Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 144
  2. Purifying Gold
     … Each time you decide to come back to the breath, chalk it up as a little victory. Don’t get discouraged by the fact that the mind sometimes wanders away or is chattering all the time. Try to notice the moments between the chatter. Appreciate them. From that heedfulness in terms of gross things outside, you then turn it to the next step: the … 
  3. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … And even if you don’t have time to sit with your eyes closed, the breath is still there. All the mental skills that you need in the course of meditation can be developed in any situation. It’s just that it’s easier to develop them when you are sitting here with your eyes closed. But they are meant to be used no … 
  4. Working Hypotheses
    We bring the mind to the breath, and we get it to stay there with a sense of ease. Not only because this is a good place to be in the present moment, but also because it’s a good path—it takes us to a good place. We trust that that’s so. When the Buddha teaches right view, in the very beginning … 
  5. Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self
     … This is why we’re meditating, working on concentration, working on mindfulness as we stay with the breath to develop a good, solid state of mind inside so that we have something to help us peel away all the really unskillful desires that may arise. This is one area where the three perceptions are useful. There are two ways that you can look at … 
  6. Fears
     … Try to create a sense of wellbeing that can come simply with being with the breath. Even though this isn’t the total cure, it’s the path toward the cure. You learn to develop a happiness less and less dependent on things outside, and more and more inward, something more under your control, something you can manage better. And as you work on … 
  7. Step Back & Watch
     … Just be one with the breath. Be one with the sense of space. Be one with the awareness. Be the knowing. But that’s a state of becoming. It’s a skillful state of becoming, it’s necessary as part of the practice, but you don’t want to fall for the assumptions that go along with that state of becoming. You want to … 
  8. Comprehending Pain
     … You’ve already had some experience as you’ve been working with the breath, noticing little patterns of tension and learning how to work through them. This is the skill you’re going to use do deal the other deeper, more blatant forms of stress. But the comprehending, here, doesn’t mean that you get rid of them. You learn how to sit with … 
  9. The Unity of the Path
     … You can notice this either as you’re in a particular state of concentration or as you move from one to another and you begin to notice that in moving, say, from one level of jhana to another, the sense of the breath changes. The activity or the level of activity in the mind changes. You notice that the deeper level has less stress … 
  10. Remembering Ajaan Fuang
     … At that point, we had Keeping the Breath in Mind, Frames of Reference, and The Craft of the Heart. So he gave her a copy of each and said, “You can print whichever one you like.” She took them and then, a week later, she came back, saying, “That’s not what I want. I want his autobiography.” Now, I had already translated the … 
  11. Recollection of the Buddha
     … Ajaan Lee made the comment one time that we human beings have lots of potentials within us that we don’t take advantage of—potentials in the body in terms of the breath and the other elements, potentials in the mind in terms of the skills we can learn. We’ve got all these potentials, but what do we use them for? To make … 
  12. Unsentimental Goodwill
     … will see that as a sign of weakness. So you have to protect yourself. But the trick is learning how to protect yourself in a way that’s not harming anyone. The breath is helpful here when you’ve developed a sense of your own energy field being filled with good breath energy. That makes it harder for people’s unskillful energy to invade … 
  13. Determined on Awakening
     … You get the breath very refined, very refined, and then you can ask yourself about the perception you have that you have to breathe in and breathe out: To what extent can you let go of that perception? See what happens when the body is really, really still. If you have the perception that the body is full of breath energy, and you don … 
  14. The True Cause of Suffering
     … That’s time to stop and come back to the breath, with the thought that regardless what’s going to happen in the future— and there is so little you really know about the future—you are going to need strong powers of mindfulness, alertness, and discernment to deal with unforeseen circumstances. And that’s what you’re developing right here: mindfulness, alertness, concentration … 
  15. To Stay the Course
     … breathe in a way where you’re aware of the whole body; breathe in a way where you’re calming the effect of the breath on the whole body; breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure, that gives rise to rapture; breathe in a way that calms the mind, energizes the mind when it needs to be energized, steadies it when it … 
  16. Clearing a Space
     … Figuring out which object you’re going to focus on; how you’re going to deal with the breath; figuring out which kinds of breath sensations you should focus on, which you should let go; which are the ones you’ve got to change; and at what point you have to stop changing them and just let things be so the mind can really … 
  17. The Thinking Heart
     … You sit here with the breath coming in and going out. Try to breathe in a way that, at the very least, feels okay. If you learn how to protect that sense of being okay right here, you’ll find that it’ll grow into a sense of ease. That sense of ease not only gives you a good place to stay and encouragement … 
  18. The Lessons of Good Kamma
     … You can learn how to focus on the breath, but as the Buddha said, you could be a person of little integrity and yet still do the meditation in the sense of getting the mind to be quiet for a while. But then you’d start misusing that quiet state, and that would get in the way of the deeper attainments, the really good … 
  19. Quick on the Draw
     … Work with the breath to make it comfortable. Develop the thoughts that remind you that there are areas of your life where you have been competent, where you have been able to withstand unskillful thoughts. You look at the addictions that other people have, the ones that seem strange to you. You might say, “Well, at least I don’t have that addiction”: whatever … 
  20. The Ennobling Path
     … Once it gets lubricated, you can settle down with the breath again. And you find that the mind is willing to settle down and be still. So the practice of concentration is designed specifically to give you that sense of pleasure whenever you need it, because the work of insight is sometimes very difficult. The mind is going to resist unless you learn how … 
  21. Avoidance
     … Some of them you can put away simply by saying, “Hey, look, we’re here to train the mind, we’re here to stay with the breath, to get quiet for a while so we can sort these things out,” but others don’t go away so easily. Those are the ones you have to question, probe, figure out: Why is this particular idea … 
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