Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 121
  2. The Dhamma Wheel in the Heart
     … So hold onto the breath. Stay with it. Hover around the breath the same way you’d hover around a child, a newborn child that has lots of needs. And you’re right here. Ultimately, of course, the child will begin to grow and gradually get a more responsible for itself, and you won’t have to be quite so attentive. But still, you … 
  3. Joy & Discontent
     … Part of it is just staying focused on the breath, having a sense of being with that sensation and not wandering off. But an important part of the meditation is also how you talk to yourself. It’s called directed thought and evaluation. That’s part of right concentration. And even before right concentration, it’s how you talk to yourself throughout the path … 
  4. Discipline
     … Part of that, of course, is giving yourself something attractive to stay with, as when you make the breath attractive. Or contemplation of the body: That can be attractive in some ways. Not in the normal way that we think about attractiveness, but when you start taking an image of your body apart in your mind and say, “This body I have here, in … 
  5. Fires of the Mind
     … In other words, you protect the mind from all other thoughts aside from the one thought of the breath. That’s what you’re going to be burning into. Your focus usually starts off as a very tiny little flame. You’ve got one spot in the body where you’re focused. It’s like setting fire to something that you’ve got to … 
  6. Magha Puja
     … You do your best to alleviate whatever pain there may be, through the breath, through the way you focus on things. But many times there will come a point where nothing you can figure out with the breath helps, nothing you can figure out with the way you focus the mind will help. So you’ve just got to watch so that you can … 
  7. The Roles of Equanimity
     … So instead of getting upset about it, you calm the mind down and watch, because obviously there’s something you don’t understand—maybe in the breath, maybe in the mind—and you’re not going to see these things or understand them unless you just sit with them for a while and watch. Here you keep in mind the attitude that, “Okay, we … 
  8. What Are You Taking into the Future?
     … As for any thoughts that come into the mind that are not related to the body, not related to the breath, realize that they’re not as real as your experience of the body and the breath right now. This is one of our main problems in life: We’re driven by our thoughts, by the little becomings we create in our mind, the … 
  9. Always in Training
     … The technique, of course, is the technique you learn with the breath meditation: When unpleasant feelings arise in the body, or strange energies arise in the body based on greed, aversion, or delusion, you can breathe through them, just as you breathe through a painful or blocked sensation in the body as you’re here meditating. It may be too much to be aware … 
  10. The Values of Stillness
     … It may not have totally done away with it, but at the very least you can fend it off and get back to work, trying to get the mind to settle down with the breath and to stay here without letting it get pushed around by your other concerns. We’d like to have the discernment that would go straight to the jugular, take … 
  11. A Mind Like Earth
     … Ajaan Lee gives some advice on thinking about the breath energies in the body, allowing the pleasure and the rapture to spread. But it’s all very proactive. It’s something you’re doing. You need the mind to be like earth, though, in order to see clearly what you’re doing, the results you’re getting, and to put up with difficult things … 
  12. Strong Through Mindfulness
     … focusing on the breath in and of itself. You want to put aside all the other thoughts. To put them aside, sometimes you just say No to them. Other times, you remember what the Buddha had to say about the drawbacks of that kind of thinking. Sometimes you remember your own ingenuity and remind yourself of why you don’t want to go to … 
  13. Responsible Happiness
     … So see how steadily you can stay with the breath. Any other thoughts that come in right now into the mind, you’re not responsible for them. You don’t have to worry about them. You don’t have to check them out to see whether they’re good or bad or indifferent. You’re giving the mind a chance just to be in … 
  14. Pleasure Has a Price
    When you focus on the breath, think of the whole body breathing. Every cell is engaged in the flow of energy, so that the breath feels spacious, loosens up any patterns of tension in the different parts of the body—so that it feels good to be here inside your body. If you have any diseases or chronic pains, work around them. Instead of … 
  15. Questioning Your Conviction
     … To what extent can you change your form? Well, you work with the breath. How do you change your feelings? You work with the breath. You can change your perceptions more directly. Sometimes this takes willpower. You’re used to perceiving things in a certain way, and the Buddha recommends—or Ajaan Lee recommends—other perceptions. The tendency of the mind is to fall … 
  16. In Training
     … When is the breath long? When is it short? Then you can discern subtler things. How does long breathing feel? Does it feel right for you right now? How about short breathing? Or you can try in long, out short; in short, out long. Fast, slow, heavy, light, deep, shallow. Trying to discern where you feel the breathing in the body. What kind of … 
  17. Craving & Desire on the Path
     … You focus on the breath, developing a feeling of ease using a perception of the breath to hold you in place. You fabricate the processes of directed thought and evaluation to settle in, and you’re aware of all these things. Well, that’s the five aggregates right there—creating right concentration. Then there are four forms of clinging around the aggregates. One of … 
  18. The Uses of Right Concentration
     … You notice: “Oh, something changed here.” The breath changed. Your perception changed. A feeling changed, from rapture to a more easeful pleasure, or from pleasure to equanimity. As you get the mind in and out of concentration, try to notice these changes, because this skill enables you to notice how perceptions and feelings have an impact on your sense of your body and mind … 
  19. A Refuge from Karma
     … We establish mindfulness, say, in the body in and of itself, or in an aspect of the body like the breath. We try to be ardent, alert, and mindful. We put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This world outside that we’ve been taking as our standard: We’ve got to put that aside, at least for the time being … 
  20. A Sense of Yourself
     … Right at the very beginning when you sit down, even before you look at the breath, think about not-self. This teaching is used in different ways at those different stages of the path. If you’re on the verge of becoming an arahant, your main duty is to let go of everything, anything that you might identify with in any way at all … 
  21. Stepping Back
     … Here you are, looking at the breath, and as Ajaan Lee says, “Just four concentrations, and you can’t master them.” The mind keeps slipping off, and no matter how determined you are to stay with the breath, you find yourself someplace else. Often it doesn’t seem like the meditation’s heading in any particular direction — just kind of mucking around — and you … 
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