Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. All-around Knowing
     … You have the breath flowing down the spine, the breath coming in at the middle of the chest at the heart and then going down into the intestines, the breath going down the shoulders, the arms, and the legs. He compares this process to extending electric lines through the countryside, providing power and light. So you have to think of the breath not as … 
  3. Creating a World of Concentration
     … Then you can think about the fact that as you work with the breath, you’re working with the basic energies of life. The breath is what keeps the mind and the body together. As you work with the breath, it’s going to be good for the health of the mind, good for the health of the body. It’s medicine, the kind … 
  4. Work & Play
    Focus on the breath and try to adjust the breath so that it feels comfortable. Then allow that comfortable breath sensation to spread throughout the body so that you fill it with a sense of ease, fullness, refreshment. We call that both playing with the breath and working with the breath. It’s work in the sense that it does require effort and we … 
  5. Training Wheels
    Usually when we start the instructions for breath meditation, we start by saying, “Focus on one spot in the body where the breath is most obvious. Allow the breath to become comfortable at that spot.” In some cases, this involves allowing. In other cases, it involves experimenting to see what kind of breathing feels good there. Then, once that spot has become comfortable, you … 
  6. How & Why We Meditate
     … It may be that the breath is too long, so that as you get toward the end of the breath it’s beginning to feel uncomfortable. Well, allow the breath to grow shorter. Or if it’s too short and you feel like you’re not really getting the full energy of the breath, allow it to stretch out a bit. In other words … 
  7. The Steadiness of Your Gaze
     … Just focus it on the breath. The breath is right here. You don’t have to search around too much to find it. The difficult part lies in keeping the mind in position, trying to maintain a steady awareness. That takes some doing because the mind is used to not being steady. It’s used to jumping around. It has a sense of there … 
  8. To Certify Yourself
     … Instead, he would ask them, “How does the breath feel? Is the mind consistently with the breath? If it’s not, what’s getting in the way?” If the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, how can you change it so that it feels more soothing when it feels frazzled, energizing when it needs to be energized, relaxing when it’s been too energized. In … 
  9. Inner Baggage
     … Because it switches through the breath, the breath is the place where you want to set up camp. This is where you’re going to stay. Stay right here with the breathing. Explore the breathing sensations. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? What do you feel? What is the sensation like? Try … 
  10. Mindfulness as Refuge
     … And how do you do that? You try to make the breath as interesting as possible. That means you have to talk to yourself about the breath and convince yourself that, yes, it is interesting how the breath energy flows in the body, how you relate to the breath. We were talking earlier today about how the breath is filling the whole body. It … 
  11. In Times of Danger and Fear
     … The Buddha’s giving you a task to be calm with the breath, to be centered with the breath. Allow the breath to fill the whole body. Allow a sense of ease with the breathing to fill the whole body. As you’re doing this task, the burdens of the mind grow less. It can watch itself more and see itself more clearly. This … 
  12. Isolating the Aggregates
     … Which sensations are the breath sensations that flow through the body without disturbing anything else at all, without exerting any pressure at all? If there’s pressure, it’s an affair of the breath element pushing the water element against the earth element. So you have to separate those out, so that you’re spreading only the breath. As for awareness, that’s not … 
  13. Why Train the Mind
     … When you can think of the breath coming in and out from all directions like this, it helps make the breathing a lot easier. You get the whole body helping. When the Buddha gave breath instructions, he started out by saying to notice when the breath is long and when it’s short. As you get sensitive to the way the breath feels, the … 
  14. The Power of Present Kamma
     … your breath, the breath coming in and out right now. After all, it’s through the breath that you experience the body, move the body, and do things with the body. Even your primary sense of the solidity of the body has to come through the breath. Your sense of the coolness and warmth of the body has to come through the breath. Without … 
  15. A Concentration Checklist
     … And the way the mind relates to any object is happening in the course of its relating to the breath. So if you find yourself getting bored with the breath, you can either play around with the breath more, or you can start looking at how the mind relates to the breath. What is the perception it holds with regard to the breath? What … 
  16. Alone with Your Mind
     … But in the Dhamma talks from years after he came out and continued teaching, he had lots of other ways of discussing the breath, too: the breath coming up the spine, the breath coming up from the navel to the nose, different levels of breath—subtle breath, refined breath—many, many ways of conceiving the breath, working with the breath, that deal with different … 
  17. Ardency
    Notice where you feel the breath, and stay focused on those sensations, the sensations that tell you now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Stick with them. Keep watching them. The Pali term for this anupassana, which literally means “following and looking.” In other words, you keep track of the breath to see what’s going to happen. The … 
  18. Fabricating the Present
    Fabricating the Present August 20, 2004 Bring the mind to the breath, for this is where everything important is happening. You want to be as still as possible so that you can catch sight of all these important things happening, because most often we don’t see that there’s anything important here. The breath goes in, goes out. That’s all we see … 
  19. Duties in the Present
     … You can focus your attention in any part of the body where it’s easy to see that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out, and the mind feels comfortable being centered there. These are your resources. Try to keep them together: Keep your thoughts with the breath, keep thinking about the breath each time it comes in, each … 
  20. Stay Tuned
    Try to tune in on the breath. There are different ways you can do this. You can start out by thinking about the breath. You might have a mental picture with the energy flowing through the body, around the body. Or you can tune in to the feeling of the breath. Like a vapor of alcohol, it can’t be contained. It has no … 
  21. What You Bring to the Meditation
     … You want to stay with the breath. You want to explore the breath energy here.” Then, you have to be alert to notice what you’re doing, to notice how things are going with the breath, and to notice when the mind is beginning to wander away. Sometimes it seems to go in a flash; other times, it’s a more gradual process. It … 
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