Search results for: "Feeling"
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- For Your Future’s Sake… There’s a feeling of wealth. You have enough to share. That’s a benefit right in the present moment, but it also develops good qualities in the mind that will serve you well down the line. You learn to appreciate your freedom of choice. You easily could have not given the item, but you choose to give it. In fact, that’s probably …
- Distractions… So it feels very natural to take on their identities. You’ve got to remind yourself, “This is not what you’re here for now.” You’ve got a different set of priorities. This is one of the reasons why we have Dhamma talks during the meditation to remind you that when you’re on the path, your values are different, your aims are …
- Lessons of Distraction… You learn how to breathe in ways that are comfortable, that feel right for the body right now. After all, one of the main reasons we have craving for becoming is our hunger for pleasure. Well, here’s some pleasure right here in the concentration. It’s harmless, it saturates the body when you do it right, so you’re more inclined to come …
- Disposable Worlds… Learn to relate to the breath in such a way that you feel at ease. Sometimes this means simply allowing the breath to come in and out as it has been, noticing where it’s already comfortable and then protecting those little comfortable spots. Other times it means actively making the spots more comfortable. We try to do it with an attitude of being …
- Protective Meditations… If the needs of the body lead you to feel greed, remind yourself of what the Buddha had to say about sharing: Even if it were your last meal, if there was somebody there to share something with, he’d say go ahead and share. The power of generosity is that strong. Then finally, recollection of death: This also counteracts greed, with the thought …
- A Doctor’s Strategies… If you’re feeling down on yourself, think about your generosity, the things you’ve given to other people in the past when you didn’t have to. Think about your own virtue, the times when you did the right thing even though it was hard. These are in the traditional list of what they call recollections—meditation as thinking. Because, the Buddha points …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… The resolve to overcome attachment to sensuality, the resolve to be harmless, the resolve not to feel ill will: These are all types of desire. And even more explicitly, the factor of right effort starts out when you generate desire for doing away with unskillful qualities and making sure they don’t arise again. You generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities and …
- Three Levels of Concentration… Then you allow the breath to adjust so that it feels good, as good as possible, throughout the whole body. Another way is to go through the body, section by section, working on the breath energy in each section until it feels pleasant, and then letting the pleasure in all the sections connect. This way you get used to working with your pleasure. This …
- Three Noble Truths Versus Four… The feeling of pleasure that comes when you stay with the breath is feeling. The mental image, the mental label that tells you, “This is where the breath is. This is how the breath flows. This is where you should be focused”: That’s perception. The directed thought and evaluation that adjust the breath to fit the mind, adjust the mind to fit the …
- Guardians at Death… You can breathe in short ways, long ways, fast, slow, heavy, light, and you can adjust the breath so that it feels just right for you right now: energizing when you’re feeling tired, relaxing when you’re feeling tense. This is the home base for the meditation. But the mind needs a lot more than just breath. Lots of issues come up in …
- Discerning Actions… It’s through the practice of concentration that restraint becomes possible— and it doesn’t feel like a burden. It becomes something that you can do and not feel strung out. The other healthy ego functions—compassion or altruism and humor—have to come in as well, so that the path is not a burden. It doesn’t become something really hard to take …
- Five Reflections… Think of whatever good breath energy you can create there or nourish there spreading to the parts of the body that are in pain, through those parts of the body, so that you don’t feel so threatened by them and so you don’t perceive the pain as blocking the flow of breath energy. You feel more brave in the face of them …
- Producing Discernment… As the breath feels really good, the mind settles down and doesn’t have to jump around. It feels just right here. Then there’s you the commentator, watching all this, deciding when the you as the producer is doing well or not, giving some encouragement to the you as the consumer, the enjoyer of the meditation, checking how much enjoyment you actually get …
- The Heart to Keep Going… Part of your approach is to keep trying to develop a sense of the pleasure that can come from form, the way you feel the body from within. Whether or not the pleasure comes automatically, the fact that you’re aiming in this direction—trying to think of the breath, trying to think of the body right here, right now, as you feel it …
- The Opportunity to Be Quiet… Even if the mind can’t settle down, if it still feels antsy about this, that or the other thing, at least remind yourself that you’re heading in the right direction, trying to get the mind still, seeing the value of stillness. There are so many people out there in the world who don’t see the value of this at all. But …
- Smart vs. Wise… He says that when you’re feeling tempted to wander off the path, you have to ask yourself, “Do I really want to go back to where I was before? Would I really be caring for myself? What kind of happiness would I be creating for myself?” It’d be pretty miserable. So one of the signs of wisdom certainly is not how you …
- Who’s in Charge Here?… If you’re doing something that’s skillful but suddenly you decide you don’t like it anymore, you’ve got to ask yourself, “How am I going to feel after having given up?” If you really have compassion for yourself, you’re not going to give up, because if you give up, then either you simply suffer the results or you put yourself …
- When You Don’t Like Your Selves… So, what are the Buddha’s recommendations? He recommends how to breathe, what kinds of feelings to create, what kind of perceptions to hold in mind, and how to talk to yourself. The sixteen steps in breath meditation are a way to recalibrate your bodily fabrication. When an angry self comes up, what does it do? It seizes your breath and does something weird …
- 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 …
- Get Outside Yourself… The true noble course was the noble eightfold path, which relied a lot on the pleasure of concentration, which is not a sensual pleasure, but involves getting the mind into a pleasurable state based on how you feel the body from within. Then you look at it from the standpoint of the four noble truths. So by asking a different question, he helped get …
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