Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

The Out Breath: Unlocking Concentration

With Toby Sola recorded on June 16, 2024.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

Shodo Harada Roshi is known as a “teacher of teachers”, with masters from various lineages coming to sit with him in Japan. If you went to Harada’s monastery, the main meditation technique you’d learn involves slowing the out breath to last one minute. This drastically slows down your physiology, which in turn settles the mind.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Shaila Catherine

    Becoming Content with Emptiness and Voidness

    Shaila Catherine asks “Will nothing be enough?” as she explores how identification with our experience can create discontent with the basic fact that matter and mind is empty of self. Mindfulness will not demolish ego; instead, we mindfully recognize…

    Read More

  • Time and Timelessness: Finding Refuge, Finding Inspiration

    Certain moments, events and experiences open our awareness beyond the everyday to a sense of something more eternally present. Meditation points our attention to just this place, which the poet TS Eliot called ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time’. Contemplating life from such a perspective we can often find fresh resources of…

    Read More

  • Stephen Fulder

    Including Diversity and Differences in the Space of Awareness

    Diversity is a challenging concept today. Yet our equanimity is developed through meeting the great range of our inner experiences, as well as staying steady in the cacophony of the marketplace. There is enough space in our hearts to welcome the wonderful richness and diversity of life and of each other. Our open awareness makes…

    Read More

  • Shaila Catherine

    Faith and confidence: the first spiritual faculty.

    Faith, confidence, and trust are English translations for the Pali term saddhā. In this talk, Shaila Catherine explores the cultivation of saddhā as an aid to awakening and as the first in the list of spiritual faculties that include faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom.

    Read More

  • Lama Rod Owens

    Love’s in Need of Love: The Practice of Love as Social Resistance

    The great Black American singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder once sang, “Love’s in need of love today.” His words couldn’t be more true as we face a global community struggling with war, poverty, illness, climate instability, and the rise of political authorities and governments who do not seem to be grounded in compassion or kindness….

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Ulla Koenig – Week of 05 May, 2025

    We are delighted to have Ulla Koenig guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these offerings support and enrich your practice.

    This week’s theme is: Touching Ground

    Whether it is the dynamics of the world that stir our hearts and minds, or personal challenges, as human beings we are confronted in many ways with the fragility of life. Touching ground, finding something to orient and trust in, is a deep need and yet not an easy endeavor. We dedicate this week to exploring the idea of taking refuge and translating it into a meaningful act that we can participate in no matter what.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Mark Coleman Profile Photo

    Nature Awareness Practice in the Anthropocene

    For many people, the natural world is a perennial place of refuge, resource and replenishment. It can be a profound support for bringing awareness into the outdoors. Yet, nature is under increasingly under siege. During this session we’ll explore how we can still take refuge in the natural world as a support for our well-being,…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    The nature of practice: from linear path to inclusive awareness.

    Today, Worldwide Insight founding and guiding teacher Martin Aylward explores the nature of practicing dharma, the way the path tends to unfold for us over time, and its developmental stages, from an initially linear sense of ‘self-improvement’ to an increasing capacity to be with ourselves however we are, and with whatever appears.

    Read More