… You gently hold that nice feeling all way through the in-breath, and all the way through the out-breath, adjusting your breathing so that it doesn’t disturb the feeling. Or you can just keep in mind the word “breath,” ”breath,” “breath,” as a way of reminding yourself not to leave the breath, when something else comes up. Or the general feeling you …
… You can work with the mind, and that
gives a greater sense of well-being as you learn how to stay focused
and solid in the midst of all the changes that come your way.
After all, we do live in a middle level of being. The Buddha talks
about levels of being that are exclusively painful, those that are
exclusive pleasant, and then …
… If they don’t work, then try to imagine a different way of
changing things.
You may have noticed this when reading Ajaan Lee’s instructions for
meditation, especially in his Dhamma talks. In Keeping the Breath in
Mind, he gives you some basic principles, but in his Dhamma talks he
plays with all kinds of other ways of playing with the breath, ways …
… The good news of the Buddha’s teaching is that it doesn’t have to be
that way.
All too often the Buddha is accused of being pessimistic, but the
whole import of the four noble truths is that you don’t have to
suffer. You don’t have to get blown away. At the very least, suffering
is manageable. As someone once said …
… The body
has to function in a certain way, the brain has to function in a
certain way, to maintain that knowledge, and yet we know these things
can change.
This is why we need to look for a refuge. We talk about taking refuge
in the path, but even the path is uncertain until it’s reached the
goal. Once the goal is …
… A lot of the
Buddha’s meditation instructions involve teaching us how to think in a
way that’s useful, in a way that’s helpful. We may think, well, we
know how to think perfectly well, thank you, but if your thinking
causes suffering, if it causes harm, then no matter how clever it is,
you still don’t know how to think …
… In that way,
you develop a greater solidity. And the solidity is in and of itself a
gift to the people around you.
I recently saw an old New Yorker cartoon: a very chaotic office with
one person in the middle of the office who seemed calm. The boss was
talking to another of the workers, saying, “George over there: He’s a
center …
… For instance, when a feeling of pain appears in fabrication, it’s
accompanied by the way you breathe and by your perceptions. So, you
can ask yourself, “To what extent is the way I’m breathing aggravating
this pain? Can I breathe in another way? And to what extent is the way
I’m talking to myself about the pain getting in the way …
… middle of the night. He saw beings
dying and being reborn in line with their karma, going up and down and
up and down. It’s almost as if samsara is playing a trick on people.
You work really hard to develop good karma and you get the rewards.
But then if you’re attached to the rewards, you start behaving in
unskillful ways …
… It’s your kamma in the present experimenting with different ways of dealing with pleasure, different ways of dealing with pain, to see what approaches give the best results. Over time, as a meditator, your powers of judgment should get more and more precise in this way.
This is one of the reasons why the Buddha included evaluation as part of right concentration. You …
… He discerns, as it is has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are effluents… This is the origination of effluents… This is the cessation of effluents… This is the way leading to the cessation of effluents.’ His heart, thus knowing …
… One of the ways of taking pleasure in doing this, even before you can
find a sense of well-being with the breath, is to talk to yourself
about what a good thing it is that you’re on this path. The Buddha
lists six different ways of taking delight that he says can lead to
the end of the effluents. It’s interesting …
… It’s a sensation of energy that flows through the whole body, and you’re sitting in the middle of this vast breathing process that affects every nerve, every muscle. The whole experience of your body is related to the breath. The more you can perceive the breath in that way, the easier it is to settle down. And the easier it is to …
… After all, the fact that there’s
pain in the body is problem enough, but you don’t want to be adding to
it by the way you breathe. And you want to see if the way you breathe
can actually help.
When I had malaria, I found that simply breathing became laborious. I
realized that because I was using certain muscles in the …
… If he’d gone forth in the middle of his life, he would have become a non-returner, a stream enterer. In other words, he could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have to fall to lower realms. But he never got around to practicing, out of sheer laziness and heedlessness. So his opportunity was wasted. He had the potential but he wasted it …
… Or if the mind is feeling really irritable, you can think of relaxing everything going down to the legs, down to the toes, think of yourself sitting in the middle of the breath, putting the breath all around you, with relaxation spreading out from the center in every direction.
So: lots of ways of playing with the breath. Lots of ways of playing with …
… You might want to check, to make a survey of the body, to make sure that all those channels are open, down the back, out the legs, in the front of the body, right down the middle, past the shoulders, down the arms, all around the head, down the legs, all the way to the feet. Any patterns of tension or tightness, allow them …
… Even good qualities of the mind are inconstant, but the more you invest in them, the longer their impact, the longer their ability to support you, all the way through the process of aging, all the way through the process of illness, all the way through the process of death. These things stay there. And they can help you. The body is something you …
… Then bring your attention to the middle of the chest. Try to be especially sensitive to how the breath energy feels around the heart, and breathe in a way that feels soothing there.
Now bring your attention to the right, to the place where the chest and the shoulder meet.
And then to the same spot on the left.
Now bring your attention to …
… When Ajaan Lee is
talking about the different ways of meditating in his book, Frames of
Reference, he starts out with different ways of thinking. Think about
the 32 parts of the body, think about the body in terms of the
elements, think about how inconstant things are, to develop a sense of
*samvega. *It’s the samvega that helps pull you away from …
DN 12 Lohicca Sutta | To Lohicca
… He discerns, as it is has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are effluents… This is the origination of effluents… This is the cessation of effluents… This is the way leading to the cessation of effluents.’ His heart, thus knowing …
Introduction | Good Heart, Good Mind
… Then bring your attention to the middle of the chest. Try to be especially sensitive to how the breath energy feels around the heart, and breathe in a way that feels soothing there. Now bring your attention to the right, to the place where the chest and the shoulder meet. And then to the same spot on the left. Now bring your attention to …
