Search results for: "The Breath"
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- Encourage Yourself… We often think meditation means not thinking—just focusing on the breath and coming back, coming back, coming back. But there are times when that just doesn’t seem to work and you’ve got to sit down and encourage yourself. A good part of meditation is skillful thinking: how to think when you’re angry to get past the anger. How to think …
- Negative Emotions… So even though it sometimes may seem dumb just to keep coming back to the breath, coming back to the breath, it’s a basic, necessary skill. Without this, you can’t really see anything. All you have are ideas you’ve picked up from books, you’ve picked up from other people. Then you try to sketch in the blank spaces, but it …
- Meditation as a Skill… How does the mind like to settle down? When it does settle down, what’s the breath like? Where are you settled? And what is the quality of your awareness? Each time you meditate, at the end of the meditation, ask yourself these questions. At what point was the meditation especially good? Try to notice those different features. Then see if you can recreate …
- Restraint… You’re making the breath your post and you have a sense of well-being that fills the whole body, so that you don’t feel hemmed in when restraining your senses. You can even think of the breath energy around the body. You’ve got a breath-energy cocoon. Is the cocoon of energy in good shape? It’s your electromagnetic force field …
- The Heart to Keep Going… If you’re aiming to get the mind with the breath, that counts as your intent to get away from sensuality—your desire to get away from sensuality—and you should try to strengthen that. Then you try to figure out ways to remind yourself of why you’re doing this, to keep yourself motivated. You can use the principle of heedfulness, realizing that …
- Mindful of the Buddha’s Shoulds… You focus on the breath—you have to remind yourself to stay with the breath. In some cases, you actively have to talk to yourself, especially if the mind finds it hard to settle down. You have to ask yourself, “Why?” Try to figure it out. There will be an inner conversation, and when you figure out the problems, you can settle in more …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… So we work with the breath and what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication. This is the energy that fabricates our sense of the body. Try to work with it in a way that feels refreshing so that you can have a basis for your goodwill. And then learn how to think properly about goodwill. What does it mean? You’re wishing that all beings …
- When You Don’t Like Your Selves… So the Buddha’s teaching you how to seize the breath back, getting sensitive to long breathing, short breathing. Learn how to breathe aware of the whole body, learn how to calm bodily fabrication down. Those are the four big steps. It’s as if the Buddha’s sketching out an outline for you, and then the various teachings we get, say, from Ajaan …
- Make the Most of Right Now… Either you take it as an object of contemplation, or you focus on the breath: contemplating the thirty-two parts of the body or focusing on the breath to develop a sense of relative well-being. You know that you’re going to have to give it up anyway, but it’s better to give it up understanding why you took it up to …
- Potentials for Good… When you breathe in, which part of the body seems to be feeding most off of the breath, gaining the most energy? Focus there. As for the parts of the body that can’t be made pleasant right now, just leave them alone. Focus on the areas where you can make it good. And from just ordinary good it can also become really, really …
- Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind… We try to settle the mind with one object, like the breath, and bring the mind to the object in a way that it feels at ease and has a sense of fullness, refreshment. So we work with the breath to see what kind of breathing would feel good, and then we learn to live with that sense of well-being. This is why …
- Think of the Consequences… Then, when you can stay with the breath and it’s comfortable, allow your awareness to spread so that you feel like the whole body is breathing in, the whole body’s breathing out. If the breath gets comfortable when the area of awareness is too small, you lose your focus on the body. You drift away. So keep the range of your awareness …
- Maintaining Stillness… That’s where you need to use your powers of endurance, your powers of ingenuity, all your mental abilities to learn how to keep the mind here with the breath in the present moment in a way that you can maintain steadily, continuously. Part of this involves getting the breath comfortable, part of it involves learning how to take that sense of comfort and …
- Discernment Is in the Doing… So as you’re sitting here, working with the breath, you’ve got to learn how to evaluate the breath on your own, to see what kind of breathing feels good for you right now. You won’t have a monk wandering through the room, telling you, “Now you’ve got to breathe in long, now you’ve got to breathe in short, heavy …
- Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna… There’s the breath—that’s bodily fabrication. Okay, you’re focused on the breath. Then there’s verbal fabrication—directed thought and evaluation—that’s how you talk to yourself. They’re two of the factors of the first jhāna. Then there’s mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions. States of right concentration all the way up through the dimension of nothingness are called …
- Standing Where the Buddha Stood… bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. As you move the mind through the levels of jhana, directed thought and evaluation get abandoned on the second level. That’s where they grow still. Then bodily fabrication, the in-and-out breath, grows still in the fourth. What you’ve got …
- Acceptance… If the mind won’t stay with the breath, is there something wrong with the breath? How about the mind? Is it carrying around some moods from the day? What can you do to put those moods aside? You can change the way you think, you can change the way you breathe, you can change the feelings and perceptions you focus on and hold …
- Injustice… One way to break the cycle is to focus on where’s the tension or tightness in your breathing that goes along with the anger, because it’s through the breath that the mind can have an effect on the body. It’s through the breath that the body can have an effect on the mind. So you consciously try to breathe in a …
- The Power is in Your Hands… This is what we’re here for, focusing on the breath so that we can bring some knowledge to the present moment because the breath is our anchor in the present. And it turns out that it’s one of the forms of fabrication that, if you do it in ignorance, is going to lead to suffering. So focus right here. That’s your …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… It’s important, when the mind does begin to gain a sense of well-being from the breath, that you don’t leave the breath to go for the pleasure. Because that would undercut your concentration, and the foundation for the pleasure would fall away. Either that or you’d just drift off into a pleasant spot where you’re not quite sure if …
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