Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas
    Focus on the breath. Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths first, to highlight your sense of the body as you feel it from within. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you’re free to change. Try shorter breathing, or in short, out long; in long, out short; fast, slow; heavy, light; deep … 
  3. All Your Old Baggage
     … just keep remembering, “Stay with the breath, stay with the breath.” Being alert: noticing what you’re doing with the breath; how you’re focusing on it and which ways of focusing, which ways of conceiving of the breath, are helpful and which ones are not. And then just sticking with it. That’s really all you have to carry right now. All your … 
  4. Seeing Through Your Defilements
     … Wherever the breath is discernable, focus your attention there. And if you’re going to talk to yourself, talk to yourself about the breath, and about the mind fitting together with the breath. This is a part of concentration called directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate it. Is it good, is it not good? Is … 
  5. Let Pleasure & Pain Fall Off the Plow
     … a sense that all the energies in the body are working together; the breath is flowing smoothly. If it’s not flowing smoothly yet, you work on it. That’s what directed thought and evaluation are for. Directed thought is when you focus your thoughts on staying with the breath. Evaluation is asking yourself, “Does this feel good? If it feels good, how do … 
  6. Strong Through Commitment
     … Where does the breath come in? Where does it go out? You have a wide range of choices. There’s one sense in which the breath does come in from the outside; there’s another sense in which the breath energy originates inside the body. You can focus on either one. They both have their advantages. When you think of the breath coming in … 
  7. A Willingness to Learn
     … the breath, the sensation of the breath coming in, the sensation of the breath going out. And make it comfortable. If the mind’s really been tired, that’s all you have to do for the hour. Just try to remember to stay with as much comfortable breathing as possible. Give the mind a chance to rest, give it a chance to gain some … 
  8. The Path of Mistakes
     … Try to make the breath comfortable. When there’s a sense of tension anywhere in the body, learn how to breathe around it, or breathe through it, to relieve as much of the tension as you can without totally losing focus. You direct your thoughts to the breath. You evaluate the breath: “What kind of breathing feels good right now?” This is an important … 
  9. Not Getting What You Want
     … If you’re breathing in, where do there have to be sensations so that you know that the breath is coming in, where it’s going out? It’s good to explore other possibilities, so that you can gain a sense of refreshment from the breath, a sense of ease from the breath—because the breath is going to be a very useful tool … 
  10. Universal Truths
     … Which ways of focusing on the breath make the mind uncomfortable? Which make the breath uncomfortable? Which ways of focusing, which ways of thinking about the breath, which ways of labeling and understanding the breath help make it more comfortable, easier to stay here so that it does become your home? — so that no matter where you go, you have this home inside, this … 
  11. What Makes Concentration Right
    As you focus on the breath, remember that there’s right concentration and wrong concentration. There’s a passage where the Buddha defines right concentration as “any singleness of mind, endowed with right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness”—in other words, the first seven factors of the path. It sounds like an awful lot. In the … 
  12. The Mind’s Song
     … So you bring it to the breath. It’s a good way to get out of your head and down into the body. Give yourself a good comfortable place to stay and be aware of the breath coming in, aware of the breath going out. Notice how the breathing feels in different parts of the body, because the breathing is a whole-body process … 
  13. Old Kamma & New
     … When you’re working with the breath, remember that it’s your friend. If you find yourself fighting with the breath, that’s not the right attitude to have. You want the breath to be comfortable, because if the mind is going to stay here, having a sense of ease and comfort is really helpful. Even though there may be pains in some parts … 
  14. Staying Still
     … In other words, getting the mind focused with the breath is doing it. Staying focused with the breath is the maintaining. The maintaining is a different skill. The first skill is coming out of the noise and into the stillness. In some cases, that requires nothing more than just reminding yourself that you’d like to be with the breath—and there it is … 
  15. Protection Through Mindfulness Practice
     … What kind of movement of the breath is actually helpful? What kind of movement of the breath makes it more difficult to stay with the body? And learn to play. Take the breath energy in the body as your playground here and be open to new ideas about how the breath energy can move. You’ll notice, in Ajaan Lee’s basic instructions, that … 
  16. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … It’s the same with the breath and the way you relate to the body. This is what the Buddha calls pleasant practice—getting the mind to settle down with a sense of ease, creating sensations, creating feelings in the body through the breath that draw you into the breath, that make you like staying here. This is one way that we practice, but … 
  17. The Carrot & the Stick
     … As for the carrot, when you work on the breath, work with the body like this, try to find ways of really getting into every little pattern of tension, every little pattern of discomfort and dissolving it away. You’re getting very, very sensitive to the breath, so that the breath can work through these things. Often we carry around a whole armor of … 
  18. Booster Stages
     … It keeps you with the breath, keeps you exploring the breath, learning new things about the breath energy in the body. And it’s is not the case that you have to wait until the end of the path to see the results. When you’re working well with the breath, you find that it is healing. It nourishes all the different organs in … 
  19. Well-armed Efforts
     … For instance, when you’re getting the mind in concentration, you’ve got the breath, which is bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation devoted to seeing how the breath can be made comfortable and how the mind can be made to stay with the breath; and then you have mental fabrication, the perceptions you have around the breath that help you … 
  20. Lessons from Jhana
     … You can think, “Whoops, I’m going to die.” You’re holding onto the perception that you’ve got to keep pumping the breath in, pumping the breath in. Here again, you have to train yourself: It is possible to be here, once the breath energy fills the body and all the breath channels feel connected, and not have to breathe. How this is … 
  21. In & of Themselves
     … I’ve got to drop it.” Try to go back to the raw materials, in this case the breath, your feelings around the breath, and your mind states related to the breath: the mindfulness, alertness, and whatever elements of concentration you can develop. That’s a world that forms part of the path. You turn these things into concentration: the breath, the object of … 
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