Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
     … They are thoughts that have provoked reactions in the breath that can lead to a lot of discomfort, tension, or exhaustion, depending on how you breathe around a particular emotional issue. Those feelings seem a lot more believable, even when they’re crazy, because they’re in the body. You feel like they’re surrounding you. We tend to take our feelings and our … 
  3. Interdependence & Death
     … There are some people who say, “Well, you wouldn’t have any breath at that point.” But when you’re working with the breath, it’s not just the breath you’re working with. When the Buddha talks about working with the sixteen steps of breath meditation, he’s also talking about mental fabrication, and the instructions themselves are in the form of verbal … 
  4. Escape from Inter-eating
     … So to train the mind, you sit here moment-by-moment, breath-by-breath, watching the mind as it stays with the breath because the movements of the mind are important. And you don’t really know them until you see how they begin. This means that we’re not here just to rest or get some stress reduction. We get the mind still … 
  5. Refuge for All Beings
     … A feeling of ease comes up and it’s all too easy to leave the breath and wallow around in the pleasure for a while. The pleasure will stay for a bit, and then it’ll turn into something else. Because the cause of the pleasure was that you had constant alertness to the breath. So you keep the cause going, and the pleasure … 
  6. Cooking with Kamma
     … Your intention to stay with the breath, that’s a kind of kamma in the present moment. But then these other habits that pull the mind back: A part of them come from your past kamma, the part that just appears on its own. And then you’ve got the question, are you going to stay with the breath or are you going to … 
  7. Overwhelmed by Freedom
     … As Ajaan Fuang made clear, my only responsibility was to stay with the breath. And my mind was overwhelmed at the prospect of that kind of freedom: overwhelmed in the sense that I didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t know if I could handle it—a whole afternoon with nothing to do—and I watched my mind as it was … 
  8. Do, Maintain, Use
     … You come to the meditation, you come to your object—like the breath—and then, if you find yourself wandering away, you just have to come right back. It may seem that the concentration comes and goes and comes and goes without any continuity. But what you’re doing here is that you’re learning how to connect those moments of concentration. Each time … 
  9. The Heightened Mind
     … Try to blot them out with the breath. You can see where they’re forming, what spot in the body is tense as the thought begins to form. Well, breathe right through it. If a picture appears in the mind, blot it out with the perception of light—anything to remind yourself that these things are little states of becoming that you could enter … 
  10. Customs of the Noble Ones
    Try to content yourself with the breath right now. After all, it is a path, a path that leads somewhere good, and it doesn’t save all of its goodness for the end of the path. If you’re willing to watch the breath, get to know it, play with it a bit, try to see what kind of breathing feels good, it gives … 
  11. The Power of the Mind
     … So tell it to stay with the breath. Tell it to settle in with the breath in a way that feels really good. Tell it to ask questions about how to settle in well: what kind of breathing feels good right now, and when it does feel good, what to do with it. It’s all very simple, but you want the power of … 
  12. Responsibilities
     … In the same way, when we take on the issues of the world and give them our total attention, our sense of the breath inside the body, our sense of our being grounded in the body, gets shriveled away. And in the same way that that pregnant grasshopper was getting ready to die, basically, our sense of our inner core, our inner center, can … 
  13. To the Far Shore
     … Yet you find that if you put them together in the right way, as you are when you’re getting the mind in concentration—you focus on the breath to create a feeling of ease, you use the perception of the breath filling the body, the ease filling the body, you think about how to improve the breath, to make it more comfortable, how … 
  14. An Admirable Friend — In Memory of Luang Loong
    Bring your awareness to the breath, wherever you feel it in the body. And allow it to be comfortable. As you stick with the breath, you’re developing good qualities in the mind. It’s called *bhavana *in Pali: developing mindfulness, concentration, discernment, persistence. Underlying all this is the conviction that this is really useful, this is really a worthwhile project: training the mind … 
  15. The World of the Body
     … We’ve got this body that we can use to practice, and we can learn how to understand how the mind causes itself suffering by examining the body, by staying with the breath, trying to be centered here in the body, because it’s right in here where things are going to become clear. When you’re focused on the breath, you’re right … 
  16. Restraint Leads to Freedom
     … The object you’re focusing on, the breath, fills the whole body. But to get there, you have to start out with restraint. The mind has to stay with the body in and of itself, and you have to put aside all thoughts with reference to the world. That’s the description of mindfulness practice, but it’s also the description of how you … 
  17. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … You’re focused on the breath. That’s part of form. You’re trying to create a feeling of pleasure. To stay focused requires a perception, a mental image of the breath that you keep in mind. And then you talk to yourself about how well it’s working, trying to get the mind to fit snugly with the breath: That’s fabrication. Then … 
  18. Right View Comes First
     … Like we’re doing right now, finding happiness in being with the breath, finding pleasure in the breath: It’s not a sensual object, it’s a pleasure of form—the body as you feel it from within. It doesn’t have most of the drawbacks of sensuality. It doesn’t require that you take anything much from anyone else. The breath is yours … 
  19. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … For instance, with the breath: When a strong emotion comes on, you can’t just talk yourself out of the emotion. You have to realize that the emotion has hijacked your breath and you’ve got to get it back. Otherwise, you feel like the emotion is penetrating your whole body, and the voice of reason has very little purchase there. So you’ve … 
  20. The Dhamma Eye
     … In this case, we’re focusing on the breath. Be mindful of the breath. In other words, keep the breath in mind. Be alert to it, what’s happening. And be ardent in trying to stay settled with it, concentrated on it. This combination of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency is what brings the mind into concentration. And what’s good about concentration? It enables … 
  21. Protection
     … So, one, keep the breath comfortable; two, allow good breath energy to fill the body, keep it filling the body as constantly as possible. That gives a lot of protection right there. These skills that you learn while you’re meditating here are not just for while you’re sitting with your eyes closed. They’re meant to be used in all situations. And … 
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