Search results for: "The Breath"
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- Choose Your Battles… With the painful feelings, you know how to use the breath to work with pain. You know how to use your understanding of pain to help so that the pain doesn’t overcome you. The same principle applies with hurtful words. Learn to depersonalize them so that they’re not like arrows aimed at your heart. Someone else may be aiming them at your …
- Conditions for Concentration… Ajaan Lee, when he talks about settling down in concentration, has one point where he says that before you focus on the breath, you can contemplate the three perceptions, you can contemplate the body, all kinds of things to get the mind in the right mood. The right mood is one that’s sober, but joyful. Now, you may say, “I came to the …
- Determination… This is one of the reasons why we work with the breath. In the instructions on breath meditation, when the Buddha talks about feelings, the first two steps are to learn how to breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of rapture and feelings of ease. You’re going to need these as you deal with pain, remembering that the pain doesn …
- Cheating the System… This is why we work with the breath in the different parts of the body. Find the comfortable parts and focus there. Find a way of breathing that feels good there, then let that sense of comfortable breathing spread through other parts of the body, so that you feel surrounded by a good feeling. And then you can look into the pain. Ask yourself …
- The Anatomy of the Present… There’s bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, your feelings and the mental labels you apply to things. He also says that we shape our experience of the rest of the aggregates through fabrication, and that fabrication does it for a purpose. We take the raw material coming in from the …
- Caring Without Clinging… As we chanted just now, getting to the point where the breath gets more and more refined, the mind settles in, your sense of awareness fills the body, the sense of breath energy throughout the body feels connected and open, so there’s a less and less need for the in-and-out breath, until you finally get to the point where the in …
- Keep Your Options Open… If you’re practicing jhana, you’re not even focusing on jhana, you’re focusing on your breath, but you’re focusing on the breath not for its own sake—it’s for the sake of the concentration, and you’re developing the concentration for the sake of something unfabricated. Always keep that perspective in the back of your mind, that range of possibilities …
- Action & Result… He teaches you where to focus your attention, say, on the body in itself, the breath in itself, and how to develop powers of mindfulness and concentration around that. When the mind gets well-fed with the concentration, clear with the concentration, then you start asking the right questions. And again, these are questions of action and result—the kinds of questions the Buddha …
- Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds… You’ve got it right here, right at the breath, right at this sense of stillness that you can create in the mind. So try to compare the two, the sense of well-being that comes from the stillness, and then the charge you get out of creating those narratives, fabricating those thoughts about the body and about how you might get somebody else …
- Rooted in Desire… Instead, if you want peace of mind, what do you have to do to get it? Sit down, focus on the breath, each breath as it comes. Learn how to make this breath comfortable, and then the next breath comfortable. And then the next. If some voice in your mind asks, “When is this going to get the peace of mind I want?” Say …
- The Right Attitude to the Body… You focus on the breath, you focus on the elements, i.e., the properties of warmth or coolness, energy, solidity in the body as you feel it from within. You take those as themes for your meditation so that you can develop a sense of ease, a sense of rapture, a really good solid base for your mindfulness and concentration. Then as you maintain …
- Honest & Observant… Then you bring these qualities to bear as you focus on the breath or whatever else your meditation topic might be. Here again, it’s this quality of being reflective: That’s where the Buddha has you focus your powers of observation—on your actions, on your intentions, and on the results of your actions and intentions. You’re looking here at what you …
- A Heart Set on Goodwill… As you’re meditating here, you’re with the breath. Then all the sudden you’re off someplace else. This is why the Buddha never mentioned anything about the mind’s innate nature, aside from the fact that it knows. It’s aware. Beyond that, it can be anything. It’s capable of all kinds of things. He says to look at the animal …
- For Your Future’s Sake… You focus on the present moment, which you can do in terms of getting the mind to settle down with the breath. You’re going to be giving up other things you could have been doing right now. Sometimes you find yourself sitting here in pain, and you wonder, “Why am I putting up with this pain?” But then you realize: Here’s your …
- Complexities of Karma… But you have to ask yourself, “Where can I focus that will get the best results now and on into the long term?” You focus on the breath, which means that you have to pay no attention to the other things. They’re there. It’s not the case that your ears grow deaf or your body gets numb when you get concentrated. It …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… After all, it’s a pleasure that can arise simply by focusing your mind on the breath. You’re not harming anyone at all. And in following this pleasure, you’re not getting intoxicated with youth or health or life or the other things that intoxicate the mind. So it’s a good pleasure to pursue. In this way, jhana was the first factor …
- A Light in the Darkness… Then gradually allow the breathing to settle down to a more comfortable rate. Once it’s comfortable, spread that sense of comfort to fill the whole body and then try to stay very consciously aware of the whole body. Don’t let your awareness shrink. There are other times when the mind has more energy to think, and in that case you’ve got …
- Ultimate Reality… Stay with the breath. You learn best about your intentions if you try to hold on to one intention. Then you see what other intentions come in and try to knock it off balance, knock it off course. If you just follow random intentions here, there, and everywhere, you have no clear idea of what happens as a result of what. But here you …
- The Limits of Control… It’s easier to be mindful when your sense of the breath in the body feels really good. It’s easier to stay with it for long periods of time. So you want to take advantage of that. It’s easier to see things clearly when everything in the mind is very still. Like the water in a lake: If the water is still …
- Mission Possible… Where do you feel that effort, especially where do you feel that effort in the body? Where is there a pattern of tension in the breath energy that allows that thinking to have a foothold in your mind? Can you breathe through that? Then, as a last resort, you crush that unskillful thinking with your determination simply not to think it. That’s when …
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