Search results for: "The Breath"
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- Virtue… When your thoughts, words, and deeds are within the precepts, it’s easy to get the mind to settle down and to stay with the breath in the midst of what you’re doing. After all, the things that destroy your meditation, the things that destroy you focus in the course of the day, are not just the sights and sounds and smells and …
- Not-self… You hold on, though, to the breath, or whatever your object of concentration is. You develop qualities of virtue, concentration, and discernment so that you can apply them to that problem of why you crave things even though the craving itself causes suffering and stress. After all, suffering is not going to end until you abandon the craving. In fact, that’s what the …
- Patience & Endurance… It’s interesting to note, though, that when the Buddha taught breath meditation to his son, he didn’t start out with the breath. He started out with teachings on patience and endurance: to make your mind like earth; make your mind like water, wind, fire. Earth is unmoving. The others move, but they don’t react to unpleasant things. In other words, you …
- Dispassion… Every little sliver of time you might find to stay with the breath, you do that. Keep at it. Keep at it. So develop passion for the goal of dispassion. And then, ultimately, you use dispassion to reach the point where the mind is beyond both. The freedom the Buddha’s talking about is that total. If we work in this direction, then we …
- To Comprehend Craving… It’s good to create a sense of well-being here by the way you breathe and work with the breath energies throughout the body so that you feel good being here, and not want to slip away. That way, you can watch as other potential becomings come up and not get pulled into them. You want to know them because the becomings on …
- Purity of Heart… In other words, use the breath as your food. This involves using the food of contact, intellectual intention, and consciousness, but you turn these things into good, strong states of concentration: a more harmless form of feeding. That way, you have something to compare: There’s this kind of feeding, and then there’s the ordinary kind of feeding that goes on out there …
- Skillful Desire… Find a spot in the body where it’s easiest to remain focused on the breath. Watch over your breath so that it stays comfortable at that spot. When the sense of comfort seems relatively steady, you expand it. Think of it seeping through all the nerves and blood vessels in the body, as far as you can go. And then see if you …
- Initiative… If you wallow in the pleasure, you leave the breath and fall into delusion concentration. So have a sense of spending your pleasure in the most fruitful way. And then finally, listen to the voices inside, listen to the voices outside, that advise you how to develop your conviction even further, how to develop your virtue, your generosity, and especially your discernment even further …
- Goodwill Plus… Of course, you’re focusing on the breath element, to get it steady, easeful, nourishing. Then you look at the mental factors. There are perceptions and feelings, and here the Buddha adds attention and intention: What are you going to pay attention to as you deal with other people? You pay attention to the fact that they want happiness. They may have some pretty …
- Not-self for the Sake of Happiness… You can change the perceptions you have around the breath and how you’re relating to the body. Whatever sense of “you” you have right now comes from control. We exert this control to find happiness, and it’s in this way that we develop the three main roles of our sense of self. There’s the sense of self as the producer that …
- To Know the Buddha… He talks about what you can learn by learning how to breathe aware of the whole body, learning how to calm the breath, learning how to breathe in ways that give rise to rapture, pleasure, to breathe in ways that allow you to be sensitive to how feelings have an impact on the mind, how your perceptions have an impact on the mind, and …
- Willing to Learn… When you meditate, you learn the instructions on how to breathe, how to work with the breath. Then you try them out and look at what you’ve got. If the results aren’t good, go back and look at what you’re doing again. Think about it. What’s still missing? Try to be observant. Look around. Ask questions if you can’t …
- A Promise to Yourself… Anything that comes in to pull you away from the breath right now, you’ve got to say No, No, No. Sometimes you have to give yourself reasons. As you can imagine, discernment is also a promise you make to yourself. You could sit there and just bliss out in the concentration and decide, “Well, this is good enough for me.” But then you …
- Intelligent Restraint… working with the breath, visualising the different parts of the body, whatever has you grounded in the body right now. Try to do it with a sense of ease. For example, if you’re thinking about the bones in the body, you can start with the bones at the tips of the fingers. Ask yourself, where are those bones right now? Do you feel …
- Good Fences… That’s bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, how you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the feelings in the body that you’re focusing on. You can make a situation really bad by focusing on how miserable you feel. But you can look for the other parts of the body that are not so miserable. And, of course, you can breathe in ways …
- Appropriate Attention… In other words, you try to remember to stay with the breath. If you wander off, you come right back. To develop mindfulness, you need alertness and ardency. Alertness means watching what you’re doing as you’re doing it and seeing the results. Ardency means trying to do this well. So when you’ve made up your mind that you want to stay …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… Now’s some free time to think about x.” And you suddenly find yourself away from the breath, away from the meditation. Then, you come back and then there’s another opinion about y—or how about z?—and, if you spend your time stamping out all those different opinions, it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole. A mole comes up out of a …
- The Dhamma Protects… Breathing mindfulness is not just a matter of sitting there and not reacting to anything or letting the breath do its own thing. It’s full of trainings. Once you’ve gotten sensitive to how long breathing feels and how short breathing feels, then you start training yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body, to breathe in and out in …
- Meditator, Mediator… Try to develop a sense of ease in the body, ease with the breath, ease being in the present moment. When you feel physically at ease, it’s a lot easier to be in a good mood and not feel so desperate, not be so impatient, because it’s our desperation or impatience that makes it difficult for us to talk. It makes it …
- In the Land of Wrong View… This is one of the reasons that Ajaan Lee, for example, talks about having the breath as your friend—because being able to stay in touch with your breath helps you watch the motions of your mind. It helps to alert you to when you’ve picked up germs from other people. And in terms of your reading and the things you listen to …
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