Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 129
  2. The Shape of a Circle
     … And as you’re going through the day, try to keep in touch with the breath as much as you can. Try to nurse the intention that wants to stick with the practice and don’t push it aside. All too often, you allow your other intentions to get in, and they crowd out your original intention. They make sneering remarks about it or … 
  3. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … He’d somehow gotten the idea that if you breathed with your entire body so that the breath came in and out every pore, it would blow the mosquitoes away. But it wasn’t happening for him. So he opened his eyes one night when Ajaan Lee was up on the Dhamma seat giving the Dhamma talk, to see if Ajaan Lee was blowing … 
  4. A Well-Thatched Roof
     … the ability to keep the mind focused on the breath and the right attitudes that allow us to see these affairs of the world for what they are. They’re not really us, not really ours; they’re just part of the world. They’re like money. You may have money in your pocket, but it’s not really yours. It’s printed by … 
  5. Indecision
     … We put those aside and we’re just here with the breath coming in, going out. This is called the pleasure of form, as you work with the breath so that it feels good all the way down through the torso, and other related energies feel good going all the way down the arms and the legs. This is called the pleasure of renunciation … 
  6. Expanding Your Awareness
     … Another way of expanding your awareness is to keep expanding it through the body as you work with the breath energy in the body. You get a sense of comfort from the way you breathe and you think of it seeping out through all the channels of in the body in whatever way it’s going to go. If you try to force it … 
  7. An Enduring Cheerfulness
     … Part of the source of that strength was that I was engaged in an exploration, learning about the breath, learning about the mind. When you’ve been meditating for a long time, you tend to forget how precious this opportunity is, how rare it is, and what a good opportunity it is to be with your mind. You may have decided you don’t … 
  8. Commit, Reflect, Discern
     … Okay, what’s the problem? Is the problem with the mind, or is the problem with the breath? You can change the way you breathe to see if that makes any difference. Or you can switch to another topic, such as spreading thoughts of goodwill. When you spread thoughts of goodwill, you may run into thoughts of somebody you don’t feel goodwill for … 
  9. Growing Up Inside
     … The sense of ease and well-being that you can create with the breath, the sense of feeling balanced and stable, means that the fact that you’re giving up certain old ways of thinking and acting and speaking, doesn’t make you feel deprived. You’re gaining something better: an opportunity to get the mind really to settle down. And the fact that … 
  10. Endurance with a Purpose
     … We think of the breath not as the air coming in out of the lungs, but as the energy flow that goes through the body. You can ask yourself: Where does the energy flow seem to be good right now? Don’t focus on any area where there’s a pain. Focus on the parts that you can make comfortable by the way you … 
  11. Questioning & Acceptance
     … breathing in long, breathing out long, breathing in short, breathing out short; figuring out how to breathe aware of the whole body; noticing how the fact of the breath bodily fabrication can be brought to stillness, how it can give rise to a sense of rapture, how it can give rise to a sense of pleasure. There’s an active element of exploring aspect … 
  12. Fabricating Goodwill
     … We usually don’t think about this while we’re meditating on the breath, but it’s good at the end of the session—if you know you’re going to get into a difficult situation in the course of the day—to think about how you can behave, how you can breathe, how you can talk to yourself, the images you want to … 
  13. A Refuge from Death
     … So when you find the mind wandering off, bring it back to the breath. If it keeps wandering off, look at the things that you’re wandering off to feed on. Look for their drawbacks. When anger comes up, ask yourself: Why are you angry? What do you get out of it? If you look at it with a fair mind, you realize you … 
  14. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … You keep in mind that you don’t want to get sucked in to your thoughts, and so you develop mindfulness but staying focused on the breath, or the body in and of itself, as your frame of reference. Any thoughts that would pull you into thought worlds you put aside. If you get worked up about something that you want in the world … 
  15. Finding the Openings
     … just the breath out of somebody’s mouth, which goes, what, five miles per hour? Who knows how fast. It blows your mind all over the place. A word of praise, and your mind gets all blown up. A word of criticism, and your mind gets blown around. So, you have to learn how to get your mind to offer less resistance to the … 
  16. Meaning Through Perfections
     … focusing on the breath as you feel it; breathing in a way that gives rise to a sense of well-being. This is a pleasure that’s not sensual. It’s the pleasure of form. And it doesn’t have the drawbacks of sensuality. This is one way you can develop perfections: simply by finding your happiness here. As you go through the day … 
  17. An Auspicious Night
     … He says: “Once there’s a sense of ease and well-being, let that spread throughout the whole body.” How do you let it spread? Ajaan Lee found that you can do it through using the breath energy: thinking of the breath energy being connected to the in-and-out breath and permeating all the nerves of the body, out to every pore. It … 
  18. Death Is Normal
     … So try to make your mind as One as you can with the breath. And from there, radiant thoughts of goodwill—to the person who’s died and to all the people who have died today. In that way, you can help the others at the same time as you’re soothing your own mind. It’s good to listen to wise sayings to … 
  19. Dignity in the Face of Hardship
     … We can fabricate our inner conversation around the breath. We can fabricate the perceptions that we bring to the meditation. When we learn these skills in the meditation, we can apply them to everything else. Whatever happens in life, we can see: How are we breathing? How are we talking to ourselves about this? What perceptions, what feelings are we focusing on? It’s … 
  20. Acceptance
     … You’re sitting here with the breath, and suddenly there’s an impulse to go someplace else. You have to examine the impulse, learn how to say No, and learn how to make the No stick. Sometimes you can do that simply by noticing, “Oh. Here comes an impulse heading in the wrong direction,” and the impulse drops away. You’re back with the … 
  21. The World Is Swept Away
     … The process of sitting right here with the mind on the breath, thinking about and evaluating the breath, perceiving and feeling the results: All the factors you’re going to need to know are right here, and yet you tend to look past them. So try to keep your focus right here. The irony of it all is that the more “right here” you … 
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