focus

The speaker discusses different ways to concentrate the mind without causing tension. They suggest focusing on various objects such as a candle, flower, or bowl of water. They also mention the option of using images, statues, or inspirational quotes to concentrate on. Other suggestions include using an oil burner or stick of incense for fragrance. The speaker mentions the practice of building a shrine with flowers, fruit, water, perfume, incense, and sacred texts for more focused concentration. They also mention using letters from different languages or tarot cards for concentration. Chanting and mantras are also suggested. The speaker advises trying different methods to see what works best. Hi everyone, I thought today I'd talk a little about concentration, different ways of concentrating the mind. Now this is an interesting dilemma because part of the thing about concentration is people associate it with tension and quite often it produces tension. You don't want to do that. You want to focus and keep your mind or your attention on something, and I've described various options, but you want to relax all the time whilst doing it. And so that's why, and I'll give you some examples of things to concentrate on. One of the most common ones is a candle. A candle is a very good thing to focus on and relax into and keep bringing the attention back. So you light a candle, it could be a tea light. You could even, with a lot of these images and these things to concentrate on, you could actually just have a virtual, there are virtual candles that you can have on your phone. You just put that there and you've got an instant candle shrine. So a candle is one thing. Another thing which is very neutral, very easy, is a flower. You can have a flower in water. So a bowl of water is another one, just on its own, just a bowl of water. But a flower in the water, perfect. And it starts to get more complicated. You can actually have a candle, a flower and a bowl of water and you're starting to develop, if you're religious, a shrine, a type of shrine. But you might just not be interested in that. So just having an image or a statue that is in some way inspirational to you, that may be sufficient. So you're just focusing on an image. You're relaxing into an image. You're thinking around the various associations because the associations will come up. You bring it back to the image or to the statue. You might have an inspirational statue of a person you admire or whatever. Another one is an inspirational quote which you can keep going over in different ways in your mind. So you have that quote there and you focus on that. Your mind will try and move away and it will, quite naturally. You allow that but you bring it back to the quote because you don't want to go into too much area away from the central focus. What is a flower? So that's another possibility. An oil burner. You can have an oil burner, so you've got a candle there and you can just focus on the fragrance, the smell. The smell may disappear after a while but you can try and bring it back. Or a stick of incense, that would work as well. Now if we go towards the idea of a shrine, I used to do a practice, a tantric practice where we used to build a shrine every morning and it used to have flowers on it and fruit on it and a bowl of water and some perfume, some incense and text, sacred text and what have you, and images of the Buddha. So that's my main practice, is Buddhist tantra. Teachers, lamas, whatever we had available. And it would change every day. We'd set up this shrine, if you like, and then do chanting. So this is another way of focusing, actually having a full shrine of some sort. But you can have it much simpler. For example, in Shingon, they use letters. They use letters from the kanji, the Japanese script. And you can do that in other languages as well, where you focus on a seed syllable and it has associations for you. Well, that may not suit people who don't understand that language. There's no reason why you can't use the English alphabet and go through the letters and find what associations those have for you. If you're a pagan, it may be that you find particular images or something like tarot cards and you have a particular tarot card and you focus on the attributes and you keep your attention on that particular tarot card. You can listen to a chant. A chant is a very good thing, I find. I mean, it can be something like, you know, relax, relax, calm. Or it can be just the repetition of a mantra, which has some associations with calm and relaxation for you. So it is very much something where you've got to be careful with this because you're trying to focus on it and you're also trying not to fall asleep because that is a form of induction. Repetition is a form of, sort of, makes you sleepy and calm. And some people may want that so that it works for them quite well. Anyway, those are some of the possibilities that are open to people in terms of concentration. You can try all of them, see which ones work for you. And there's other, there's more advanced ways of doing these things which we may come to later. Anyway, I hope that's of some use. Okay, bye now.