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Ivan Ganza 9 years, 2 months ago.
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April 17, 2016 at 6:38 am #528
Often the breath seems barely perceivable, where as strange as it may sound, the sound of silence, seems much more prominent, and is also indicative of reduced involvement with thought.
I also wondered about the breath following instructions, in the book:
on the one hand we are told not to control it
on the other hand we are told to generate positive feelings upon returning to it
& as mentioned above it is barely perceivable in anycase
all this reminds me of a trick hypnotists use when they say:
“TRY to seperate your hands”. or “TRY to open your eyes” the harder you TRY the more stuck they are!
It almost seems we are being told to TRY and follow the breath, which because it is so faint seems to make TRYINg & stress tension a subtle aspect of the endeavor.
am I just thinking about it too much? I ignore these thoughts and continue anyway, but wonder am I the only one who finds the breath frequently so faint that it disappears? I have a low pulse rate.
April 17, 2016 at 4:12 pm #530The breath (from my understanding) is simply a focal point for attention. Like a tool. The objective is to focus and stabilize your attention, eventually, totally. That is shamatha. It is so completely simple, yet not so easy to go into total focus and stability. It is so simple it can escape us, we tend to look for some complex head trip. Our minds are so extremely agitated and unstable here in industrialized cultures. We
The breath is a great object of select for focus of attention because as long as you are alive it will be there. That allows every other event occuring in your mind to be brought into into relief … as an interruption to quiescence. Then you can eventually, progressively become acutely aware of every event in your mind. That is the objective: to know your mind totally.
When the mind wanders from the focus of attention, that is mental aggitation. When you get sleepy, that is dullness. With aggitation the remedy is relax more deeply. With dullness the remedy is refresh your interest in the object. In all cases the remedy is to relax more deeply, progressively more and more relaxed.
The way I was trained, starting out, one spends entire sessions just becoming accustomed to relaxing progressively more and more. Then you start training attention on easy targets, begin to include like sensations of breath throughout the body. Then more narrow focus, perhaps sensatioins of breath in the belly, then the chest. Then at the tip of your nose. Soon the tip of the nose sensations take up the whole field of your awareness and they alone become this huge intensified experience that occupys all your ability to sense. Everything else in your experience recedes into the distant faint background.
If your mind is too wild and wooly to get into these things then psychotherapy, or the like, has accelerate clearing all the garbage out the is controling your mind, not permitting you to have control of it.
April 17, 2016 at 8:28 pm #531If I was anymore relaxed my lower jaw would drop and my mouth would open
in fact I become aware of the normal unconscious tension that keeps our mouths shut.
Not sure what to do about that tension. Sitting with mouth open doesn’t seem ideal.As regards thoughts sometimes they are as you say quite busy,
other times, mind is more relaxed
I hear the sounds:
refigerator going on and off
birds or a frog or passing cars
and frequently the sound of silence
So mind is fairly quite
so it doesn’t seem it’s busy mind or tension that is interfearing with perception of breath sensation
there just doesn’t seem to be much.
Oh well
I’ll see what happens
as practice continues.April 19, 2016 at 9:22 am #535Hi David,
Can you detect the feelings of coolness/hotness/fluctuations at the tip of your nose, or in that region? Is it so extremely faint you can not detect anything? Or is there something there?
Try it now and please report back your experience;-)
Cheers,
-Ivan/ -
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