Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 128
  2. Rites of Passage
     … Simply be with the sense of the breath coming in, going out, allowing it to fill the body. Allow it to find its own right rhythm. You nudge it a little bit here, nudge it a little bit there to make it feel good, and this makes it easier to get pulled into the present moment rather than into the future or the past … 
  3. Examine Your Happiness
     … You’re feeding off of the breath, the ease you can create with the breath. You’re also feeding off of the steadiness of the intentions that keep you here. But over time, you get more and more sensitive to the fact that even the steadiness of concentration is not totally steady. It involves a very subtle kind of movement, back and forth—sometimes … 
  4. Wisdom for Dummies Revisited
     … This is one of the reasons why, when we meditate, we work with the breath to gain a sense of well-being. The good part of the mind needs help. And working with the breath gives the rest of the mind a sense of well-being as well, gives the whole body a sense of well-being—so that the next time you think … 
  5. Guardian Meditations
     … We talk a lot here about the breath. As Ajaan Lee says, that’s home base among the various meditation topics, but then there are other topics that he calls your “foraging areas”—in other words, places where the mind can go, and where it sometimes has to go in order to get it to settle down, when it won’t settle down with … 
  6. In Line with the Dhamma
     … Do what you can to make it intriguing, this process of learning to understand the mind, learning to understand the breath energy in the body, how you can use that breath energy as an aid in you practice. Develop an interest in it. Let it capture your imagination. The road to dispassion has to lead through desire and imagination skillfully applied. This doesn’t … 
  7. The Skill of Restraint
     … You want to be able to stay in the body as you look, as you listen, to maintain your sense of the breath energy throughout the body. If you can’t, that’s a sign either that you’re looking for the purpose of forgetting the body — in other words, you’re looking for the purpose of greed, anger, or delusion — or you’re … 
  8. Views & Vision
     … Can you learn how to develop a sense of detachment from your own body now, so you’re not afraid to let it go when you have to? And then mindfulness of the breath is a practice for developing all those good qualities that you need to make your aims a reality: mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration, and discernment. This is the recollection that you … 
  9. Quality
     … You’ve got the breath. You’ve got the mind that’s both thinking and aware. That’s what you know. Anything that goes out beyond that, you don’t know for sure. So stick with just what you know. Bring all these things together: body, breath, thinking, awareness. As for anything else, just keep reminding yourself, “I don’t know that. I don … 
  10. The Second Noble Truth
     … As we stay with the sensation of the breath, we’re inhabiting the body from the inside: That’s called form. Another level of becoming is on the formless level. Once you get the mind into deeper stages of concentration, based on a perception of infinite space or infinite consciousness, that’s formless. All three of these levels count as states of becoming and … 
  11. In Alignment
     … Keep the breath balanced. Experiment a bit to see what feels just right. Just like a balance trying to find its point of an even keel, it’ll lean a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, but just enough so that you eventually know what’s straight up and down. Then try to keep it there. This is our … 
  12. The Lightning Bolt
     … We take the breath as our home base, as the object we keep returning to, because as the Buddha said, it’s the best one for clearing unskillful states out of the mind, like rain clearing the dust out of the air. But there are times when simply sitting here with the breath is not going to be enough. So you can stop and … 
  13. Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute
     … Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the breathing process in the body. Try to focus your attention there and keep it there. And to make it more interesting, try to notice what type of breathing feels good. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. Short in long out … 
  14. An End to Suffering
     … They’re told to look at the breath and they figure out something else they’ve got to do instead. Or they’re told to look at their own mind and they figure out something else they’ve got to do instead. Anything but looking at their own mind. And then, when they don’t get results from the meditation, they blame the Buddha … 
  15. Investment Strategies
     … As you’re sitting here focusing on the breath, you’re developing qualities that will be very useful, such as mindfulness and alertness. In other words, when you see the mind moving into unskillful directions, you can hold it in check and bring it back to the breath. And you can try to remember, as best you can, what is skillful at any particular … 
  16. Four Determinations
     … This is why, in the breath meditation instructions, you’re taught to energize yourself, and then calm bodily fabrication, eventually to the point where the breath stops. You energize yourself with rapture and feelings of pleasure, and then you calm mental fabrication even to the point where perceptions and feelings stop. That’s the direction we’re headed. Now, you don’t just suppress … 
  17. The Big Picture
     … Keep it focused on the breath. And there’s mental fabrication, perceptions—the labels you put on things—and then feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Pay careful attention to that. These are the things you use to take the raw material provided by your past karma and turn it into your experience of the present moment. And they’re … 
  18. Desires Have Their Reasons
     … And working with the breath is a really good way of doing this. Not only does it provide you with a state of concentration, but it also helps you see how sometimes your desires highjack the energy in your body—put a squeeze on your nerves, as they say in Thailand—to make you do things that part of you knows are not all … 
  19. Abandoning & Developing
     … Do you have the qualities of mind that help you stay with the breath? ** The two main sets of qualities that the Buddha teaches in that context are the hindrances on the one hand, and the factors for awakening on the other. They’re a paired set. Often you see them together in different contexts in the Canon. What separates them and makes them … 
  20. Friends Inside & Out
     … That’s why you want to look more deeply into the breath, look more deeply into what it’s like for the mind to settle down and really feel secure here. As the Buddha says, as we’re practicing we’re trying to see something we’ve never seen before. That means we have to do things we’ve never done before. A lot … 
  21. Training Your Selves
     … The world here, of course, is the world of your experience inside the body as you relate to the breath. As for you, you’re the one focusing, and you’re the one who’s enjoying the sense of ease that comes when you do it right. But you’re also the one who comments on when it’s not going well, why is … 
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