Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 108
- The Management of Suffering… We talked briefly today about when to take a stand and when not to take a stand, and it has nothing to do with your feelings. It has everything to do with what you anticipate will be the long term consequences. All too often we have weak conviction in that principle, because it’s too easy to go for the short-term, the quick …
- Samvega… It’s what the animals of the forest feel when the lion comes out and roars his roar and they realize they’re in danger. The arising of saṁvega is the point of the practice when you start taking things seriously: when you see that you’re in danger. You can’t just coast along. You’re not here simply to accept what’s …
- Mindfulness & Perception… There are going to be feelings of pleasure and pain, so you learn how to cultivate the breath in such a way that gives rise to pleasure. Use a perception to remind yourself to stay here. Then there’s fabrication, especially in the first stage of right concentration: You’ve got to keep directing your thoughts to the breath and evaluating it. What feels …
- Equanimity as a Skill… The Buddha asked them, “Have you ever noticed that this pain you feel during your tortures ends when you stop doing the torture?” In other words, the pain is not coming only from the past. It can also come from things you’re doing right now. What you’re doing right now is something you can’t be equanimous about. You have to be …
- Perceptions Around Pain… The proof that it was burning off was the pain they were feeling. So he asked them: Have you ever noticed that when you don’t do your austerities, there’s no pain? It sounds a little flippant, but he’s making an important point: that a lot of our pain does come from our present actions. This applies both to physical pain and …
- Fangs in the Static… the form of the body, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—all very ephemeral things. How could you build anything lasting out of things that are ephemeral like this? Now, not all those perceptions are negative. The Buddha also has you think of the positive perceptions of how the cessation of these things would be a good thing, dispassion for these things would be a good …
- Stop Shooting Yourself… She’d probably been the victim of harsh speech many times, a victim of the gossip many, many lifetimes, and her feeling of oppression became even more overwhelming. After leaving meditation, she went to mention this to Ajaan Fuang, hoping that he would console her, say something gentle and kind and reassuring. But he said, “Well, it’s your fault. You wanted to be …
- Discernment Is in the Doing… So as you’re sitting here, working with the breath, you’ve got to learn how to evaluate the breath on your own, to see what kind of breathing feels good for you right now. You won’t have a monk wandering through the room, telling you, “Now you’ve got to breathe in long, now you’ve got to breathe in short, heavy …
- Virtues Bright & Neither Dark nor Bright… You feel for them. So it’s not just a matter of following the rules—although you do follow the rules. I was reading someone saying that the use of discernment with regard to the precepts is figuring out when to hold by them and when not to hold by them. That’s not very discerning at all. That’s just the way of …
- Limitless is the Buddha… Start out by trying to breathe in a way that feels really good, really satisfying inside. You’re going to be giving up a number of other pleasures as you practice, but the compensation is that you can develop a sense of well-being by being right here, breathing in, breathing out, simply being very sensitive to the process of breathing. And you’re …
- Mindful of Karma… Pleasant and painful feelings come from action: past actions and present actions combined. The fact that you’re feeling something unpleasant right now can be the combination of all kinds of things: what you did this morning; what you did last week, last month, in your last lifetime; before that even; but more importantly what you’re doing right now. As for what you …
- Becoming Consummate… To do that, though, you also need to have a sense of being solidly here in your body in the present moment so that you don’t feel wiped out or blotted out by other people’s outrageous behavior. You’re here, the breath is here, and you have the choice to breathe through any sense of tension or tightness that comes with the …
- How Completion is Found… So you’ve got to develop a good comfortable spot, your spot inside the body someplace, where it feels comfortable to stay focused. And you learn how much pressure is too much pressure and how much is not enough: to get to the point of “just right.” All of this means trying to be skillful. And that means trying to learn from your actions …
- Noble Standards… Suffering here doesn’t mean that you’re hurting their feelings. Some people will use their hurt feelings to run your life, but that’s not what the Buddha’s talking about. He’s talking about ways in which people would actually harm you: killing you, stealing from you, taking things that you need in order to find happiness—or even worse, getting you …
- Get Out of the Way… With every little thought that comes up in the mind, we feel we have to look at it, examine it, file it away, pass judgment on it as to whether it’s useful or not. For the time being, though, you don’t have to be responsible for any of these thoughts. You have one thought you want to hold on to. You want …
- Days Fly Past… Why does death shake the mind? Because we identify with the body, we identify with feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, sensory consciousness. As long as we identify with things, we’re going to be shaken not only by death, but even by the slightest changes in these things. Life seems to be going along well and all of a sudden something comes up unexpectedly. We …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… Learn to look at your breathing as a process of either skillful or unskillful cause, and then look at the effects, which feelings arise as a result of the way you breathe. This is an immediate lesson in the four noble truths and the categories of appropriate attention. From there you can apply the same lesson to other aspects of your life, such as …
- The Power is in Your Hands… Why does this happen? How does it happen? We can trace it back to feeling, contact, the six senses, and then the things that happen before contact at the six senses: name and form, fabrication, ignorance. All these things are happening inside. This system of analysis may sound kind of abstract. And when things are laid out in a line like this, it sounds …
- Energizing Your Meditation… Just monitor things until you reach a point where it feels like the breath energy’s being depleted, and then you breathe in again. The other place where you tend to squeeze it is between the in-breath and the out-breath—or between the out-breath and the in-breath—as a sort of marker. After all, you’re trying to remember, “Now …
- Creating a World of Concentration… If the breath doesn’t feel comfortable, you can ask yourself, “What would be more comfortable? What would feel better?” You come up with some ideas; then you test them. If they don’t work, go back and try to come up with some new ideas. This is related to the quality of ingenuity. When one approach doesn’t work, you back up for …
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