Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 107
  2. The Karma of Meditation
     … On days when the breath throughout the body seems like nothing but iron bands, you should just let it go. Think of the breath as a soothing breath, a calming breath, that just radiates. It has no clear lines, no clear boundaries. That can begin to dissolve those iron bands away. Which means that even though there are ingredients coming in from the market … 
  3. To Depend on Yourself
     … You can stay with the breath. If something comes up and you decide to take a little break from the breath and follow this other thing, or just cut it off, that’s your choice right now. But if you want to develop powers of concentration, you have to learn how to cut things off. The important thing is that you realize you do … 
  4. Strength in Humor
     … So, try to find it in the breath. Where is there a sense of fullness in the breath? When you breathe out, do you squeeze at the breath energy? If so, there you are: You’re destroying the potential for fullness. One good exercise is to focus on your hands. Try to relax all the muscles in your hands and keep them relaxed all … 
  5. Taking Charge
     … where you focus, how you focus, how you manipulate the object, like the breath, to get the mind to settle down further. When you know that you’ve reached the point where you don’t need to manipulate it any more, that you can just be with the breath: All of this requires discernment. So if you look carefully at all five of these … 
  6. A Message for the Universe
     … What are the images you use? Which images are useful? Ajaan Lee gives a series of useful perceptions in his seven steps, but then you look at his Dhamma talks, and you can see that he has lots of other ways of perceiving the breath energy as well. So there’s no one “right way” of looking at the breath energy. But there are … 
  7. A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness
     … Try to be fully conscious of the breathing so that you can get the most out of it. We tend to think of breath as just the air coming in and out of the lungs, but there’s more to it than that. There’s the whole energy-flow throughout the body. When you breathe in, energy flows down the nerves, energy flows through … 
  8. Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing
    Try to stay focused on the breath, wherever you feel it most vividly. If you don’t know where it’s most vivid, take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Let it calm down until it feels just right—not too heavy to be comfortable, but not so light that you can’t follow it. And don’t put too … 
  9. Frustrated Desires
     … This is why we try to develop a sense of well-being with the breath, a sense of well-being just in this sense of the form of the body. This is not a sensual pleasure. As the Buddha says, this kind of pleasure is blameless. It’s based simply on inhabiting your body, learning from the breath, learning which ways of breathing feel … 
  10. Saṃvega & Pasāda
     … You can work with the way you breathe, work with the way you conceive of the breath. Think of the breath energy going through the different parts of the body—down the back, out the legs, coming in the base of the spine, going down through the hips, coming in the back of the neck, going down the shoulders, and the arms. There’s … 
  11. Right Resolve, Right Concentration
     … Then you can bring it to the breath. You know that as soon as you leave the breath, you’re going to go back to those same old pointless thoughts, so why go? One of the most effective ways of dealing with distraction is to develop that sense of samvega first as a way of bringing the mind down. It’s in these ways … 
  12. Capable
     … So you stay with the breath. That’s part of the body and it’s already there. What’s going to make a difference is developing those three qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Mindfulness is the ability to keep in mind what you want to do and what you should be doing. Alertness is what watches what’s actually going on—what you … 
  13. The Perfection of Freedom
     … When we meditate, we’re focusing on an intention, the intention to stay with the breath. As you master the ability to stick with that one intention, you’re going to learn an awful lot about intention, as you’re going to learn an awful lot about the breath. But the knowledge about intention is going to more important, because it’s in that … 
  14. Alert
     … In the beginning, it’s hard to look at it directly, so you anchor it with the breath because that’s your guarantee that you’re in the present moment. Without the breath as an anchor, it’s very easy to get carried away into thought worlds that refer to the past, refer to the future, refer to any place but right here, right … 
  15. Using Perceptions
     … So the question is, what perception would be useful right now? We use the perception of the breath, and the Buddha’s perception of the breath may not be what our original perception is. But it’s good to learn how to use his vocabulary, because he provides us with sketches that are useful. Like the sketch of the body, breathing in, breathing out … 
  16. Beyond Inter-eating
     … When that happens, you have to keep reminding yourself, no, come back, come back, come back to the breath. This is where mindfulness comes in: to keep reminding you that sitting around and thinking about whatever kind of thought you like to feed on—whether it’s thoughts of kindness or thoughts of anger; skillful thoughts or unskillful thoughts—you’re continuing the mind … 
  17. Keeping the Buddha in Mind
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has you focus on the breath, and develop mindfulness around the breath. It’s like a string around your finger. Every time you look at the string, you remember why you tied the string around the finger. And here, if you imbue your breath with mindfulness, it means that wherever you go, you’ve got … 
  18. Judging Your Efforts
     … At the very beginning, just try to stay with the breath. You may have been with the breath many times in the past when it worked out well, but today it’s not working out so well. What do you do? You go back to the beginning. A lot of people don’t like that. It’s very discouraging. You keep finding yourself back … 
  19. The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle
     … The form is the form of the breath, the form of the body as you’re aware of the whole body. The feeling is the feeling of pleasure. Perception is the mental image that holds you with the breath. Fabrication consists of your directed thought and evaluation as you adjust the breath to fit with the mind, adjust the mind to fit with the … 
  20. Emptiness
     … What would you like to make present? Well, you’d like to make mindfulness, so you just focus on the breath, and keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath. Don’t worry about how long it’s going to take to get the concentration you want. Just focus on what you’re doing right now. Don’t let your anticipations take over; don … 
  21. Toxic Environments
     … This is one of the reasons why we work with the breath so much in the body. We’re trying to develop a state of concentration that’s strong—full-body awareness, full-body breathing—so that energetically nobody can invade your space. You see some people defining samādhi, the Pali term for concentration, as calm. And calm is part of it, but calm … 
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