Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. The Good Side of Kamma
     … As you stay with the breath, you’re learning to be more mindful, more alert, and to put more effort into being skillful about what you’re doing. You begin to see the results of skillful choices right here and now. Pay attention to the breath, stick with it, learning how to focus on it in a way that doesn’t put too much … 
  3. Rewriting the Mind’s Song
     … It’s one of the things that you notice as you try to get the mind to settle down with the breath. All these other things come in beside the breath. They’re background music—and sometimes they drown out the breath. One of the reasons we have the chants at the beginning of the meditation—and that the chants are repeated day after … 
  4. Carrying Your Duties Lightly
     … As soon as a necessary thought or a necessary decision has been made, drop everything, and go back to the breath. If you’re going to carry anything around, carry the breath around, carry your awareness of the body around. So even though you may have to take on the narrative to do your job, you take it on lightly. In this way, you … 
  5. Training in Right Resolve
     … Notice where you feel the breathing most clearly in the body. Focus your attention there, then ask yourself if the breath is comfortable. If you’re not sure, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. See what the body needs right now, see what the mind needs right now, and see if you can bring their needs together. Sometimes the body likes very … 
  6. The Dhamma Eye
     … When you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present, because there is no past breath you can watch, no future breath you can watch, but you can watch the breath right now. As you learn how to watch the breath more and more steadily, it gets easier and easier to watch your own mind to see what’s going on … 
  7. Appreciating Your Practice
     … He would talk about the mind in relationship to the breath: ways of working with the breath, ways of working with the mind, ways of putting them together. When teaching individual people, he would ask them to describe their experience. Then, from their experience, he would give recommendations using their vocabulary. Part of the reason for this was to make sure that people didn … 
  8. Right Speech
    Right Speech November 26, 2007 You’ve probably noticed that, as you sit here meditating—thinking about the breath, evaluating the breath—you’re talking to yourself. You’re reminding yourself, “Now stay here,” commenting on how the breath is, and trying to think up ways that the breath could be better, where to focus, what you find interesting, what you find useful. This … 
  9. Sensitivity & Skill
     … Start out by noticing some spot in the body that’s especially sensitive to how the breathing feels. Try to protect it as you breathe in so that there’s no tensing up in that spot as you breathe in, as you breathe out, or between the breaths. You don’t have to mark the spot between the breaths by squeezing it. Just leave … 
  10. Chanting Before Meditation
     … There’s just your awareness, your body, and the feeling of the breath coming in, going out. Notice where you feel the breath and notice how it feels. You can try some long breathing to start out with, and if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change—make it shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower … 
  11. After-work Meditation
     … But many times it’s hard to get with the breath. So you have to look at what you’re saying to yourself. As you sit down to meditate, what’s the topic of conversation? Instead of doing walking meditation, do talking meditation. We have to learn how to talk well to ourselves. This is what directed thought and evaluation are about. To get … 
  12. Insight into Pain
     … That’s what keeps you in touch with the object, such as the breath. There are many things that you could be sensitive to in your awareness of the body right now, but the Buddha’s asking that you be sensitive to the breath, the in-and-out breath and the other breath energies in the body. You try to stay tuned to that … 
  13. No Mistakes Are Fatal
     … Instead of chattering about things outside, you direct your thoughts to the breath, you evaluate the breath. Then there are the final set of building blocks, feelings and perceptions: feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain, and the labels you put on all these things. You apply all those to the breath as well. So you’ve got all the building blocks … 
  14. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … Focus on the breath. You evaluate the breath. There’s thinking even in the first jhana, as you direct your thoughts to the breath and evaluate it. Notice which ways of breathing feel really good and how to take that good feeling and let it spread around the body, to soak through the body. All you have to do is sit here and breathe … 
  15. Feeding Instructions
     … It’s as if you’re outside the breath a little bit. But then when things are well adjusted, there seems to be a melding as your awareness and the breath become one. Sometimes you have to stay there for long periods of time, but ultimately they will separate out on their own—the awareness and the breath—but not where you might expect … 
  16. You’ve Got Friends
     … With right concentration, you take the breath as your ally. You try to step out of purely mental concerns and focus on the physical sensation of breathing. Then see what you can do to make that comfortable. When I talk about the breath, it’s not just the in-and-out movement of the air, it’s the whole energy flow through the body … 
  17. Bewildered
     … Remind yourself that the breath is there first, the pain came later. So the breath can have priority. See if that switches things around. After all, the pain is what? It’s not any of the elements. It’s not fire, it’s not water, it’s not earth, and it’s not breath—although we do tend to glom it on to the … 
  18. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … So appreciate the breath. Savor the breath. As the Buddha says, when the mind settles down, indulge in it, but make it an indulgence where there’s also a part of the mind separate from the pleasure. It stays with the breath, stays with the cause separate from the pleasure. The mind stays with the breath despite the pleasure, and lets the pleasure do … 
  19. Training Your Commentator
     … What are the causes? You watch the breath and you learn how to be in not too great a hurry to get the results. Patience is required. Another ground rule is that you have to know when not to talk to yourself. One of the times is when you try different things with the breath and nothing seems to work. The mind doesn’t … 
  20. Think Outside the Ruts
     … That’s what the breath provides: a place to stand outside your thoughts. You can be with the breath coming in, breath going out, bathing your body in the breath, bathing your own sense of “you” in the breath—“you” inhabiting the body. You want to fully inhabit the body so that you can get out of your mind, or at the very least … 
  21. Magha Puja
     … What does the path have you do? It’s pretty simple—just stay with the breath. Try to be at ease with the breath. Find a level of breathing that feels soothing and energizing at the same time, one that goes deep down and refreshes the entire body and refreshes the mind. As Ajaan Fuang once said, if you’re going to doubt anything … 
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