Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Right Learning
     … You direct your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate the breath. You keep working with the breath until you’ve done just about what you can with the breath. You begin to notice, as you do this, what factors make a breath uncomfortable. Sometimes they’re physical factors; sometimes they’re mental factors. If you’re too anxious or in too much of … 
  3. You Can’t Clone Awakening
     … When the Buddha talks about the breath as bodily fabrication, it’s because there’s an element of intention in each breath. So even just looking at your breath, you can begin to see: Where is the intention? How is it fed by the way you perceive the breath? What mental picture do you have of the breathing process? How does it affect the … 
  4. Comfortable with Yourself
     … And whatever skills you learn in the course of becoming friends with the breath, you can take those with you. After all, what do you have here? The mind and the breath. No matter where you are, you still have the mind and the breath. The problem is that you let other things interfere. That’s the part of the practice that takes place … 
  5. Right & Wrong Decisions
     … When we work with the breath, it may seem like a detour but it’s not. When you’re with the breath, you’re in the present moment. As you work with the breath to make it comfortable, to make it energizing, whatever the body needs right now, you’re making it easier and easier for the mind stay in the present moment. Why … 
  6. Circumspection
     … In the course of staying focused here, you begin to see a lot of things besides just the body or the breath. In other words, we focus on the breath not because we’re trying to get the breath or to turn into expert breathers. The breath is simply a means to what we really want. So the Buddha has a strategic purpose in … 
  7. Dissolving Distress
     … Because as you focus on the breath, you’re learning not only about the breath, but also about your mind. And this is where it gets really interesting—you begin to see how your mind shapes your experience right now. When the Buddha talks about the breath, it’s not simply a matter of watching the breath coming in and going out. He says … 
  8. Mind in & of Itself
    As you start to focus on the breath, it’s good to make a survey of three things. First, the breath itself. Take some good long deep in-and-out breaths, and think of the whole body breathing. Not just the lungs, not just the nose, the whole nervous system is involved in the breathing process. If there’s any area in the body … 
  9. Selecting from the Teachings
    Allow the mind to settle down with the breathing. Think of yourself as gathering the mind in from all the places it’s been roosting in the course of the day, like a big flock of birds. It’s been thinking about this, thinking about that, all over the place. Now all the birds are going to come down on the same telephone pole … 
  10. Rightly Directed
    Set your mind on the breath right now, and keep it right here. Try to make the breath steady, coming in steadily, going out steadily. And remind yourself that as you set the mind here, you’re both setting it in the right place and pointing it in the right direction. The Buddha calls this atta samma-panidhi, the self rightly directed. As the … 
  11. Fourth Truth, First Duty
     … You find a topic, like the breath, and you stay focused there. Keep track of the breath coming in, going out. In the beginning, you simply discern how the breath is going in the body right now, whether it’s long or short, but then you train yourself: You train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole … 
  12. Kind & Happy
     … In terms of the body, you’ve got the breath moving in and out. So focus on the breath. How does it feel when it comes in? How does it feel when it goes out? Keep watch on the breath. And keep the breath in mind. In other words, don’t forget the breath. It’s so easy you focus on the breath once … 
  13. Patient & Inquisitive
     … As the breath starts coming in, it simply infiltrates the breath energy already there. Hold that perception in mind. It makes it easier for the breath energies to work their way through the body. Then, as the breath energies get comfortable, when the Buddha then talks about allowing yourself to breathe in a way that’s sensitive to rapture, breathe in a way that … 
  14. Refuge
    Try to focus your attention right here at the breath. Wherever there are sensations in the body that tell you, “Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out,” try to stay with those sensations. Try to be as consistent as you can in staying here because it’s only when you stick with the breath consistently that you’re going … 
  15. The Stages of Meditation
     … As a result, the breath gets shaped not by our awareness, but by other emotions that come through the mind. It gets shaped by our unexamined thoughts about how breathing happens. And so the breath gets constricted, parts of the body don’t seem to be participating in the breathing process. Ideally the breathing process should be a whole-body process. Your whole nervous … 
  16. The Breath All the Way
    The Breath All the Way October 2, 2010 Mindfulness of breathing, keeping the breath in mind, is the meditation theme the Buddha taught more than any other, and he praised it highly. He said that it can take you all the way to clear knowledge and release: clear knowledge of awakening, release from all suffering and stress. It’s also the meditation theme he … 
  17. Worlds Inside & Out
     … All too often, when we deal with the breath, we have childish cartoon ideas of what the breathing process is. As soon as you’re told, “Breathe in, breathe out,” you get that little cartoon character in your body doing the breathing. It creates a little box around the breath. You hold your body in a certain way because of that cartoon idea. So … 
  18. Looking for Trouble
    We meditate with our eyes closed so as to cut down on distractions, so that you can focus all of your attention at the work in hand, which is being with the breath, being sensitive to the breath in the body. When the breath comes in, know it’s coming in. When it goes out, know how it feels when it’s going out … 
  19. Patience
     … Stay with the breath, allow the mind to settle in with the breath, be friends with the breath. Allow the breath to open up and get more and more gentle, more and more porous, so your awareness can seep into the breath. That’s all you have to do. Of course, we want to add things on top of that to make the results … 
  20. Questioning Your Unconscious Actions
     … What’s going on? What’s resisting? If you find that you’re having trouble adjusting the breath because your perception is off, well, change your perceptions. This is where mental fabrication comes in and has an influence on bodily fabrication. When you breathe in, where do you think the breath is coming in? How does your mind picture the breathing process? Change the … 
  21. Unentangled Compassion
     … While it’s with the breath, you try to bring your full sensitivity to the breath. Make the breath as comfortable as possible. Take a couple of experimental in-and-out breaths—deep, long—and see how it feels. If long, deep breathing feels good—keep it up. If not, you can change. Notice where you sense the breath or the process of breathing … 
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