Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 119
  2. Consciousness, Name, & Form
     … One good way of getting the right context is to focus on the breath directly as you experience it: coming in and going out, along with the energy flow in the body that allows it to come in and out. Question it on its own terms: Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can change … 
  3. Look at Yourself
     … You notice this especially when you work with the breath. Simply focusing on the breath in a certain way, you immediately get certain results. If you focus with too much force, the breath feels uncomfortable. It feels like it’s been trapped. If your focus is too vague, you find yourself wandering off. So you really want to stay focused right here in a … 
  4. Antidotes for Narcissism
     … When you’re focusing on the breath, you’re mindful of the breath, which means you keep the breath in mind. The actual awareness of the mind comes under sampajañña, alertness.And even that is more focused that simple awareness: You’re alert to what the mind is *doing, *and the results that coming from its doings. So when you reflect on your body … 
  5. Pride in Your Craft
     … So you’ve got to ask yourself, “What am I doing? How am I approaching the breath, how am I relating to the breath in a way that’s causing that fluctuation, causing that stress?” And the mind will move to a different level once you see, “Oh, it’s this. I’m doing this,” and you let go of it, i.e., you … 
  6. Freedom through Restraint
     … The source of everything you’re experiencing in the world is happening right here in the bounds of the mind with the breath together with the body. So don’t think of it as restrictive. When I first ordained, I chafed against the rules a lot. But then I began to realize the fact that we had rules as monks meant that we were … 
  7. A Slave to Craving
     … Or you can stay with the breath and the breath is interesting enough, gratifying enough, pleasurable enough, so that the promise of other pleasures doesn’t really pull you off course. This is part of the Buddha’s strategy to show you there really are better pleasures that you can find here inside that don’t cost any money. You don’t put yourself … 
  8. Dwellings
     … Like right now, you enter into the body, focus on the breath, and then you try to stay. As far as you’re concerned right now, the world outside the range of your body is irrelevant. You want to be totally involved in the world inside the body. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? When you breathe out, where do you … 
  9. Loving Yourself
     … to stay with the breath, to be alert, to be mindful, to put an effort into pursuing the path. You’re going to run up against a lot of other intentions that go crosswise to the path or pull you back in the other direction, so you’ve got to learn how to deal with them. If you deny that they’re there, you … 
  10. How to Use the Teaching on Kamma
     … So if there’s a pain someplace, you can try to adjust the breath to see if that makes a difference, Sometimes you have to put up with the pain. You realize that no matter what you do right now—in terms of how you breathe, how you talk to yourself, the images you hold in mind—there’s going to be pain. But … 
  11. Endurance & Equanimity
     … This is one of the reasons why it’s good to be able to work with the breath. If something negative comes up and you’re sensitive to the breath energies in the body, you’ll know where that negative energy gets lodged and you can breathe through it, empty it out, make sure that you don’t carry it around. I had a … 
  12. Not Pained by Pain
     … Focused on the breath, you learn how to breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of rapture and refreshment; that’s the first step. The second step, you breathe in and out giving rise to a sense of pleasure. The third is that you breathe in and out being sensitive to mental fabrication—in other words, feelings and perceptions. Perceptions, here … 
  13. Fear of Death
     … You can sit here and bathe the body in a sense of ease, in a sense of rapture, simply by focusing on the breath, adjusting the breath so that it’s comfortable, and no one is going to try to steal it from you. Once it really feels good, you can just settle in, letting the breath bathe you on all sides, coming in … 
  14. The Desire for Truth
     … You’re alert to the breath. And then when you learn anything about the relationship between the mind and the breath—how to get the mind to settle down, how to deal with distractions that pull you away—you remember that so that you can put it into practice again. That’s what mindfulness is for. And as you get more precise in observing … 
  15. Assumptions
     … The storms in the mind don’t wipe out the breath—if they did, you would die. The breath is there, and you can make it comfortable. And then starting from that foundation, you can look into that mind-state. Watch it. Is it as steady as you think it is? It comes in its ways. It has its gusts just like the wind … 
  16. Encouragement
     … Once you’ve made up your mind to direct your thoughts to the breath and to evaluate the breath, it’s not the case that you’ll always be directing them there, or that all thoughts would go in that direction. So, you want to learn how to evaluate when something comes up in the mind: Is it Dhamma, or is it not? Among … 
  17. Lessons from Generosity & Virtue
    When you make up your mind to stay with the breath, one of the first things you learn is that your mind probably isn’t as made up as you thought it was. There are many minds in there, many ideas of what you could be doing with this next hour. So when you have that original intention to stay there, you’ve got … 
  18. The Strength of Conviction
     … Well, is there a way you can lure it in, tempt it to stay with the object, make the object more interesting, more attractive—develop greater interest in what, for instance, the breath is doing for your body? It’s a simple process—breathing in, breathing out. But it can have a huge impact on the health of the body, the functioning of the … 
  19. Comparing Mind
     … Breathe in a different way, and then a different way, until you finally gain a sense that the breath has this kind of influence on the mind, this kind of influence on the body. That way, you can start learning how to read what the body and the mind need. It’s not the case that there’s one ideal breath for concentration. Sometimes … 
  20. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … To focus on the breath, to know when it’s coming in, to know when it’s going out, is called focusing on form—the way you feel the body from within. And allow it to be comfortable. After all, the mind won’t stay if it’s not comfortable. As you can depend more and more on the sense of feeling centered, it … 
  21. The Identity Crutch
     … I’ve got some tools I can use with to deal with this problem—things I’ve been learning in dealing with the breath, learning how to focus on the breath, learning how to spread a sense of ease through the body, learning to develop that sense of ease in a way that’s not dependent on things outside. That may be a useful … 
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