Search results for: "Feeling"

  1. Page 106
  2. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … To focus on the breath, to know when it’s coming in, to know when it’s going out, is called focusing on form—the way you feel the body from within. And allow it to be comfortable. After all, the mind won’t stay if it’s not comfortable. As you can depend more and more on the sense of feeling centered, it … 
  3. Inner Wealth
     … You’d feel that it’s beneath you. In this sense, this healthy sense of shame is an aspect of self-respect, self-esteem. You realize that your actions are valuable, that they’re powerful. When you think about doing something where you yourself know better, who are you deceiving when you pretend that you don’t know better? You’re deceiving yourself, harming … 
  4. Path & Raft
     … You’re identifying with form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all the five aggregates—building a sense of self around them. Either you identify with a particular aggregate or group of aggregates, or you feel that they belong to you. You have a self that owns these things, or your self is in these things, or these things are in yourself. Any of these … 
  5. Do. Maintain. Use.
     … And don’t feel like you’re being invaded by it. Think of your body as being like a big window. The breath is the frame, and things can go right through. You don’t have to catch them. You don’t have to repel them or push them away. They’ll go right through and they’ll disappear. As for thoughts, sometimes you … 
  6. When You’re Discouraged
     … So when you’re feeling discouraged in the practice, remind yourself: This is something you’ve got to do. You’ve got to learn how to get your mind under control, otherwise you’re going to suffer a lot when aging comes, when illness comes, when death comes. People may give you advice, but how you manage your mind in the face of those … 
  7. Focus on the Precepts
     … Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so on. Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those five clinging-aggregates is to comprehend them. To comprehend them means to understand them to the point where you have no passion, aversion, or delusion around them, and you comprehend them … 
  8. The Path Has a Goal
     … I don’t know which is more disheartening, the fact that he’s been such a lousy meditator for so long or that he feels so good about being a lousy meditator. You can’t take people like that seriously. You can’t take them as guides. The Buddha taught skills that get results. That, he said, is the test for any kind of … 
  9. Sending Happiness
     … the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself in directed thought and evaluation, the feelings you focus on, the perceptions you focus on. What needs to be changed? You can change the way you breathe. How do you direct your thoughts to the breath? How do you evaluate the breath? Or if you find that the mind isn’t willing to settle … 
  10. Meaning & Importance
     … As the Buddha says, we take the potentials for form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, and we fabricate them into actual forms, feelings, etc., for the sake of something. Usually for the sake of happiness, which means that every present moment has a for-the-sake-of in it. It’s moving in a direction. It’s a means to an end. That’s … 
  11. Trading Up
     … Finally, when you can’t hold it any longer and you start breathing in, the in-breath feels really good. This pleasure is called the pleasure of form. It can be very intense, if you sit with it long enough, but it’s still a pleasure of form: the form of the body as you feel it from within. It’s not sensuality. It … 
  12. Appropriate Attention
     … See what kind of breathing feels good in the body right now: long breathing, short breathing, heavy breathing breath feels right. You can experiment to see. This makes it more interesting. And right there, you’ve got a lesson in skillful and unskillful intentions. Some intentions to change the breath end up with an uncomfortable, tight, restricted, or tense sense of the breath. You … 
  13. There’s Work to Be Done
     … If you act like you don’t know that it’s there, it’ll hang around for a while and not feel so threatened. So when you’re first dealing with these blockages inside—and they’re both mental and physical at the same time—work around them. If there’s a tightness in the heart, go down either side. A tightness in the … 
  14. Skill
    Focus on your breathing, wherever you feel the breathing—in other words, wherever there are sensations in the body that let you know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Focus on those sensations. It could be a sensation of the air coming in and out the nostrils, or the movement of the shoulders, the movement of the … 
  15. Change Your Mind
     … So you experiment with breathing in ways that give rise to pleasure, breathing ways that give rise to rapture, being sensitive to how feelings and perceptions have an effect on your mind, and learning how to calm that effect. You also experiment with breathing in ways that have an effect on the mind, or gladdening the mind while you breathe in and breathe out … 
  16. A Taste of Freedom
     … Some people, when they come to meditate and they find out they have to stick with one object, feel like they’re being confined. They can’t think about this; they can’t think about that. Usually, when they’ve got a free hour like this, they can think about all kinds of things. And for most people, that’s their idea of freedom … 
  17. The Core of Experience
     … And the things you’ve got—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, what the Buddha calls the five aggregates—are things that if you simply cling to them, are going to cause problems, going to cause suffering. In fact, the clinging will be suffering. But you can turn them into a path, which switches their role as part of the first noble truth, about … 
  18. Caring Enough to Doubt
     … Can you use that energy to create a sense of pleasure right now? What would feel really good right now? Now, this may take work, and it may require energy as well. But you begin to realize that the pleasure that comes from focusing well on the breath is totally without drawbacks. It’s a hit that you can take again and again and … 
  19. The Uncertain Present
     … We’re attached to them because we feel the need to feed. As long as the mind is weak, it does need to feed, so you have to be careful about what you feed on and how you do it. So which aggregates are you going to foster? Which type of form are you now going to develop? As you focus on the breath … 
  20. Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe
     … Or you can have a perception of a knife that cuts through any point where you feel there’s a line connecting one pain to another. Use whatever works. If you have trouble focusing on any of these techniques, at the very least think thoughts of goodwill for all beings. Because one of the worst parts of feeling ill is that you start indulging … 
  21. Pulling Out of the Narratives
     … You may feel sweaty, you may feel the heat, but you don’t have to focus on those things. Get really focused on the breath. It’s like that music school I visited one time in Seoul, Korea, where all the musicians were sitting in one big room, everybody playing really loud, yet each person really focused on what he or she was doing … 
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