Search results for: "Feeling"

  1. Page 107
  2. Before Your Face Was Born
     … Then when you find yourself doing things that are not up to that high standard, you feel like a failure. It’s good to remind yourself that all those issues are useless. They don’t accomplish anything at all. They are what Ajaan Maha Boowa calls the fangs of unawareness, the fangs of ignorance: this whole issue of conceit. So remember: We’re here … 
  3. Exercising the Mind
     … But sometimes you can remember the lesson, but you just don’t feel like doing it. You don’t feel up to doing it. That’s because you lack strength. This is how the meditation really helps you in daily life. It gives you both the mindfulness and the strength, exercises both the mindfulness and increases your strength, so that when you learn a … 
  4. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … Every time there’s a feeling, there’s always going to be a perception. There’s a passage in the Canon where Ven. Sariputta says, “Feeling, perception, fabrication—these things are hard to tease out. They come together.” The way to tease them out is to figure out, “How can I be, say, with a pain but not suffer from it? How can I … 
  5. Ven. Ananda’s Awakening
     … That way, you can create a sense of ease, asking yourself what kind of breathing would feel good right now and where can you think of the breath energy coming into the body. Or you can think of it originating in the body itself—one spot, two spots, many spots. Simply by holding an image in mind, you’ll see that the breath responds … 
  6. Forging a Path
     … Just try to be consistently aware of how the breath feels, and that there’s always breath here in the body. There’s the in-and-out breath, but there’s also the breath energy that runs through the nerves, runs through the blood vessels. You can just be with that: without break, without pause. This gives the mind a much needed place to … 
  7. Sit with It
     … There are some pains in the body, some feelings of discomfort that have nothing to do with the breath at all. And if you think a boring meditation or a meditation that doesn’t go the way you want it to is difficult, think about what it’s going to be like when you’re about to die. The body at that point won … 
  8. People Suffer from Their Thinking
     … Then you have to think about letting the breath be comfortable, trying not to force the breath too much, just noticing what kind of rhythm of breathing feels good right now. This requires some thought, but it’s constructive thought. It’s okay to think and pose questions around this issue, because that kind of thinking and questioning gets you more absorbed in the … 
  9. Concentration as a Skill
     … When you breathe in, does it feel like the energy is going up or down? If it goes up, it is comfortable? Or is it getting stuck in the head? If it’s getting stuck in the head, think of it going down through the throat down into the chest. But don’t push it. Don’t exert any pressure on it. Just think … 
  10. Three Stages in the Practice
     … Where do you feel it? Where does the sensation of an in-breath start for you? It may start in a place that it doesn’t start for somebody else. How do you know that your body needs an in-breath right now? How can you tell when you’ve been breathing out too long? As people get older they have a tendency—Ajaan … 
  11. Firm in Your Intent
     … We feel a hunger; we feel a lack. One of the purposes of the meditation is to develop strength inside, so that we have a sense of enough. The lack comes from a desire for happiness, but still, the Buddha says that that desire is something to be honored. We really want to be happy, and there is a way to find true happiness … 
  12. Hope
     … You read the news nowadays, and it all seems to be intended to make you feel hopeless and helpless. Things going on in the world that you can’t control: That seems to be the emphasis of the message. We have to realize it’s driving home a point that the Buddha made a long time ago: Genuine hope lies in here, in the … 
  13. Memory & Motivation
     … What shape do you want to put it in? What shape is going to be good for your life and the life of the people around you down the line? So if you’re feeling lazy right now, how do you motivate yourself to really do the practice? Or if you know that something is skillful but you don’t feel like doing it … 
  14. The Steadiness of Your Gaze
     … Sometimes you feel a stirring in your awareness. Something wants to move. Things aren’t as interesting as they were, or for some reason or another the mind begins to let up a little bit before it actually moves on to something else. Learn how to detect that. Then work with the breath, work with your focus in a way that can get around … 
  15. A Goal Without Limits
     … The pleasure of the goal, even though it’s not a feeling, is a pleasure. It is a happiness. It is a bliss. And it’s that fulfilling. So what are some of the ways the Buddha talks about the goal? One of the epithets he gives for it is: anidassana. It’s a word that doesn’t appear often in the Canon. It … 
  16. Beyond Inter-eating
     … What kind of breathing would feel really good this time as you come back to the breath? And then with the second breath, what breath would feel better? Or is there some part of the body that’s not being nourished by the breath? Could you breathe in that part of the body? Keep moving around, noticing the parts of the body that seem … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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