Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 101
  2. A Multilingual Mind
     … This is why we start with the breath. What kind of breathing is skillful breathing? What kind of breathing is unskillful breathing? What kinds of perceptions are skillful, what kinds are unskillful? The breath and the questions about the breath are all elements in the process of fabrication. When you’re talking to yourself as you meditate, what kind of talking is skillful, what … 
  3. The Meaning of Insight
     … The primary choice will be whether to stay with the breath. You made up your mind at the beginning of the session that that’s what you’re going to do. See what happens when you stick with that decision. Each time the question comes up and there’s a little stirring of a thought in the mind, choose to come back to the … 
  4. The Need for Right View
    As you focus in on the breath and try to stay with the breath, you’ll notice that there’s a commentary going on in the background. It might be as simple as the reminder: “Stay with the breath. Stay with the breath.” Or it may be more elaborate. And as much as we’d like to think that there’s a simple, pure … 
  5. Feeding your Attack Dogs
     … So prepare yourself for the fact that the mind is going to leave the breath. There will be a lot of vagrant intentions that don’t fall in line with the initial intention, which was to stay here with the breathing, to try to stay concentrated all through the hour. You’ve got to watch out for the present karma of when you decide … 
  6. Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
     … Learn to think about the breath in a way that makes it easier to breath. For example, you can try holding in mind the perception that your body is like a big sponge, and the breath is coming in and out every pore of the skin. Think of the breath as an energy field that fills the body, and see what that does to … 
  7. Goodwill & Kamma
     … And so it’s the intention there that’s important, the intention to pay attention to the breath continuously, that keeps that feeling going. Two, the Buddha’s also reminding you that you don’t switch your attention away from the breath to focus in on the feeling. If you do, everything gets very blurred. Either you lose your concentration or you goes into … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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