Best Of

@Jeroen said:
When you give attention to your breath with friendliness and love, you get to recognise the wisdom of the body. It just breathes in a shallow way, taking in just enough breath to keep the body functioning when you are at rest. It doesn’t breathe deeply or bring in lots of oxygen when it isn’t necessary — it knows when enough is enough.

Sometimes I find that the in-breath generates energy and tension, and the out-breath is a moment of release and relaxation, then my in breath is short, and my out breath is long, and I find myself in a tremendous space of let-go.

Breath creates spaciousness in the body… the in-breath expands the lungs and opens the chest, and the out-breath brings release and relaxation, while tension and energy disappear. In a way it is analogous with what happens with the mind, that thoughts too expand and we get an impression of spaciousness in the mind when we just let our attention rest on the breath.

The original nature of mind, the sky-like spaciousness of being, becomes more visible when you are more acquainted with the breath, and the cloud-like thoughts become fewer. This thought suddenly occurred to me after spending some time with the breath after reading the sky metaphor in ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’. Beautiful…

As I have been doing the year of breath for four months now, some days I have found I remember the breath just once or twice, and some days I spend ten minutes or more just being with the breath. I embrace it with love and kindness and compassion, knowing that some of my thoughts have been unkind, and that is why I hold it like a small baby.

Experience of mantra practice

Thus have I experienced:

In practical terms, mantras and chants are used to clear mental clutter and then focus the mind.

When I used to attend Dharma talks, our Geshe came to the island once a month to teach. We always began and ended with a chant or mantra. The visits stopped a few years ago.

I start each meditation with a greeting to the universal wisdom and compassion the mind opens to, and I end with gratitude for the experience.

For the coming year

A practical resolution is to refrain from self-reproach when a resolution is broken. The discipline lies not in perfection, but in how the mind is trained to respond to failure.