Search results for: "The Breath"

  1. Page 84
  2. Becomings
     … You’re mindful of the breath coming in going out. You keep remembering to stay here. Try your best not to go someplace else. And then you’re alert. On the one hand, you’re alert to the breath itself: what it’s doing, how it feels, where you notice it most clearly in the body. On the other, you’re also alert to … 
  3. Appropriate Attention
     … Use the breath as your anchor to keep you here. As you work with the breath—trying out long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow, heavy, light—you provide yourself with a way of staying interested in the present moment. You’re not just forcing the mind to be here. You realize that you’re here to learn about it, and there’s a lot … 
  4. Unskillful Habits
     … So as we are meditating, we’re putting ourselves in a position, we’re positioning ourselves in the right spot, right here at the breath. As you stay here, you get to see a lot of things going on in the mind, a lot of things going on in the body. Yet, while you’re with both the mind and the body, you’re … 
  5. Knowing & Acting
     … The skill here, what we’re working on at the moment, is getting the mind concentrated, getting it absorbed in the breath. The word for absorption in Pali is jhāna, which is related to a verb, jhayati, which means to burn, as when a fire burns. They have several different words for burning in Pali, and it’s interesting that the one they choose … 
  6. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … He ended up not only surviving, but also discovering new ways of focusing on the breath, using the breath, connecting to the breath energies throughout the body to cure his heart. And he arrived at a way of teaching breath meditation that he used for the rest of his life. So the Dhamma is here to offer you something with which you can make … 
  7. Right Resolve & Right Concentration
     … And learn how to look at concentration as your true friend, look at the breath as your true friend. You’ve got to win the breath back so that it doesn’t act as a servant for greed or aversion or delusion or jealousy or fear— so that you can tune into good, comfortable breathing anytime in any situation. That’s your first line … 
  8. A Decent Education
     … How do you use pleasure? Focus on the breath right now and see how it feels. Then experiment with the breath to see how the way you breathe can produce either pleasure or pain. It may be subtle — the difference between the two — but it’s there. We’ve learned to desensitize ourselves to this aspect of our awareness, so it’s going to … 
  9. Attahi Attano Natho
     … No one else can focus your mind on the breath. I can stay here and keep repeating over and over again, “Stay with the breath, stay with the breath,” but that doesn’t focus your mind on the breath. It gives you an idea of maybe what to do, but it’s up to you to exercise your mindfulness and alertness, and to make … 
  10. Unfabricated Happiness
     … What kind of perception do you have of the breath? If you think of it simply as air coming in and out through the nostrils, it’s going to be hard to use the breath to help spread those feelings of ease and well-being around the body. But if you think of the breath as a flow of energy, it’ll be easier … 
  11. What Should I Do?
     … Even when you stay with the breath, sometimes you can’t figure out what to do with the breath, so you just watch it. Tell yourself, “Let the breath breathe on its own.” You’re not going to interfere, and that way you may see something you hadn’t seen before. The third activity, cooling the gold in water, stands for getting the mind … 
  12. Large-hearted Goodness
    When you settle down with the breath, and the mind is willing to stay here watching the breath consistently, making it smooth all the way in, all the way out, it’s food for the mind. And it’s good food. It’s food inside, not food out in the world. You get a sense of well-being, a sense of ease, of being … 
  13. The Same but Different, but the Same
     … This was especially true when people got to the point where they could get their minds to settle down and really be still, the point where the breath filled the body, awareness filled the body, and the breath got so calm that it you couldn’t sense any coming in and out: You were fully aware of the body but you didn’t sense … 
  14. Learning How to Talk to Yourself
     … So we meditate to bring some light to this topic, by telling you to try to think about the breath and comment on the breath in such a way that the breath feels good and, when it feels good, how you can maintain that sense of pleasure. In the beginning, focus just one spot in the body that feels especially sensitive to how the … 
  15. Single-minded
     … Allow it to have a sense of fullness, that it’s one spot in the body where you don’t have to pull the breath in or push it out. It’s automatically connected. As soon as there’s a thought that you need some more in-breath, it’s right there. As soon as there’s the thought that the breath can go … 
  16. Samvega
     … So you come back to the breath. Then you work with the breath in a way that makes it more interesting so that it’s not so easy to slip off. But if you find yourself slipping back again and again, then you really have to think about the drawbacks of that kind of thinking. Where is it going to take you? If you … 
  17. Perceptions Around Pain
     … You can lay claim to another part of the body where the breath is nourishing, where the breath is refreshing or, at the very least, the breath is okay. The pain can have its part. Then you begin to realize that the pain is not the same as the body. Your sense of the body is made up of the four elements. There’s … 
  18. Patience & Tenacity
     … Even though part of the mind may be in a lot of turmoil, you can find a little corner that’s not, that can actually think about what you want to think about or be still with the breath if you finally want to be still with the breath. Think of your mind as being like a large room. There maybe some people off … 
  19. The Buddha’s Map
     … So we focus on the breath and ignore a lot of other things right now. The important part of the sketch is to try to be aware of the breath as a whole-body process. Get a sense of your awareness as a whole-body field, not confined to any one point. You may focus on one point that’s more prominent than any … 
  20. Take Down Your Sails
     … Something may be wrong with the mind, something may be wrong with the breath. Those are the two issues. Learn how to sort things out, learn how to articulate them to yourself. Are you carrying in a mood from the day? What can you do to shred the mood? How about the breath? How does the breath feel right now? Are you breathing in … 
  21. Representing the World to Itself
     … We start with something simple like this, like the breath. There are lots of different ways you can represent the breath to yourself, lots of different ways you can picture it to yourself. I know in my own case that reading Ajaan Lee, when he talks about the different breath energies in the body, opened up a whole new world of what could be … 
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