Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. The Buddha’s Protection
     … If you’ve slipped off the breath, you bring it right back. While you’re with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. Even though you may not be able to create a sense of well-being in every part of the body, find the areas where you can create a sense of well-being. Focus … 
  3. Diagnosing the Mind
     … When the mind is too energetic, one way of dealing with it is to give it lots to think about—lots to think about in terms of the breath. Focus on the details, move around, watch the breath energy in different parts of the body. Get really precise, down to the joints of your fingers, the joints of your toes, trying to see if … 
  4. When This Is, That Is
     … Get the breath comfortable first wherever you find easy to focus on the breath, and then start doing your spreading. Don’t spread a tense breath. That just makes things worse. And have an open mind about where the breath energy can come in and out of the body. It can be anyplace. So you can experiment with that. As you do this over … 
  5. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … You can work with the breath. You can make the breath comfortable. Try some good deep in-and-out breaths for a while just to ventilate the body and to make the breathing process really obvious and blatant. Then pose that question in the mind: What kind of breathing would feel good now? How about this breath? And then this breath? And keep it … 
  6. A Legacy of Strengths
     … There’s directed thought, where you keep reminding yourself to stick with the breath. And then evaluation: You ask yourself, “Does the breath feel good? If not, what can I do to make it feel better?” You can change the rhythm of the breath or the texture of the breath. Or you can change the image you have in mind about what the breath … 
  7. Desire for Happiness
     … Once you learn to be sensitive to the breath, in touch with the breath, then allow it to expand through the body. If you find any little pieces of tension or tightness in any place in the body, any sense of blockage, allow the breath to move in there, seep through those places of blockage, open things up. Then maintain that quality of openness … 
  8. The Pleasure of Concentration
     … Gain a sense of where its most sensitive spots are, and of how the breath can nourish those spots, refresh those spots. And again, remind yourself that sitting here blissing out on the breath is not a selfish thing. If you can find well-being in here, one, you’re not taking anything away from anyone else. And two, you develop an inner strength … 
  9. The Buddha’s Qualities
     … If you run into obstacles in your pursuit of the breath, you have these other tools for dealing with the obstacles. Once they’re out of the way, then you can focus on the breath 100%. Just be with the breathing. That’s all you need to know about right now. There’s nothing else. In fact, you don’t even have to listen … 
  10. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … What’s distinctive about the sixteen steps is how much they talk about fabrication, starting with the breath. The Buddha could have said many times, “Calm the breath.” But no, he says to calm bodily fabrication. He could have said to calm your perceptions and feelings. But no, he said to calm mental fabrication. He’s focusing on the fact that you’re fabricating … 
  11. Shaping the Present
    Bring your attention to the breath and notice where you feel it as you breathe in and breathe out. Do you like the way it feels? If you do, keep on breathing that way. If you don’t, you can change. This is one of the most important principles in the practice, one that gets overlooked or ignored or even denied: that you have … 
  12. Tuning-in to the Breath
    Tuning-in to the Breath December, 2002 When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, one of the questions I asked him was, “What do you need to believe in order to meditate?” He answered that there was only one thing: the principle of kamma. Now when we hear the word “kamma,” we usually think, “kamma-and-rebirth,” but he meant specifically the … 
  13. More Buddhist Engineering
     … You direct your thoughts to the breath. You keep them directed to the breath. And if those thoughts wander away, you can bring them back and direct them to the breath again. Evaluation: You evaluate the breath. You evaluate the mind. Do they fit together well? What way of breathing would provide a good place to stay? When you’re trying to develop a … 
  14. It’s All in What You’re Doing
     … You’ve got the breath, which is form. You’ve got the feeling of ease that you’re creating by the way you pay attention to the breath. You’ve got the perception that’s holding you with the breath. You’ve got the thought fabrications that are directing your thoughts and evaluating to get the breath and the mind to settle down together … 
  15. Beyond Duality
     … Take the breath for example. When you begin, it seems that you’re in one part of the body watching the breath in another part of the body. But as you get more and more sensitive to the breath, and the longer you stay with it, then the more you have a sense that the breath is surrounding you, that you’re plunged into … 
  16. Meditation as a Skill
     … Is the breathing comfortable? Could it be more comfortable? You can try it longer or shorter, heavier, lighter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels good. In watching yourself, you have to watch the breath and watch the mind watching the breath at the same time. After all, just because you have the intention to … 
  17. Learning by Doing
     … Look as carefully as you can at what’s actually going on right now as you try to keep your mind with the breath, keep your awareness with the breath, maintain the intention to stay with the breath. Breathe in a way that gives rise to a feeling of pleasure. Maintain a perception of the breath that’s open—in other words, open to … 
  18. Choices
     … You’re making choices right now as you stay with the breath, sensitive to how the choices of the mind affect the breath, how the breath affects the choices of the mind. Explore that. There are a lot of good things to be learned right here. So the teaching on karma provides the context for the present moment, and karma itself is what makes … 
  19. Talking to Yourself
     … You want to be with the breath. See what happens when you can stay with the breath. Try to get interested in the breath. Ask yourself questions about it. What are these breath sensations in the body? They’re already there. It’s a question of simply viewing them as breath sensations. This is where another type of fabrication comes in. It’s called … 
  20. Patience & Consistency
     … If you’re going to stay with the breath, stay with each breath, each breath, each breath—but don’t let this get mechanical—all the way in, all the way out. It helps to have some strategies for getting the mind to stay this way consistently. That’s why you work on getting the breath comfortable and being aware of the whole body … 
  21. Tranquility & Insight in Tandem
     … How do they flow out? What are they flowing for? What are they looking for? When you’re first trying to settle down with the breath, the obvious things are the cravings that pull you away from the breath. You’re sitting here focusing on the breath, it’s coming in and going out, and then all of a sudden you realize you’ve … 
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