Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. Look after Your Mind with Ease
     … So, right now, talk to yourself about the breath. How is the breath going? Is it comfortable? Where do you feel the breath right now? When you breathe in, does it feel like you’re fully nourishing your torso all the way down? Is it nourishing the nerves? Is it nourishing your eyes, your ears? Think of the breath as the flow of energy … 
  3. Bases for Success
     … In this case, it would be the breath filling the body, and that’s the one thing you’re working on. That’s what the effort is all about. Any hindrances that come up—in other words, anything that would distract you from this one object—you’ve got to put aside. You do everything you can to keep the mind with the breath … 
  4. To Know the Unconditioned
     … You start by directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating the breath, using perceptions about the breath—like the perception that the breath is a whole-body process, along with perceptions about where it begins in the body. In the beginning, for concentration to last, you have to keep fabricating it on many levels. But as you begin to settle in, you start to … 
  5. A Happiness Based Inside
     … That’s why we look inside to work with the breath. To get beyond the sensual level, the Buddha says there’s a level of form, which is the way you sense your body from within. This, too, changes but you’re getting closer and closer to something that’s more and more under your control. You can adjust the breath. You can take … 
  6. The Sport of Wise People
     … Can you think of yourself as hovering outside the body? Can you be inside the body in different places? When the breath comes in, can it come in from the back? Can the breath begin in the body and not outside? And how about the breath energy around the body? There are a lot of things you can explore here. You can get your … 
  7. Afraid of Pleasure
     … You keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath. Then you evaluate it. This is where the real work of the meditation comes in. How does evaluation lead to pleasure? How does it lead to a sense of refreshment? You evaluate different ways of breathing until you come across one that begins to feel pleasant, begins to feel refreshing. This is why thinking plays … 
  8. Relaxing into the Body
    Sometimes it’s useful, before you focus on the breath, to just scan through the body. Notice where there’s any tension and relax the tension. What you might do if you don’t see clearly where the patterns of tension are—in other words, everything seems to be a mass of tension—is to compare different parts: your left hand with your right … 
  9. Discernment
     … Think of the breath coming in, going down the body; think of the breath coming in from the bottom—through the soles of your feet, up through the legs. See what that does. You can work with the breath, you can imagine the breath, in lots of different ways, and it’ll have an impact on how the breath energy flows in the body … 
  10. Discerning the Middle Way
     … Evaluating the breath and then, when the breath gets good, evaluating what you’re going to do with the pleasure you get from the breath. In other words, you don’t want to just wallow in the pleasure. You want to use it as a tool to create a place in the body where it’s easy to settle down, pleasant to settle down … 
  11. Victory
     … We bring the mind to the present moment with the breath so that we can gain some strength from the breath and gain strength from getting the mind to settle down and be still. So gather your thoughts in right now. If you’re going to think about anything, think about the breath. Think about the mind being with the breath. Then pay attention … 
  12. To Take Danger in Stride
     … And the breath is the closest thing to the mind there is. It’s your basic experience of the body. Even before you experience the solidity of the body, there’s the energy of the breath that gets you in touch with it. Make that energy your home so that you’ll always have a safe place. Then reflect on that chant that we … 
  13. Secluded from Sensuality
     … If sensual thoughts come up again, you give them a little karate chop and settle down to work with the breath again, until you find that it really is satisfying being right here, just breathing in, breathing out, thinking of the breath bathing the whole body, saturating the whole body, going deep into the parts of the body that tend to be blocked off … 
  14. Right Inner Speech
     … Thoughts that pull you away from the breath, even if they’re true, you don’t need them right now. Just stay with this perception: the breath coming in, breath going out, the breath energy permeating the body. This is what we have to deal with, because how does the mind communicate with itself? It uses its perceptions. And how is it going to … 
  15. A Rare Gift
    When you’re meditating at the same time there’s a Dhamma talk, 99.5% of your attention should be with the breath and only half a percent with the Dhamma talk itself. The sound is here to act as a fence. If you find yourself losing touch with the breath, the sound of the talk is here to remind you to come back … 
  16. Focus on Your Skill
     … You’ve got to find the right balance, and one of the ways of doing that is to take a lot of interest in the breath—what the breath energy can do in the body—because the more clearly you can see the breath, the more refined your sensitivity to the breath, then the more refined your sensitivity to what’s going on in … 
  17. How to Read Yourself
     … In this case, the Buddha says, there are times when you to get the mind to stay with the breath but you run into a fever in the breath or a fever in your feelings, or a fever in the mind. In other words, the mind’s not willing to stay. It feels antsy, irritable. That’s when you have to stop and think … 
  18. Every Little Bit
     … Try to get more interested in the breath for instance. Try to be more precise in your observation of the breath. If things are getting stale, often it’s a sign that you’re not paying careful attention—because the breath, when it’s good, is really good. It really is nourishing. There really is a strong sense of well-being that comes as … 
  19. True to the Practice
     … So what we’re doing right here as we focus on the breath is to bring the mind into the present moment to see how it crafts things. At first it seems like tying it down, so it’s going to struggle, because the mind is used to traveling around. So to make the task easier, we give the mind something pleasant to stay … 
  20. Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes
     … Under the factor of fabrication, you have the breath: What are we looking at right now? We’re looking at the breath. You have directed thought and evaluation: That’s verbal fabrication—how you talk to yourself. You focus on a topic and then you make comments on it. Right now, you should be focusing on the breath, commenting on the breath. If you … 
  21. Persistence
     … You’ve got to keep this point in mind because it’s so easy to forget that you’re sitting here meditating and focusing on the breath: You’re off someplace else. Or you get distracted by something in the breath itself. Things get nice, things get comfortable, and as Ajaan Fuang would say, your hands and feet let go and you just fall … 
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