Search results for: "Feeling"
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- Harmlessness… Compassion is what you feel when you have goodwill for someone else but you see that they’re suffering or they’re acting on the causes that would lead to suffering. This can apply to yourself as well as to other people. So it follows that ill will is a general desire to see someone suffer or to do things that will cause suffering …
- Space for Sustained Contemplation… And as you’re dealing with the types of fabrication around the breath—the directed thought and the evaluation, perceptions and feelings around the breath—that sensitizes you to the fabrications that are always going on in the mind. Whatever the attachment is, whatever the craving is, you realize it has to be made out of these things. That’s what you want to …
- A Sense of Yourself… How hard do you find it to part with your things? How hard do you find it to give of your time or your energy to other people when they ask for it, or even when they don’t ask for it, but you see that they could use it? What gets in the way of your generosity? When you feel that you’re …
- Feeding While You Work… You have no responsibilities and you feel fine for the time being. But then you come back, and things are sometimes worse than they were before, because you neglected the opportunity to learn the lessons that needed to be learned by being skillful, seeing cause and effect as they’re happening. This is what the four noble truths are all about, this is what …
- A Flammable Mind… If there’s nothing good at all, you have to feel compassion for them because they’re just really making life worse and worse and worse for themselves. So there’s no need to focus on the details that would give rise to anger. Those little details: Those are the sparks that set your desiccated mind on fire, your flammable mind on fire. The …
- Awaken to Your Potentials… Right now, you’re mainly concerned with the potential for the path—how to develop it, how to take this breath you’ve got right here, right now, how to take this sense of the body as you feel it from within, and make something special out of it—something that’s refreshing, something that’s energizing. If you’ve been tired from the …
- For the Sake of the Deathless… So we’re feeling our way. We do have a map, and it’s a map that’s just right. It doesn’t have too much information. If the Buddha had tried to give all the information he gained in his awakening, the map would become unreadable. He gave us just enough to get us on the right course. But the path also requires …
- Evaluation… Is this a good comfortable breath to stay with? Does it feel good being with the breath? If it doesn’t, you can change. No one is standing over you with a whip, telling you not to change, not to do anything, or to just accept whatever’s there. After all, you’ve had a hand in creating whatever’s there. If you want …
- Fear & Anger… So while we’re meditating here, it’s good to gain practice in being sensitive to what kind of breathing feels good, and where the different parts of the body are getting caught in unskillful energy patterns. It’s one of the reasons why Ajaan Lee has you focus on the centers of the breath—the middle of the head, the palate, the base …
- Pride in Your Craft… But if you pay attention, you can start seeing what kind of breathing genuinely does feel good now. It’s going to take a while to get really skilled at this, because sometimes a certainly way of breathing that feels cool right now is actually not all that good for you. You learn that over time. As you keep watching, keep observing, and develop …
- Sanity for the Holidays… If it’s just that person’s feelings spouting off, you learn how to let it go. If you can’t let it go, there’s a lot of trouble. I was talking to someone the other day who was saying, “If someone says something wrong, how can you not correct it? How can you just let it go?” If you go around straightening …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… So it’s not just a question of whether the technique is right for you, it’s what are you giving to the technique? Here, we’re focusing on the breath, being with the breath as it comes in, as it goes out, noticing where you feel the breathing in the body, not just at the nose, but anyplace in the body where the …
- Good & Bad Meditation… How do you breathe so as to minimize the pain, or to at least put you in a position where you’re not feeling threatened by the pain? I’ve often found in my own practice that a particular blockage in the body suddenly makes the meditation really interesting. Once, in my first year, I had a problem with my foot. I spent hours …
- A Committed Relationship… Because sometimes a certain type of breathing may feel good for the body but the mind has trouble staying with it, in which case you’ve got to change. Other times a kind of breathing may feel good—especially the very gentle subtle breathing may feel good—but the body’s getting starved of oxygen. I found years ago when I was suffering from …
- Delusion Concentration… Keep your main attention with the comfortable parts of the breath, the areas where the breath feels good. This, of course, leads to the problem on the other side. When you’re with the comfortable parts, you have to be very careful not to just wallow around in the pleasure. This is especially tempting after a tiring day. It’s like coming home to …
- Four Noble Truths to One… the five clinging-aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. The aggregates don’t cling. We cling to them, and the clinging is the actual suffering. Once we learn how to be with these things, to engage in these things without clinging, then there’s no suffering around them. So you have to comprehend: How is that clinging suffering? We have to …
- Dispassion Is Freedom… The mind feels a lot more expansive: That’s dispassion. The mind really feels expansive because it’s not concerning itself with little tiny things. The Buddha tried to induce in his listeners a taste of dispassion when he gave the graduated discourse. You think of all the good things in generosity, the good things in virtue; the rewards of those things, but then …
- Death & Goodwill… If there’s something you see is right and someone else is doing something you feel is very wrong, you can get into conflict, if you see that it’s worth it. But you have to do it with goodwill. If you’re coming at the other person with ill will, that person is going to detect it. He’ll be very unwilling to …
- Skillful Thinking… Think in those ways for a while until you feel more confident in yourself and in the path, and then you can get back to your practice. Or, if you find yourself getting complacent and lazy, you can think about death for a while, because death can come at any time. It’s right here in your breath. If you breathe in and can …
- How to Read Yourself… In this case, the Buddha says, there are times when you to get the mind to stay with the breath but you run into a fever in the breath or a fever in your feelings, or a fever in the mind. In other words, the mind’s not willing to stay. It feels antsy, irritable. That’s when you have to stop and think …
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