Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 106
  2. True for What Purpose?
     … You want to focus on your own body as you feel it from within, to get the mind to settle down. This means you have to be selective in what you focus on, and also in what you say to yourself about it. You could be commenting on how your mind is not settling down, and how you’re a miserable meditator. Or you … 
  3. Fear of the Truth
     … It’s when you’ve living with fictions—with a lot of make-believe in the mind—that you feel threatened by the truth. When you try to pretend that there’s nothing unskillful in the mind at all, that all of your intentions are good—or that the unskillful ones will go away with some magical practice—then the truth is threatening, and … 
  4. Mindfulness the Gatekeeper
     … And the best way to keep those duties in mind is to simply be with the body in and of itself, how it feels to be with the body right here right now. For example, the breath: If you’re concerned about the duties of the world, the breath has only one function for you, which is to keep you alive. So when you … 
  5. Push Yourself
     … When you achieved awakening, you wouldn’t even feel that it had been attained through pain. The well-being of the awakening would blot out any sense that you had to go through something painful. The goal is that overwhelming. It’s not simply a matter of saying, “Okay, I’m going to accept things as they are, lower my standards, and be okay … 
  6. Mindstorms
     … Basically what a fiction writer does is to inhabit a little mental world, exploring what it feels like from inside. The more real you can make that world to yourself, the better the story when you write it down. What’s uncanny about these worlds is that sometimes a character you create can surprise you. The more real the character becomes in your mind … 
  7. The Mind’s Ostinato
     … But as long as you’ve established your priorities clearly, then the mind will feel more at ease. You’ll be at ease to think about the breath, evaluate the breath, make the most of whatever sense of well-being you can develop through the breath. The fact that all those activities are centered around one thing gives the mind a greater sense of … 
  8. Cause & Effect Right Now
     … A thought comes up in the mind and we feel compelled to run with it, or to complete it, or to figure out exactly what it’s all about. But because there are a lot of thoughts that aren’t worth following that way, you have to learn how to sort them out. And when there’s a pain in the body, it’s … 
  9. Courage
     … He was feeling his way with no guarantees. And here we have 2,500 years of examples of people who have gained awakening. Of course, for us the only proof will be what was the proof for them: that you find it within. But there are examples suggesting that this is possible. There are advantages to letting go of the things that we hold … 
  10. Frustrated Desires
     … It’s based simply on inhabiting your body, learning from the breath, learning which ways of breathing feel good, which ways really don’t feel good, which ways of concentrating the mind give a true sense of well-being, which ones give a more distorted or skewed sense. That’s something you have to learned through trial and error. Again, you’re learning from … 
  11. You Can’t Eat the Buddha
    You Can’t Eat the Buddha August 7, 2008 When you come across a situation where a friend is in pain or suffering, in mental distress, and you can help the friend overcome the pain, get over the distress, it gives rise to a very good feeling in the heart. The problem is that there are other times when we’re with other people … 
  12. You Can Do Better
     … Not only is there a better way to act, but you also feel that “Yes, I can do this. I have it within me, and it’s worth putting out that effort.” Those are the things that drive your practice along. We see the active side of discernment in lots of different places, as in right resolve. After you’ve gotten a good sense … 
  13. The Door of the Cage (2)
     … But there are skillful views that you cling to provisionally, skillful ideas as to what you should do—habits and practices, the precepts, the practice of concentration, the development of discernment—that you hold to provisionally, and a sense of self that feels competent to undertake the path and that will actually benefit from all this. And, as I’ve said, clinging to habits … 
  14. The Perfection of Freedom
     … And what is the feeling side, the feeling of pleasure or pain? Those are two very different things. When you can see the distinction between them, you begin to see how fleeting pleasure and pain can be. They come and go, come and go, come and go. Yet we live our lives trying to feed off those pleasures—and end up feeding on a … 
  15. The Anatomy of the Present
     … There’s bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, your feelings and the mental labels you apply to things. He also says that we shape our experience of the rest of the aggregates through fabrication, and that fabrication does it for a purpose. We take the raw material coming in from the … 
  16. Cornered
     … You take it with a purpose and you make it into an actual experience of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. You do that through the three fabrications we’ve talked about so much: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These are our cooking techniques. Then we’ve got these … 
  17. A Stranger to Your Thoughts
     … How is it doing? Is it feeling inclined to settle down? Or is it not? And if it’s not, what is it getting worked up about? What thoughts are preventing it from settling down? You have to work with those first. And how do you work with those thoughts? Try to make yourself a stranger to them. In other words, when you see … 
  18. The Best Work Around
     … Be really alert to what’s going on, adjusting it, fixing it so that it’s just right, so that the mind does feel good there. That’s the work we do in our meditation—to create a sense of well-being in the present moment—and it’s work that’s worth doing. You find that as you get into it, it’s … 
  19. The Values of Stillness
     … You don’t have to feel responsible for them. The mind needs its space. It needs to learn how to take on this different identity of the still mind. All too often, you’re told that as a meditator you should try to put aside any sense of identification with anything. And then they turn around and tell you, “Well, be the stillness or … 
  20. De-thinking
     … And my feeling was if you that many questions, none of them are really life-and-death questions. So I didn’t feel motivated to answer. If someone writes a letter with one question, I believe that person. So as you’re sitting here, try to sort out which are the most important questions for helping the mind right now? Everything else you can … 
  21. Action & Result
     … When you cling to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrication, or consciousness, there is some pleasure. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. But the clinging itself can turn things into pain and can lead to more suffering. We go around defining ourselves this way all the time. This is why we get reborn. We find that the things by which we define ourselves are falling … 
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