Search results for: "The Breath"

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  2. The Wisdom of Equanimity
     … So you’re creating a pleasure for the mind, cleaning away the things that would push you away from the present moment, from being with the breath. This includes uncomfortable ways of breathing. It also includes complaints that the mind makes about the breath. Here it’s important to make a distinction. You will be evaluating things and figuring out: “This breath is not … 
  3. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … Like right now, you’re keeping the breath in mind—and keeping in mind the fact that you want to stay with the breath. Mindfulness also means remembering to recognize what’s coming up in the mind. In Thai, they use the same word for “to remember” and “to recognize”: cam. When sensual desire comes up, you recognize it: “This is sensual desire.” You … 
  4. Technique & Attitude
     … How you focus on the breath. How you keep the breath in mind. And how you’re alert to the breath. There are specific steps, specific techniques that you want to master, because it is a skill. And having a specific technique like this gives you a way of measuring the currents of the mind against each other. It gives you a firm point … 
  5. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … Use the comfort of the breath as food when you’re dealing with things you have to accept, things you can’t change. And use the breath as part of a skillful approach in taking apart unskillful mind states that you can change. So, pay careful attention to the breath. It has a lot to offer in this skill of learning what to accept … 
  6. Patience
     … We start with the breath. Of all the properties in the body, of all the functions in the body, it’s the one most directly influenced by the mind. So you’ve got a double duty here: working with the breath and then being patient about it. Because if you get impatient, that’s going to have an impact on the breath, and the … 
  7. Rightly Directed
     … As you get used to being with the breath and developing good qualities around the breath, those good qualities will continue to surround your breath. Each time you return to the breath, there they’ll be. So imbue your breath with conviction. Imbue it with persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment, all the qualities that are developed in those sixteen steps, and then just keep the … 
  8. The Saints Don’t Grieve
    The Saints Don’t Grieve January 28, 2005 One of the most difficult but important principles in the practice is what the Buddha called, “Learning to see renunciation as freedom.” For most of us renunciation seems to be a restriction — as when you’re getting the mind to focus on the breath. Before you make up your mind to do that, the mind doesn … 
  9. Generating Power
     … In other words, you keep reminding yourself to stay with the breath. If you notice that the mind is wandering off, you immediately get it back on track. Try to sense when the mind is preparing to go even before it actually goes. That way you can nip the distractions in the bud. And try to be as alert as possible to how the … 
  10. Comfortable With the Truth
     … Focus on the breath, see how long you can stay with the breath, see what other things come up to push you off the breath. Then learn to be quick to come back, and learn to get quicker so that you don’t get pushed off. Usually in the beginning this is one of the most disconcerting parts of the meditation: to see how … 
  11. Time Well Spent
     … But if you can say, “The time to work is the time to be with the breath, the time to talk is the time to be with the breath, the time to eat, the time to…whatever: It’s time to be with the breath,” that creates a continuous thread. This ability to make up your mind to stick with one thing, to keep … 
  12. Energy Channels
     … Often you find that in order to emphasize the difference between the in-breath and out-breath, you tend to squeeze different parts of the breath body, different channels of the breath energy at some point in the breathing cycle. So try to be sensitive to that. When you find a place you’ve been squeezing it, okay, think: “Open, all the way in … 
  13. Good Heart, Good Mind
     … This is one of the reasons why we work with the breath. Find a spot in the body that’s especially sensitive to how the breathing comes in, goes out. Find a spot in the body that’s especially sensitive to the in-and-out breathing, and keep your attention right there. Be very careful to breathe in such a way that it feels … 
  14. The Story behind Impatience
     … Here the intention is to stay with the breath, and to think about the breath, to evaluate the breath, to make it more comfortable so that you can stay here longer, to give more support to your original intention. As you get more and more sensitive to the breath, you find that you also get more and more sensitive to those intentions. Those are … 
  15. Stake Out
     … So we focus on the breath and the breath energies in the body. As the Buddha says, you want to be aware of the entire body. Some people are going to interpret that as being entirely aware of the whole length of the breath, in which case they say that the word “body” there means the body of the breath as felt at the … 
  16. Factors for Awakening
     … You start out ardent, alert, and mindful, focused, say, on the breath in and of itself, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. When you do that really well, you get the mind into the four jhanas. The list called the factors for awakening basically goes into the steps on how you get from right mindfulness to right concentration, up through … 
  17. Respect for Concentration
     … You work with the breath in whatever way will help you to settle down, to stay clear and centered. As you use the breath to work through pain in the body, you’ll find that some pains you can deal with and some pains you can’t, but the only way you’ll know is by experimenting. If there are pains you can’t … 
  18. Why We Train the Mind
     … Alertness is watching what’s happening with the breath. When it comes in, where do you feel it? When it goes out, where do you feel it? In what ways is it comfortable? In what ways is it not? What can you do to change it? That’s a quality called evaluation: taking stock of the breath and exploring the potentials that the breath … 
  19. Reading Your Meditation
     … your ability to stay with the breath, to have a center, to experiment with long breathing, short breathing, or long in, short out; short in, long out;being able to spread the breath to the different parts of the body. First off, just be sensitive to how the process of breathing feels in the different parts of the body, down your back and shoulders … 
  20. Choose Your Actions Wisely
     … If you clamp down too hard on the breath, if you force it too much, it’s going to get very uncomfortable, it’s not going to be a good place to stay. Just try to keep in contact with it. As for any thoughts that might come into the mind that don’t deal with the breath, just let them go. If they … 
  21. Even Animals Can Be Trained
     … Try to see what rhythm and texture of the breathing feels good. Some places will tell you that a good rhythm to start out with is about 5-6 seconds in-breath, 5-6 seconds out-breath. Try that for a while and see how it feels. And think of the breathing as a whole body process. When the Buddha talks about the breath … 
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