IN A NUTSHELL: HOW TO MEDITATE

IN A NUTSHELL: HOW TO MEDITATE

"Close your eyes. Sit up straight. And focus on your breath. Know when the breath comes in, know when it goes out. All the way in, all the way out.
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Try to stay with the sensation of breathing wherever you find it clearest to follow. For some people, it's the sensation of breathing in the nose. For others, it's the movement of the chest, the movement of the abdomen―any place in the body where you can sense: Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out.
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And wherever you focus, allow the sensation to be comfortable so that it feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out. If it feels good, it's a lot easier to stay with the breath.
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This may require adjusting the rhythm and the texture of the breathing: deep breathing or shallow breathing; heavy or light; fast or slow. You can change the speed and the texture of the breath in the course of even one breath, especially when you're doing long breathing. Be careful that it doesn't get too strained.
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Then, once you've been able to get the breath comfortable, think of that sense of ease flowing through all the nerves of the body. Because the sensation of having a body here is a type of breath energy. If we didn't have the breath energy in the body, we wouldn't know we had a body here. We wouldn't feel it, we wouldn't sense it. So try to think of all these sensations as being connected.
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That also helps not only to make the breath really comfortable deep down inside but also to keep you awake. If the range of your focus is too narrow, it's very easy, once the breath gets comfortable, to fall asleep or to start just drifting off―or in and out of focus. So make sure that once there's a sense of ease, you allow it to spread like melted butter spreading over toast, seeping down into the holes in the bread, saturating the bread.
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And then once you've got a sense of ease filling the body like this, try to maintain it. And make your awareness fill the body, too. And here you have to be careful, because there will be a tendency for your awareness to shrink. So try to keep aware of the whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out.
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That, in a nutshell is the how, how you do the meditation."

❁❁❁
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from “Terror & Revulsion”
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You can read the full text here:
https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/CrossIndexed/Published/Meditations9/070827_Terror_&_Revulsion.pdf