Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Between You and Your Eyes
    The Buddha’s teachings are primarily about things that are immediately present to our awareness—the feeling of the breath, the movements of the body, thoughts moving in the mind: things immediately present, but things that we tend to miss, things we’re pretty ignorant about. When we suffer, we think we know suffering, but we don’t really. When we have a desire … 
  3. The Third Frame of Reference
     … And here the breath is very helpful. What way of breathing is energizing? What feels really satisfying as the breath comes in, the breath goes out, healing the body, and through the body, healing the mind? This is an important skill. It requires that you learn how to read your breath and to notice how the breath has an effect on the mind. This … 
  4. Fighting off Ignorance
     … As for your directed thought and evaluation, for the time being you simply want to direct your thoughts to the breath and evaluate the breath. Be very deliberate in what you’re going to think about. As for the labels you put on things, think of the whole body as breath energy. See if that makes the breathing easier. When you breathe in, think … 
  5. Commit & Reflect All Around
     … As he learned about the breath—of course at that time, he had a very strong motivating factor—the question was: Was he going to survive or not? He also learned, observed a lot of things about the breath that he hadn’t known before. So try to develop a sense of ease with the breath, so that it’s comfortable to stay here … 
  6. The Dualistic Path
     … So as you work with the breath, allow the breath be comfortable. Try to get more and more sensitive to how the way you breathe can lead to a sense of comfort or discomfort in the body. Again, this teaches you cause and effect, stress and lack of stress. The reason we don’t see these things clearly is because our mind is hopping … 
  7. A Path Under the Trees
     … You use that to help keep the breath in mind. Then you’re alert. In other words, you watch what you’re doing. When you’re with the breath, you watch the breath. When you’re not with the breath, you know that you’re not with the breath. Then you bring in ardency: You really want to do this well. So, if you … 
  8. Timeless Dhamma
     … Then you calm the effects of the breath on the body. That makes you sensitive to rapture, sensitive to pleasure. You become sensitive to how your perceptions of the breath affects rapture and pleasure. In other words, what ways of thinking about the breath can give rise to feelings of intense rapture? Thinking of the breath as a quality of the whole body, not … 
  9. Chewed Up by Your Food
     … Then there’s the fabrication, which thinks about the breath, works with the breath, evaluates the breathing, how well the pleasure is going, evaluates the point where the pleasure is full enough, so you don’t have to evaluate much anymore, but just keep focusing on the breath sensations, and staying there with this expanded sense of awareness. It’s when you’re nourishing … 
  10. The Power of the Mind
    It happens all too often as you’re meditating that you sit down, the breath is not comfortable, the body is not comfortable, and you get upset. That, of course, aggravates things. You have to remember the Buddha’s statement at the beginning of the Dhammapada: The mind or the heart is the forerunner of all things. When you look at the body, you … 
  11. Turn Off the Automatic Pilot
     … So when you’re working with the breath, you’re engaging in these processes of fabrication very directly. If you hold certain perceptions of the breath in mind, and you think of the breath energy as a continuum throughout the body, that’s going to change the way you feel the breathing. You also notice how much pressure you’re putting on the breath … 
  12. Turtle Meditation
     … When people are being harsh with you, you can develop an energy field around the body by staying with the breath, letting the breath fill the whole body so that their energy can’t penetrate your energy field. When you fully occupy your body in this way, their negative energy goes right past you. You don’t suck it in. You don’t absorb … 
  13. Established in Full
     … When the Buddha talks about establishing mindfulness with the breath, he notes that when you’re with the breath, when you’re alert, mindful about what you’re doing, you create a feeling of well-being or ease. So the feeling is right there. And of course your awareness is right there. The good and bad qualities of the mind are right there as … 
  14. Factors for Awakening
     … What’s wrong here? Is the breath too weak? Is the mind just simply getting lazy? One thing that can happen is that you get with the breath, there’s a sense of ease, and you drop the breath and go for the ease. That’s like earning money at a job, then quitting the job and going out and spending all your money … 
  15. Feeding While You Work
     … We work at the breath, we adjust the breath, we try to be mindful of the breathing. Then some pleasure comes along and we tend to wallow in it, forget the breath, forget all that we’re doing. We just want to enjoy our opportunity to have some pleasure, to feed on the pleasure. That of course destroys the concentration, because the causes aren … 
  16. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … Then, after a while, there comes a point where the activities of thinking about the breath, adjusting the breath, and evaluating the breath, can be put aside because the breath has gotten as good as it can be. As Ajaan Fuang once said, it’s like putting water into a water jar. You put it in bit by bit by bit, but there comes … 
  17. Engaging the Whole Mind
     … One is where you’re going to focus your attention, and here we focus on the breath. When the breath comes in, know that it’s coming in. When it goes out, know it’s going out. Focus wherever you have a sense of the process of breathing. It may not necessarily be the movement of air coming in and out of the nose … 
  18. All Four Tetrads at Once
     … So even as you’re first settling in with the breath, you’ve got all four aspects right there. You can read the different tetrads as alternative instructions as to what to do as you get started. First you analyze the problem: You’re trying to settle down and the mind’s not settling down. Is it a problem with the breath? Is it … 
  19. Strategic Wisdom
     … Stay focused on the breath. You can focus on the feeling of the breath anywhere at all in the body, any spot where it’s convenient, where the sensation of the breath is clear, that lets you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Try to stay there. Keep it up. This is the difficult part in … 
  20. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … Notice where you feel the breathing and how it feels. You know consciously that there’s air coming in and out at the nose, but there’s more to the breathing process than that. There’s a flow of energy that goes through the body, expanding the rib cage so that air can come in and go out. The air is not doing the … 
  21. Intense Stillness
    Ajaan Lee says that the breath is like a mirror for the mind. If the mirror is distorted, you’re going to get distorted images of the mind. If the mirror is concave, your image will be shorter than you really are. If it’s convex, it’ll be longer. What you want is a mirror that’s nice and flat. The problem is … 
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