Concentration of attention (Mindfullness)

After I retired, I went to work in Thailand. There I became interested in Buddhism.

One of my colleagues, a physics professor, came to work sad one day. I asked what happened. She killed a mosquito. She is a Buddhist and wants to live her life in a way that does not violate the precepts of Buddhism. Then her life on this earth will be the last. After death, her soul will no longer reincarnate into other living beings, but will go into nirvana. She did not want to kill, but automatically she slapped her leg, and then she realized that she had killed the mosquito.

Murder in Buddhism is a great sin. Monks should not work, because they can accidentally kill some kind of living thing, for example, cut a worm if they dig up the ground.

In Thailand, I have not met a single local who was not a Buddhist.

There are no Buddhist schools in Thailand. Buddhism is studied in monasteries, in practice. Everyone can come to the monastery and live there for 7 days or a month or a year or as long as he wants. It's free.

My colleagues lived in monasteries for some time during their school years, and then during their lives they sometimes live in monasteries for 7 days or for a month.

I went to one of these monasteries. The monastery had a campus for foreigners. They spoke English there. Life on campus I described in detail in my blog [1].

We practiced, among other things, Mindfulness.

Mindfulness is concentration of attention.

It was necessary to concentrate only on what you are doing at the moment. For example, one of exercises was to walk for half an hour, putting the heel to the toe and not be distracted from this for a single second. It's hard and terribly boring. I did these exercises, but every time I thought that it was just a waste of time. Now, more than 10 years later, I have realized how important concentration is in my daily life now, and I think also in the lives of many of my peers who may come into the room and forget why they came there, make coffee, but forget to turn on the coffee maker, look around the house for keys or a phone. Concentrating attention will help to avoid these troubles. It is achieved through training. You need to fully focus on what you are doing at the moment.

1.      Buddhism in Thailand II

https://galinapop.blogspot.com/2010/03/buddhism-in-thailand-ii.html