Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 109
  2. Limitations
     … So even though mindfulness and alertness sound like very ordinary things, still, when you make them continuous, they have a very revelatory effect on your understanding of the mind, on your understanding of the heart, on your understanding of why you feel stress, why you feel suffering. The good news here is that it’s your own habits that are causing the suffering, which … 
  3. Stern Kindness
     … It’s especially true when the mind feels lazy or more inclined to wander off someplace else or not even meditate at all. That’s when you have to keep in mind the dangers of not meditating, and the rewards of meditating. Sometimes the mindfulness can cajole us into meditating, and other times it has to use threats. The cajoling is when you remind … 
  4. Abandoning Effluents (3)
     … There’s restraining the senses, reflecting on the requisites as you use them, tolerating pain—painful words, painful feelings—and avoiding dangers. That leaves two more approaches, and these deal with all of the asavas. The first is destroying. If a thought of sensuality comes up in the mind, a thought of ill will, a thought of harmfulness, or any unskillful quality, you put … 
  5. Getting the Most Out of the Present
     … things that you’ve done that you’re not all that happy about, that you feel embarrassed about, sometimes you even feel ashamed about. You think of how much of your life you’ve frittered away with one thing or another. In terms of the really unskillful things you’ve done in the past, the Buddha said that the right attitude is to remember … 
  6. Rhythms of the Mind
     … If you simply rest and rest and rest and don’t do anything at all, don’t do any clearing out at all, it feels good, it feels comfortable, but there’s still a lot of stuff you’re carrying around. If you start just clearing everything out, it’s like taking a medicine that just keeps flushing you out, flushing you out. You … 
  7. The Broken Gong
     … But if you focus on how the breathing process feels, say, in your throat, in your chest, in your abdomen, you can derive more pleasure from each in and out breath. Then you can look at the extent to which you tense up your shoulders or your back when you breathe in: Is it at all necessary? Can you breathe in and out without … 
  8. Your Committee of Addicts
     … These are basically ways in which we put the aggregates together—our sense of our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our thought constructs, our acts of consciousness. We put them together into something that we actively hold on to. The Buddha’s great insight was that if you’re really serious about going beyond suffering, you can take the different things that you hold … 
  9. Secluded from Sensuality
     … Now, the middle way was not a halfway feeling or a middling feeling. It involved another way of getting away from pain and suffering apart from sensual pleasure—and that was the pleasure of the mind in concentration. That was one of the first factors of the path that he discovered: a sense of ease and rapture that comes when the mind is secluded … 
  10. For What It’s Worth
     … By reflecting on that, the mind feels ease, it feels joy, has a sense of self-worth, a sense of its own fortunate circumstances, and it’s a lot easier for the mind then to settle down. There will be times when it’s hard to get the mind to stay with the breath. It seems to be wandering off to other places, and … 
  11. Breaking Old Habits
     … people trying to put an end to the suffering they feel, not really quite getting there, but continuing to repeat the same old actions over and over and over again. And the habits have an old familiarity. It’s like an old shoe you feel comfortable wearing. It may not be a particularly good shoe, or particularly good for your posture, but you’re … 
  12. In Training
     … The fact that you’re acting on a skillful intention is pleasant in and of itself—it feels good not to be giving in to greed, aversion, and delusion—but it may be hard and lead to short-term setbacks. This is why there’s so much confusion about the nature of your actions and what their powers are. So here the Buddha says … 
  13. To Comprehend Craving
     … When you find that you can’t be a being in this world anymore, you’re going to feel strongly threatened. If you haven’t overcome the raw craving to be a being, you’re going to grasp at any identity that opens itself up to you. And, given that we’re driven by craving at that time, this tendency can lead you anywhere … 
  14. Not-self Is a Value Judgment
     … Even when he was talking to people on the verge of becoming arahants giving them that questionnaire, notice how he phrased the questions: “Form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness: Are they constant or inconstant?” — “They’re inconstant.” “If they’re inconstant, are they easeful or stressful?” — “They’re stressful.” And then the final question is not, “Then is there a self?” No, the question is … 
  15. The Right Medicine
     … That’s why we work with the breath, both because the breath can be very calming—it can provide a good, steady foundation for the mind so that it can stay continually in the present and feel content to stay in the present—and also because the breath is about as close as you get to the mind without actually focusing on the mind … 
  16. Pain
     … It comes in as instructions on breath meditation under the section on feelings. Train yourself to breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to rapture. Breathe in and out in a way that gives rise to pleasure. Breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, i.e., feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels we put on things, the images we … 
  17. A Memorial to Your Life
     … Breathe in a way that feels especially good. Think of a part of the body that may not be getting much breath energy right now. Well, give it some. **In other words, doing this well involves the other bases for success. The first is persistence: You stick with it. You have a clear sense of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, and then … 
  18. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … In both cases, you’re learning how to look at the role of perception in your mind, along with the role of feeling and fabrication, which are the central aggregates in any attempt to free the mind from the aggregates. That makes you more and more sensitive to what the mind is doing to deceive and create unnecessary suffering for itself. As for which … 
  19. You Should Heed These Shoulds
     … If you have some discontent about your lodging, don’t feel bad about yourself. Just notice, ‘Discontent is like this.’” I’ve never seen the Buddha give advice like that. What this line of thought is doing is taking the three perceptions and turning them into a metaphysical teaching of three characteristics, making that the basis of the Buddha’s teachings. On top of … 
  20. Willing to Learn
     … And so in the beginning, it’s very normal to feel awkward. There are things you’re enthusiastic about but other things you’re very unsure about. And you’re going to be changing as a person as you come into this world: sorting through your old habits and talents, trying to figure out which ones are still useful and which ones are not … 
  21. Training Your Inner Teacher
     … When it’s feeling depressed, feeling that it’s going nowhere, you give rise to that sense of pride, that “Yes, I can do this, and it’s worth doing.” So learn how to use all those tactics as you teach yourself as you look after your practice, and make sure that your practice is in line with the Dhamma. That way, it develops … 
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