Search results for: "The Breath"
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- Two Kinds of Middle… It’s a pleasure that comes simply from inhabiting the form of your body, being with the breath, the breath energy all around the body, all through the body, experiencing it from the inside. That’s form. It’s also a pleasure that can come as you learn how to direct the energies in the body—finding out where they’re flowing well, where …
- Getting the Most Out of the Present… When you’ve meditated on the breath before, how did you get good results? Try to relax around the breath. Don’t make the meditation too much of a chore. Think of it as an opportunity to breathe easy. Each breath is another opportunity to breathe easy. When the mind can rest a bit, then it can look at itself more clearly. So whatever …
- Training Your Cynical Voices… Keep coming back to the breath again and again and again. Keep exploring how you can breathe in a way that really feels gratifying. As for the stages of concentration, they’ll come on their own when you’re working with the breath like this. So there’s nothing superhuman about what you’re doing here—simply that you’ve got to learn how …
- Worries & Regrets… As you breathe in, think of the breath scattering the thoughts. Or you can think of the breath as a big broom sweeping through the body, sweeping through the mind, sweeping those thoughts away. That way, you can settle down and actually strengthen the mind here in the present moment, so that it’s strong enough to maintain those right views, maintain the right …
- Circumspection… Maybe I could try that.” Ajaan Lee’s instructions on the breath are a case in point. When I was in Singapore last year, some people were complaining that Ajaan Lee had introduced brahmanical ideas into Buddhism where they didn’t belong by talking about breath energies in the body. Now, the Buddha never said anything about breath energies in the context of breath …
- Battling Negativity… It starts with the breath. As the Buddha says, you learn how to breathe in different ways so that the breath becomes an ally in your battle with negative mind-states. You learn how to breathe aware of the whole body. You learn how to calm the sensations of breathing in the body so that there’s a sense of ease and refreshment every …
- Thoughts About Thinking… Sometimes you find that you can spend the whole hour thinking about the breath: different breath energies in the body and how you can coordinate them. If there’s a pain someplace in the body, you can ask yourself: How can you use the breath to help with the pain, so that even though the pain may stay there, you don’t feel so …
- Don’t Stop with Acceptance… Retrain the way you breathe around the pain, especially how you deal with the breath energy. Ajaan Lee has a lot to say on this topic: Say there’s a pain in your hip. Do you feel that the breath gets stopped by the pain? Is the pain like a wall? If so, change the perception. Think of that wall as being porous. Think …
- Right View from Right Effort… For example, you’re working with the breath right now. What kind of breathing is good? There’s no categorical answer to that question. What feels good right now? You experiment: longer breathing, shorter breathing, deeper/more shallow, heavier/lighter. When you find something that feels good, you stick with it. It may feel good for a while and then not so good. So …
- The Need for Goodwill… In our own case, we meditate so that we can develop the skills inside that allow us to find happiness here, simply by the way we breathe, by the way we understand the breath, hold the breath in mind. We also do this as an example to others because the good examples of human behavior are what give us heart as we live in …
- Secluded from Sensuality… That mean not only avoiding the pleasures but also avoiding fantasizing about them.s So, again, you have to maintain this sense of well-being that comes from inhabiting the body—staying with the breath, working with the breath energies—if you’re going to have any chance of pulling yourself out of sensuality and finding a noble truth inside the mind. This is …
- Meditate to Win… You train in how to breathe calming bodily fabrication, which basically means calming the breath itself. And, as a couple of suttas say, you get to the point where the breath stops. That’s when it’s really calm. Similarly with training in feelings, mind-states, mental qualities. So when you come here, you’re submitting to a training. We often translate those passages …
- A Valuable Gift… Try to make your mind one, here with the breath. Whatever way of getting the mind to settle down works for you, that’s what you pursue. There’s no one right way of getting the mind into concentration. Each person’s mind is going to find a different topic to be calming, although some topics can take you only so far, while others …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… On the one hand, there’s the breath, which is bodily fabrication. This is one of the reasons why we focus on the breath. The breath is an intentional process, and we look at the breath so that we can gain a sense of our own intentions. Then, when we learn how to modulate them and adjust them so that we can breathe in …
- Accepting the Way Out… This is why we practice with the breath so much, so that it becomes second nature: As soon as something comes up, you check the breath. If the breath doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Then there’s verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself about the issue at hand. That’s tied in with mental fabrication, your feelings and your …
- Dhamma Is a Quality of the Heart… We’re going to talk about the breath. The breath doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s not Buddhist. It’s not Christian. It doesn’t belong to anybody in particular. It’s common property throughout the world. We talk about the breath so that we can use the breath to catch the mind. And then we can talk about the mind: in other …
- Wise About Pleasure… And as you’re adjusting the breath, try not to put any pressure on it, because if you apply pressure to the breath, then no matter what kind of breathing you’re engaged in, it’s not going to feel comfortable. It’s more a question of allowing the breath to feel good, allowing the body to breathe in a way that feels refreshing …
- Concentration Develops Right View… Becoming is also another one, as you begin to notice that when you leave the breath, you go into another thought world. And in that world, it’s as if the breath doesn’t exist, as if the body doesn’t exist. You’re entirely someplace else. How did that happen? And what part of the mind wanted it to happen? You’re not …
- Freedom, Conditioned & Not… Your present actions take the potentials from past actions and turn them into what you’re experiencing right now—as when you’re choosing to stay with the breath. The fact that you’ve chosen to stay with the breath changes the breath right there. If you do it right, there’s going to be a sense of ease that comes with the act …
- A Home of Your Own… If there is any one part of the body where the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, you can change it. Think of the breath as just the energy that courses through the body as you breathe in, breathe out. In some areas it’s going to be more obvious than others. But as the mind settles down, the more obvious areas calm down, and …
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