Search results for: "The Breath"
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- The Buddha’s Wisdom… The Buddha gives you new things to keep in mind, not just the precepts, but now you’re going to focus on, say, just the breath in and of itself, or feelings or mind states just in and of themselves. But it’s good to start with the breath because everything else revolves around that. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful. Ardent in trying …
- Three Recollections… As soon as you focus on the breath, it’s like trying to balance a needle on top of a ball-bearing: It slips off. Or like trying to put two north poles of magnets together: They push each other away. There’s something that repels you from the breath, something that repels you from the present moment. In cases like that, he says …
- Understanding Aggregates… Here again, you’ve got form (the breath); feeling (the feeling of dis-ease you might encounter when you first try to settle down, and then the feeling of pleasure you’re trying to develop); the perceptions that you keep in mind about how the breath goes, where you can focus on the breath, your relationship to the breath. Fabrication starts out especially with …
- Working Hypotheses… You may hold a perception of the breath. At first, it’s your anchor that enables you to stay here in the present moment. But after a while you begin to realize that your way of perceiving these things may actually still be a disturbance. To begin with, there’s the need to adjust the breath so that it feels just right. But when …
- Discernment Fosters Concentration… You don’t feel starved of breath, you don’t feel like you’re suffocating, it’s just that the breath energy in the body is full. Everything is connected inside. If there’s a felt lack of breath energy in one part of the body, the breath energy in another part will move in. And you learn how to maintain that. It’s …
- Feeding on Right Resolve… After all, the breath can go through anything—it’s energy. And think of it coming before your other sensations in the body. All too often, we feel the solid parts or the pains in the body are there first, and then the breath has to be pushed through them or work its way around them. But just hold in mind the perception that …
- Generosity of Spirit… You’ve got the breath, that’s your bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation, verbal fabrication, and your feelings and perceptions are mental fabrication. For the most part, as we go through life—especially if we have little training in meditation—we wound ourselves by the way we fabricate the present moment. We breathe in ways that are uncomfortable. We talk …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… So the mind does need to rest, and it requires some thinking to get it to settle down, as you learn how to play with the breath, play with your meditation object. See what works, what doesn’t work. Use your imagination. I read a passage one time in which I was accused of having an “imaginative” way of teaching concentration. It was presented …
- The Buddha’s Universal Solvent… When you’re really with the breath, there’s no story there. You migt make a little story about how, “Last night, I meditated really well. I stayed with the breath.” But if you were to give a really detailed story of your meditation, well, the breath came in. Then the breath came out. Then the breath came in again. Then went out again …
- If These Walls Could Talk… So if you find yourself wandering off, away from the breath, you try to bring yourself back. And as you stay here, you try to strengthen your focus. This is one of the reasons why we work with getting the breath comfortable, trying to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out. Notice where the breath is flowing well …
- Your Inner Teacher… If your mind wanders off the breath, if it wanders away from your body, here’s the sound of the talk to send you back, to remind you of why you’re meditating, and sometimes to point out things that you might not have thought of otherwise. But still, the talk is meant to be here in the background. If there’s anything in …
- The Wisdom of Incongruity… In the beginning, we actually have to use that ability to think around things from various angles to help get the mind settled in on the breath in a comfortable way. If the mind has a tendency to think, well, try to have it think about the breath. Think about evaluating how comfortable it is, where you feel it, where it feels good, where …
- Perfection in an Imperfect World… the ability to keep something in mind, as we’re doing with the breath right now—keeping the breath in mind, and keeping in mind all the tricks we’ve learned about how to deal with the breath. You don’t have to run them through your mind all the time, but have them at your fingertips so that when you recognize a certain …
- Intelligence of the Heart… It’s the same as when you work with the breath. In the beginning, it’s difficult trying to find ways of getting good breath energy to flow through the body. But as you get more and more used to how the breath channels are arranged in your body, and how you can allow the breath to spread, then you get more and more …
- Selfing & Not-selfing… You’ve got the feeling of pleasure that you’re trying to maintain; the perception of the breath that holds you with the breath; fabrication of directed thought and evaluation as you keep thinking about the breath and evaluating how good it is, and adjustments so that it feels good breathing in, good breathing out, all the way in, all the way out. You …
- Renunciation… Ultimately, as you focus on the breath, the breath gets more and more refined, to the point where you don’t even have a sense of the in-and-out breath, and the shape of the body begins to dissolve away. The body begins to feel just like a mist of little dots. If you focus in on the space between the dots, that …
- Unparadoxical Happiness… No matter what happens, no matter how loud the noises around you are, how insistent outside stimuli maybe, they don’t destroy the breath. They don’t destroy your ability to stay with the breath. This is a kind of happiness that comes with practice. So it’s worth working on. It’s a happiness that does withstand scrutiny. Yet even this is not …
- Advice for a New Monk… Notice where you feel the breath. Whichever part of the body that’s easiest to stay focused on and to know, now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out: Try to stay focused right there. If thoughts come into your head, remind yourself that they’re not destroying your breath. The sensations of breathing are still there. Try to maintain …
- Mindfulness of Death… There’s one passage where the Buddha says that if you really want to be heedful, you remind yourself each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, “May I live for this one more breath, I could accomplish a lot.” In other words, mindfulness of death focuses you on the breath and what you can do with the breath. If you simply …
- When Attacked by Distractions… This is what’s holding me there.” Now, if you find that applying this kind of thinking helps, and you really are understanding things, okay, drop the breath for a bit and focus on this. Although you can also find that using the breath to deal with whatever has got you distracted can be helpful. In other words, there’s probably some dis-ease …
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