A Meditator’s Practice Guide to the Mind Illuminated by John Charles Yates

Author:John Charles Yates [Charles Yates, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780990847748
Published: 2017-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Experiencing the whole body while breathing in, he trains himself. Experiencing the whole body while breathing out, he trains himself.

Ānāpānasati Sutta

The Practice

As with the body scan, first direct your attention to the breath at the abdomen.

Then, making sure that peripheral awareness of the breath at the abdomen doesn’t fade, shift your attention to a particular body part, such as your hand.

Define your scope of attention to include that area only. Then further refine your scope to include only the breath sensations in the hand. Ignore all other sensations by excluding them completely from attention, but let them remain in peripheral awareness.

Next, move to another body part, perhaps the forearm, and do the same thing. Each moment of attention should include a very strong intention to focus clearly on breath-related sensations and to exclude everything else.

As your skill improves, keep increasing the scope of your attention to include larger and larger areas. Also, keep shifting between larger and smaller areas. For example, you might move between one finger and the entire arm. Your intention should be to observe all breath-related sensations as clearly in the whole arm as in that one finger. Whether you succeed or not isn’t important (though eventually, you will succeed). What matters is that simply holding this intention will bring your maximum available conscious capacity to bear on the current task, and everything else is ignored. As long as you ignore everything but the expanded meditation object, subtle distractions are temporarily subdued. Your sensory sub-minds may keep projecting non-breath-related sensations into consciousness, but they appear only in peripheral awareness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.