Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Concentration Work
     … People complain that it’s not quieting to think about the breath and work with the breath energy in different parts of the body. Well, it’s part of the work needed in order to get things ready to settle down in a way that will be solid and lasting. Be willing to do the work that’s needed for a good, solid concentration … 
  3. Near to the Buddha
     … We meditate on the mind; we meditate on the breath. The breath is the closest thing in the world to your mind. Even in your own body, there’s nothing that’s closer to you than the breath. When you learn to develop qualities of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration, discernment around the breath, then every time you breathe, there they are, right nearby. In … 
  4. Building on Certainty
     … Then you can try different ways of thinking about the breath. Instead of thinking of the body as a big bellows—with the nose as the little hole at the end of the bellows—think of it as a big sponge. The breath energy is coming in and out through all the pores of the sponge. Put that mental picture in your mind. Think … 
  5. Lifting the Mind
     … Because you have to learn how to observe yourself, say, with the breath: Can the mind stay with the breath? What seems to pull it away from the breath? How do you bring it back? You have to learn how to monitor what you’re doing, and this is another way of lifting the mind. They’ve done studies with school children and found … 
  6. Read the Breath
     … Learn how to read the breath. In other words, learn how to read what the body needs. Sometimes you see the effects of the breathing immediately; other times you notice it over time. This ability to read your breath is a very important skill, because learning how to read the situation in your body and mind in general is where discernment comes. Discernment is … 
  7. The Problem of Suffering
     … For instance, we’re working with the breath now. You’re focusing on the breath coming in, going out. The teachings on the four noble truths, all the various ways of expressing the path, relate to what you’re doing right now. The important thing is what you’re doing. You pick up the Buddha’s teachings as they become necessary, as they become … 
  8. Suffering Is a Feeding Addiction
     … So you have to be alert to detect the warning signs that the mind is about to leave the breath: Part of the mind is with the breath, but another part is scouting around, looking for something else. If you detect that happening, then you can make the breath much more gratifying, much more enveloping, so that the part that was looking for someplace … 
  9. Nimble with Your Questions
    We keep coming back to the same place—the breath coming in, the breath going out, how you feel the breath energy in the body—because we want to get familiar with this territory. We want to know it all the way in, all the way out, and to see the different things the breath can do until we get familiar with all its … 
  10. Insight Is a Judgment Call
    Insight Is a Judgment Call February 21, 2017 As you focus on your breath, try to figure out the best way to focus on the breath. This is a quality called evaluation. It’s pretty simple. You’re with the breath, but there are lots of ways of breathing and lots of ways of being with the breath: where you’re going to focus … 
  11. Learning from Labor
     … What perceptions of the breath, what perceptions of the body, what perceptions of where you are in the body right now in relationship to the breath, are most conducive to getting the mind to settle down? We talk about watching the breath, and sometimes that’s an unfortunate image. It’s as if you’re up here in your head looking down at the … 
  12. Learning from What You Do
    When you focus on the breath, start out by paying extra special attention to the places in the body where the breath is most obvious. That might be at the nose, but it might not be at the nose. It might be in the chest, the shoulders, the back, your abdomen—wherever you sense the breath most clearly, the sensations that tell you now … 
  13. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … You’re focused on the body, being sensitive to the breath, sensitive to the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out, and then you calm the process of bodily fabrication, i.e., you gain some rapture and then calm the effect that the breath has on the body so that it gives rise to a sense of ease and well-being. In … 
  14. Skillful Fear
     … This is where we get into the values, because sometimes you’re sitting here with the breath and something else comes up. Your immediate instinct is to say “What’s this?” and then go with it, on the premise that any thought is more interesting than the breath. But there are good thoughts and bad thoughts, thoughts that are worth thinking and thoughts that … 
  15. Oneness is a Water Snake
     … When you’re focused on the breath, you want to think of all the sensations in the body as being related to the breath one way or another. In any places that you would originally interpret, say, as a sensation of a bone or some other hard part of the body: When you think of it as breath, that changes your sense of whether … 
  16. Mindfulness: The Whole Formula
     … You’re focused on the breath for a couple of breaths, and then something else comes up. You look into it, and it sucks you in. Suddenly you’re not with the breath anymore, you’re someplace else, especially if the breath hasn’t yet become very comfortable. When there’s nothing particularly appealing to it, the mind very easily slips off. Sometimes it … 
  17. A Safe Place
     … You notice what the mind is doing, how the mind is settling in with the breath. At that point, you don’t need any more conversation in the mind about the breath. You can just be with the sensation of the breathing. Go into the sensation of the breathing and allow things to be very still. Some people complain that everything gets so still … 
  18. New Eyes
     … If you have right view, you see a lot of interesting things going on in the breath right now. Lots of people will say they look at the breath, it goes in and goes out, and after a while they get bored and start looking for something else. The mind goes looking for something else to think about. It’s not that they get … 
  19. Mindfulness: Get with the Program
     … You stay with the breath and you begin to notice how feelings relate to the breath. You begin to notice how mind-states relate to the breath, how mental qualities relate to the breath. You’ve got an anchor. Now, the Buddha does recommend other anchors as well. There’s the contemplation of 32 parts of the body. That’s really good for making … 
  20. Sensitivity & Strength
     … Where do you feel the sensation of the breathing? Do those feelings, those pulses of energy or waves of energy, give you more energy to the body, or do they subtract energy from the body? The breath is what keeps us alive, you know, but there are ways of breathing that make the body tense, tight, and drain its energy away. So just pose … 
  21. Feeling & Intention
     … You learn how to perceive the breath, to picture it to yourself, in different ways. This is something that’s very intimate. Just the way you picture the breathing to yourself can have a huge impact on how you actually feel the breath. And this will have an impact on the mind. If you can put aside your image of the breath as just … 
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