Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … Think of the breath energy flowing all around and through the pain. All too often we tighten up around pain, which just makes it worse. So think of the breath energy flowing well and going right through it. It can permeate anything. If you’ve got congestion in your nose or in your ears, think of the breath energy coming in and out every … 
  3. Rehab Work
     … You want to stay with the breathing process as consistently as you can so that you can notice the little signals that tell you things like, “Now the breath is getting too long,” or “It wasn’t deep enough just now, so let’s try a little bit deeper this time.” Only when you watch continually like this can you can actually notice these … 
  4. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … So when you’re working with the breath, trying to get the mind into concentration, you’re bringing some awareness to the way you fabricate the state of your mind and your experience of your body. When the breath starts feeling good, you can think of the breath flowing throughout the body. The whole nervous system ultimately gets involved in the breathing process, and … 
  5. Persistence
     … So what do you need to let go of right now? As for any thoughts that have to do with anything else but the breath right now, just let them go. Try to develop an interest in the breath. When the Buddha defines right effort, or the quality of persistence in the path as one of the bases for success, it includes generating desire … 
  6. Choosing Not to Suffer
     … So take this time to focus on the potentials of the breath and see what good qualities you can develop in the mind. There’s the potential for mindfulness, which is the ability to keep something useful in mind. In this case, keep in mind just the breath in and of itself. You don’t have to relate the breath to anything else outside … 
  7. Learning by Doing
     … This is necessary to develop your insight, because the factors that go into creating the good sense of concentration—the form of the body, which is the breath; the feeling of ease that you get from the breath; the perceptions you hold in mind about the breath; your thoughts that think about the breath, that evaluate it, and your awareness of all these things … 
  8. Doing Aggregates
     … You can get it to do two things, to be with the breath and to watch over the mind as it stays with the breath, and to notice when it’s wandering off. If you give the mind enough things to do in the present moment related to the breath, it’ll settle down. Otherwise, it has a few empty hands to grab on … 
  9. Mindful of Karma
     … But once you’ve made up your mind that you want to stay with the breath, you have to be alert to the things you can do to keep yourself with the breath and alert to the things that are going to come in and pull you away. You have to be alert to how the breath is and also alert to how the … 
  10. Potentials
     … As you get sensitive to the breath in the body, you begin to notice that it’s not just the breath coming in and out of the lungs. There are feelings of energy flowing here, flowing there in different parts of the body. How can you take advantage of that? How can you develop that potential? When the breath starts feeling good, one of … 
  11. Training Your Minds
     … Mindfulness means the ability to keep something in mind, like you’re trying to keep the breath in mind right now. Try to remember each time you breathe in: Stay with the breath. Each time you breathe out: Stay with the breath. Then you try to remember to do it skillfully, i.e., find a way of breathing that feels really good. Then you … 
  12. The Body In & Of Itself
    When you focus on the breath you’re focusing on the body in and of itself. That’s your frame of reference, and you want to hold to that frame of reference. Take that as the world you’re inhabiting right now. As for the outside world, just let it drop away. Friends, family, issues at work, issues at school—you don’t have … 
  13. Happy to Be Here
     … There’s the breath itself, with is bodily fabrication, and then there’s the way you talk to yourself, which is verbal fabrication. Here you talk to yourself in a calm and soothing way. Then you take an interest in the breath, realizing that the breath and the breath energies in the body have lots of potentials. They can do a lot of good … 
  14. A Divine Seat
     … As the Buddha said, you direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate. On the one hand, you evaluate the breath. How does it feel? What kind of breathing would feel good now? This is an area where you can experiment. He calls the breath bodily fabrication, and the word fabrication is often equated with intention. There’s an intentional element in … 
  15. Bigger than the World
     … One of the big mistakes we make as we work with the breath is that we have some cartoon ideas of what we should be feeling as the breath comes in; what we should be feeling as the breath goes out. We then create those feelings and, as a result, add a lot of unnecessary tension to the breathing process. So think of the … 
  16. A Rite of Passage
     … One of the tricks is making sure that you don’t squeeze the end of the breath in as you change to the breath out. Try to think of the in-breath flowing into the out-breath, the out-breath flowing back into the in-breath. In other words, let the breath do the breathing. You don’t have to use the solid parts … 
  17. Limitations
     … Once you’ve made up your mind to stay with the breath, you try to keep it there and use whatever techniques, whatever strategies you can think to keep the mind with the breath. This can include experimenting with the breath, thinking of the breath energy circulating throughout the body, exploring areas in the body that are tense or tight, and using the breath … 
  18. Respect for Suffering
     … Stay right here with your basic awareness focused on the breath coming in, the breath going out. This develops two of the main qualities that are important for developing a real foundation of mindfulness, a really solid frame of reference: mindfulness and alertness. The third quality is ardency, being ardent in your mindfulness and ardent in your alertness. Ardent in your mindfulness means that … 
  19. The Path of Questions
    The Path of Questions July, 2001 Let the mind settle down comfortably on the breath. Don’t push it too hard and don’t let it float away. Try to find just the right amount of pressure for staying with the breath. Let there be just that one question in the mind right now: how heavily to focus on the breath. Other questions you … 
  20. Fear of Mistakes
     … As you focus on the breath, you have the breath as your topic. You direct your thoughts to the breath and evaluate the breath, evaluate the mind in relationship to the breath: Is the breath comfortable? How do you know if it’s comfortable? Well, you test it. Try different ways of breathing, and then you can decide which one is best for giving … 
  21. An Island of Certainty
     … As you stay with the breath, you begin to watch the mind at the breath: first with the perceptions dealing with the breath, and also with the thoughts that come wandering through. Why is it that when you’ve made up your mind to stay with the breath, something else comes in and immediately you go? When was the choice made? Sometimes it was … 
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