Anapanasati Question

Zenshin

Ok folks,

I've mentioned before my mental health issues so I'm not going to go into them again.

Here's the thing I have a lot of racing thoughts while practicing mindfulness of breathing but here's the thing no matter how distracted I am by thoughts I can always maintain some attention of the breathing. So my question is should I just keep the attention there or should I push it to maintain full awareness. As always thanks for your answers.

how

We are not our thoughts. One of the reasons so many forms of practise have you remain aware of your breathing is to connect your meditation to a reality beyond the sandbox that our thoughts offer us.
Who's saying that what your doing is not "full awareness"?

buddhajunkie

stick to your breath until you reach a point in your practice where the thoughts slow down. Otherwise it's too easy to get swamped in thoughts.

DairyLama

Lonely_Traveller said:

Ok folks,
Here's the thing I have a lot of racing thoughts while practicing mindfulness of breathing but here's the thing no matter how distracted I am by thoughts I can always maintain some attention of the breathing. So my question is should I just keep the attention there or should I push it to maintain full awareness. As always thanks for your answers.

Basically the idea is to keep attention on the breath. Could you say what you mean by "full awareness"?

Zenshin

Greetings oh porpoiseful one

Sometimes my full attention is on each breath, sometimes part of is and part of it is on the racing thought. Either way my question is a bit redundant as my meditation routine is going ok at the moment. It just a while back someone told me that my concentration was too forced. But I've become aware of when I'm forcing it at the moment as I tense up and push my awareness hard against each breath.

Sorry if I'm not making much sense got a bit of a medication hangover this morning.

Zenshin

I've changed my routine a bit anyway back to something I did before, rather than trying to separate samatha and vipassana by doing pure mindfulness of breathing and mahasi sayadaws techniques I now focus on breathing until the breath becomes quite fine and then just try to maintain bare awareness of each thought, emotion or sensation that arises in the strongest manner until it passes and then switch back to awareness of the breath if there is nothing else. I could tell I was beginning to "gain" quite a deep state (for me anyway) of concentration from it when I finished this morning.

I've been experimenting a lot with different techniques since I got into Buddhism and it looks like what I described above works best for me so my initial question may be a bit redundant.

footiam

Lonely_Traveller said:

Ok folks,

I've mentioned before my mental health issues so I'm not going to go into them again.

Here's the thing I have a lot of racing thoughts while practicing mindfulness of breathing but here's the thing no matter how distracted I am by thoughts I can always maintain some attention of the breathing. So my question is should I just keep the attention there or should I push it to maintain full awareness. As always thanks for your answers.

In Vipassana meditation, one is to observe the changes that is constantly occurs, each time, trying to draw back our attention to the rising and falling of the stomach. I don't think we have to try so hard to the extent that it bugs. That probably would defeat the purpose of meditation.

nlighten

I think the point is to use the breath to focus your mind, but to use that focus to become aware of your mind.

lobster

nlighten said:

. . . focus to become aware of your mind.

:wave:
Become aware of the awareness and look for the nature/emptiness of the awareness
. . . And have a nice day . . .

driedleaf

I was taught to just keep the breath in mind, the awareness will happen on its own.