopping and looking deeply. We tend to stress the importance of looking deeply because it can bring us insight and liberate us from suffering and afflictions. But the practice of stopping is fundamental. Stopping is the very beginning of the practice of meditation. If we cannot stop, we cannot have insight. We have to learn the art of stopping—stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, and the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down.
How can we stop this state of agitation? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy.
A CLEAR MIND
Meditation is not to avoid problems or run away from difficulties. We do not practice to escape. We practice to have enough strength to confront problems effectively. To do this, we must be calm, fresh, and solid. That is why we need to practice the art of stopping. When we learn to stop, we become calmer, and our mind becomes clearer, like clear water after the particles of mud have settled.
WALKING IN FREEDOM
It is possible to enjoy every step you make at any time you want, whenever you feel the need to move from one place to another, no matter how short the distance. If you make five steps, then make those five steps into a walking meditation. Every step will bring you joy and stability.
When you climb the stairs, climb each step in mindfulness, concentration, and joy. In that way you are doing exactly what the Buddha was doing: generating and transferring your best to the world. Peace, happiness, brotherhood and sisterhood become a reality if we know how to live our daily life in mindfulness and concentration. Invest 100 percent of yourself in the walking. Become aware of every step. It’s you who are consciously walking. Your habitual preoccupations and ways of thinking are not pulling you away. You retain your sovereignty. You are the one who decides. You walk because it is your intention to walk, and in every step you have freedom. You take each step purposefully, and each mindful step brings you in touch with the wonders of life that are available in the here and now.
This is why, when you are walking, you do not think. If you think, the thinking will steal your walking from you. You don’t talk, because talking will take the walking away from you. Walking like this is a pleasure. When mindfulness and concentration are alive in you, you are fully yourself. You don’t lose yourself. You walk with grace and dignity. Without mindfulness, you may think of walking as an imposition, a chore. With mindfulness, you see walking as life.
As you walk, let your steps follow the rhythm of your breath. Let your breathing be natural. Breathing in, if your lungs want two steps
RADIO NST
Most of us have a radio constantly playing in our head, tuned to Radio NST: “Non-Stop Thinking.” Most of this thinking is unproductive. The more we think, the less available we are to what is around us. Our mind is filled with noise, and that’s why we can’t hear the call of life. Our heart is calling us, but we don’t hear it. We don’t have the time to listen to our heart. We have to learn to turn off the radio and stop our thinking, our internal discourse, in order to be able to fully enjoy the present moment and live our life.
Our mindful breathing and steps are able to pull us out of our thinking and bring back the joy in being alive.
HABIT ENERGY
We may have the will to stop, but our habit energies are often stronger than our will. Habit energy is called vāsanā in Sanskrit. It is very important to recognize our habit energy. This energy may have been transmitted to us by many generations of ancestors, and we continue to cultivate it. It is very powerful. We are intelligent enough to know that if we do this or say that, we will damage our relationship. Yet when the time comes, we do or say it anyway. Why? Because our habit energy is stronger than we are. It is pushing us all the time. Even if you want to stop, it doesn’t allow you to stop. We say and do things we don’t want to, and afterward we regret it. We make ourselves and others suffer, and we bring about a lot of damage. We vow not to do it again, but we do it again, because our habit energies push us. We need the energy of mindfulness to recognize and be present with our habit energy in order to stop this course of destruction.
With mindfulness we have the capacity to recognize the habit energy every time it manifests. We can say, “Hello, my habit energy, I know you are there!” If we just smile to it, it will lose much of its strength. Mindfulness and concentration are the energies that allow us to recognize our habit energy and prevent it from dominating us. Intellectually we know we should live in the present moment. Yet we’re always being pushed by our habit energy of rushing around. We’ve lost our capacity to be in the present moment. This is why practicing mindfulness and concentration is so important; talking and reading about it is not enough.
LOOKING DEEPLY
In meditation, we practice concentration, bringing everything into sharp, clear focus. This is called one-pointedness of mind. Only when there is concentration can the work of looking deeply take place. We use our breathing to bring all the energy of our mind consciousness to one point. Our confusion stops, and we are able to sustain the energy of our mind consciousness on one object. The object of our concentration—the queen bee around which our swarming thoughts can gather—may be our breathing, a leaf, a pebble, a flower, a situation we are in, a person we want to understand better, or whatever else we want to make the object of our meditative focus. It’s like putting a spotlight on the object of our concentration. Just as when a performer is on stage and the spotlight is focused only on them, we focus our mind intently on the object of our concentration. When we use a lens to focus sunlight on one point, its energy is concentrated so effectively that we can burn a hole in a piece of cloth. In the same way, we focus our mind consciousness on one point, on one object, in order to get a breakthrough and understand it better.
ORANGE MEDITATION
When you eat an orange, make the eating into a meditation. Sit in a way that you feel comfortable and solid. Look at the orange in such a way that you can see the orange as a miracle. An orange is not something less than a miracle.
Hold the orange in the palm of your hand, look at it and smile. You see the orange tree, the orange blossom, you see the sun entering the leaves and the rain penetrating the ground beneath, and you see the tiny fruit form; and now the fruit has grown into a beautiful orange. So just looking and smiling to the orange, you get in touch with the wonders of life, because an orange is a wonder of life. Due to our lack of mindfulness and concentration we ignore this fact; we don’t see that the orange in the palm of our hand is really a miracle. When you look at the orange and smile to the orange, you really see the orange in its splendor, in its miraculous nature. And suddenly you yourself become a miracle, because you are a miracle. You are not something less than a miracle. Your presence is a miracle. You are a miracle encountering another miracle.
You peel the orange. You smell it, and in you there is the element of solidity, true presence, and awareness. Life in this moment becomes something real, something wonderful.
NEURAL PATHWAYS
Traced in your brain are many neural pathways that can lead to suffering or happiness. You may travel on some of them frequently and they have become a habit, always leading you to react in the same way. For example, when you’re in touch with a certain thing, perhaps a memory or an object, it may always take you down a pathway that leads to anger and hate. With the practice of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, you can choose instead to focus on something wholesome that leads you to a feeling of happiness. Or when a situation arises that always leads you to react in a way that brings suffering, if you can bring in mindfulness, you can choose to respond in a way that contains more clarity and understanding. Doing this a few times, you begin to open up a new neural pathway that leads to happiness and reconciliation.
Suppose someone says something that angers you and your habit is to say something back to punish them, even if you know it won’t help. Mindfulness can help you not to respond too quickly. You can say to yourself, “Hello, my anger, you are my old friend. I know you are there. I will take good care of you.” Recognizing and embracing your anger will help bring relief. Practicing mindfulness of compassion like this, directed toward yourself and toward the person you believe to be the cause of your anger, allows compassion and understanding to arise, and your suffering and anger can begin to melt away. You are able to see the suffering in the other person and you may even find something to say that will help them.
MENTAL FORMATIONS
To be aware of our mind means to be aware of the “mental formations,” our various states of mind. A “formation” is anything that is made of other elements. A flower is a formation, a physical formation. It is made of sun, rain, soil, seed, and so on. Our hand is a physiological formation. Our anger is a mental formation; mindfulness and concentration are also mental formations. According to my tradition, there are fifty-one mental formations. As a young novice, I had to memorize all of them. It is important that we train ourselves to recognize each mental formation when it arises and to call it by its name. Contemplating the mind means contemplating the mental formations.
THE FIVE UNIVERSAL MENTAL FORMATIONS
Of the fifty-one mental formations there are five universal mental formations that are operating all the time: contact, feeling, attention, perception, and volition. They form a sequence, with one mental formation leading to the next, and the whole process from contact to volition can take place in less than a second.
Contact occurs when a sense organ touches a sense object, for example when our eyes see a flower. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our senses are always coming into contact with something. A contact may make an impression that is mild or strong. Only when the intensity of a contact is important enough will attention manifest. Contact also serves as the foundation for feeling to arise. Mindfulness can come in at any time. But if it can be brought in by this point, it can intervene in the process of perception, before the energies of perception and volition push you to respond out of habit.
