Search results for: "Feeling"

  1. Page 105
  2. In the Land of Wrong View
     … Notice, when you breathe in, where do you feel it? You may not be feeling it primarily in the areas where you think you should. But that doesn’t matter. In fact, when you notice that the breath is doing things you don’t expect, that’s when you know that you’re really watching it. Because the way we breathe will vary from … 
  3. Fear of Death
     … If you really feel goodwill for all, there’s no way you can intentionally harm them. You don’t have to like all beings; you simply decide that you don’t want to cause them suffering. You don’t want to take pleasure in their suffering. As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people’s suffering? You don … 
  4. A Full Heart
     … That in and of itself simply feels good. It’s also very useful. If you look carefully, you begin to notice that when a distracting thought comes up, the simple fact of keeping that thought in your range of awareness requires that you create a little marker to remind yourself of the thought from moment to moment. That marker is usually a little bit … 
  5. Assumptions
     … So you don’t feel so compelled to keep on suffering. You start noticing what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering and you realize it’s unnecessary, so you drop it. That’s what it comes down to. But you can’t do this just in the abstract. You have to watch what’s actually going on. And you have to apply … 
  6. Faith in the Practice
     … It’s not a middle way between pain and pleasure—in other words a neutral feeling tone. It’s the realization that you can use pain and pleasure as means rather than as ends. For example, there’s the pain of knowing that “There’s work to be done.” But then there’s the confidence that comes: “Well, I can do it.” The pain … 
  7. Not-self in Context
     … When you feel tempted to stop, ask yourself, “Okay, you came here for this purpose, which is to put an end to suffering. Do you not want to do that? Don’t you really care for your genuine happiness?" It’s in cases like that where the activity of identifying yourself is actually useful. So, taking action as the context, you begin to see … 
  8. Unskillful Habits
     … It helps you to breathe through a lot of the tension in the body that would make you want to get the anger out of your system, or get that feeling of confinement, that feeling of discomfort out of your system. You’re now in a position where you can watch: What is this anger? Does it give you a realistic picture of what … 
  9. Death World
     … We feel that our reaction is a natural response, built into the way things are: When people do outrageous things, we feel we’re bound to get angry. But as the Buddha said, whether they’re outrageous or not, your reaction is still your kamma. You have to look at it that way. So you have to ask yourself, “What kind of action would … 
  10. Useful Vocabulary
     … How is a perception, say, distinct from a fabrication? How are they related to feelings? You can’t see relationships until you actually see that there are two things to be related. Otherwise, it’s just a blob. Making these distinctions is useful because you want to know precisely where your cravings are. That’s what all these words are for, so that you … 
  11. Dealing with the Hindrances
     … figuring out what kind of breathing feels best for you right now, where you can create a sense of well-being in the body, and then how you can make the best use of that sense of well-being, letting it spread down the nerves, down the blood vessels, bathing the whole body, maintaining your focus with the breath so the mind is willing … 
  12. Where Your Mind Gravitates
     … In other words, go back and look in more detail at your lust, at your anger, at your delusion, but come from a position where the mind is feeling relatively well fed, relatively secure, more soundly based, more soundly grounded, so that you can see things a lot more clearly. It’ll be less and less inclined to want to fall in with your … 
  13. Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away
     … How’s the breath? Too long? Too short? Too heavy? Too light? What kind of breathing would feel really good right now? Think about this for a while. This is what directed thought and evaluation are for: to do whatever correcting needs to be done. When you’ve finally got something going well, you foster it. You don’t have to do so much … 
  14. Get Out of Yourself
     … This is why, in the description of right mindfulness, the Buddha talks about being aware of body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities, both inside and out. Now, if you think of mindfulness as meaning awareness, you wonder how you’re going to be aware outside of somebody else’s breath or aware of their greed, aversion, or delusion, or their … 
  15. Present Kamma
     … When you breathe in and out, when you think about it, what’s the picture you hold in mind about the breathing? Where does that breath come in? Where does it go out? You might want to survey your body to see where the feeling of energy flow is, because that’s what you want to focus on. Now, the breath might not be … 
  16. An Island of Certainty
     … If you don’t want to go any further in the breath meditation, or you don’t feel secure about going any further quite yet, just stay with this. But ask yourself if it’s comfortable. Here again you may have some doubts, so you can experiment. Think of the Buddha. How did he come to knowledge? How did he gain an awakening? When … 
  17. The World of Conviction
     … But then there’s that part of the mind that would like to be free and feels so stifled by conventional society, conventional values. There’s a large part of society that wants to teach you how to treat that part of your mind with disrespect. Years back there was a movie called The Devils, about a priest and a nun in the Middle … 
  18. A Refuge from Death
     … This is why we practice concentration, to keep the mind on one object and give it something good to hold on to, so that it doesn’t feel tempted to go wandering off and feeding in its old ways. So when you find the mind wandering off, bring it back to the breath. If it keeps wandering off, look at the things that you … 
  19. The Raft of Jhana
     … What makes these faculties different from your ordinary directed thought and evaluation, your ordinary feelings of pleasure, and sometimes of rapture? It’s that you’re bringing them together to one thing. But you’re using habits, abilities, tendencies that you already have, so it’s not so otherworldly after all. What this means is that you’ve got to take the habits you … 
  20. Single-minded Determination
     … But as you begin to feel at home here, at ease here, you grow more resistant to getting knocked off because you don’t want to leave what you’ve got. This feels like the right place to be. Then you can start taking on the more deep-rooted intentions that come your way. You take them apart to understand, “Why do they seem … 
  21. When This Is, That Is
     … And I’ve heard people complaining that they feel disappointed. Where are all the grand, mystical visions? Where are all the bright lights? But reading about the Buddha’s grand visions doesn’t give us grand visions, or if it does give us grand visions, they’re probably deluded. The Buddha was right: What’s really important is experienced as a principle of causality … 
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