Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 110
  2. Curious About the Process
     … The part of the problem may be that you just don’t feel comfortable settling down. So a good first stage is to think about the other practices we have in terms of generosity and virtue. When you’re preparing something to give to other people, or you’re in the process of trying to observe the precepts and you come up against a … 
  3. Steering the Raft
     … There are similar contemplations for feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. There’s a lot about these things that you simply can’t control. They come and they go. You can see them coming, and you can see them going. If they were really you, you wouldn’t be in a position to observe their coming and going. Things like this, if they’re based … 
  4. Right Questions in the Right Order
     … But the aggregates are the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. Clinging is clinging to these things in any of four ways: through either through the desire for sensual fantasies, the desire for views, clinging in terms of habits and practices concerning the way things should be done, or clinging in terms of your sense of your self. Any of those four … 
  5. Owning Your Actions
     … On days when you’re feeling lazy, you might want to think about death. Death could come at any time—after all, we are in California. The Big One could happen without warning. Even if we’re not in California, the body’s just primed to go at any time: Something goes a little bit wrong with your heart, and that’s it. The … 
  6. The Dangers of Sensuality
     … But when you first become aware of it, what feelings in the body, feelings in the mind, spark these things? Then you see that these things end. Then they have to be revived again and again. So when you revive them, then the question is, why? What’s the appeal? In some cases, the appeal is in the object. This is one of the … 
  7. Adjust the Flame
     … Find one spot in the body that’s sensitive to the breath, one that feels really good when the breath is just right, and not so good when it’s not right. Take that as your guide. Often this is in the area around the heart, but different people will find it in different spots. So, find your spot. Watch it all the way … 
  8. Right View about Right View
     … Udayin, who’s a regular troublemaker in a lot of the suttas says, “Well, maybe he was thinking about the fact that actions give rise to feelings, and feelings are stressful.” The Buddha said, “This is not the context for that.” When you talk about action, you’re talking about skillful and unskillful, and you want to induce people to do skillful actions, so … 
  9. Goodwill for the Whole Committee
     … Sometimes you feel pulled in many directions. The Buddha gives the image of a series of animals all tied together by leashes. There’s an alligator that wants to go down into the river, a monkey that wants to go up into the trees, a jackal that wants to go into the cemetery, a dog that wants to go into a village, a bird … 
  10. Looking After Yourself
     … So you have to be very sensitive to how the body feels as you’re eating. This is why it’s important to have a good sense of how the breath is going, how the other elements or properties of the body are going as you’re eating. Try to maintain a full-body awareness and you’ll find that you begin to sense … 
  11. The Essence of the Dhamma
     … Some people take their medicine, other people don’t, and you feel sorry for those who don’t, but you don’t exalt yourself for the fact that you’re taking your medicine. You’ve got your diseases; they have their diseases. You work on yours. And be very heedful of the fact that one of your diseases is this tendency to exalt yourself … 
  12. True Honesty
     … So we shouldn’t feel indifferent to the possibility for true happiness. We shouldn’t feel embarrassed about our desire for true happiness inside. This is what we’re working on right here: digging down into the mind. As the Buddha said, the possibility for true happiness lies right here. It’s a deathless, a timeless well-being. What obscures it? Our actions. The … 
  13. Equanimity Isn’t Apathy
     … Water washes away dirty things, it washes away fragrant things, but it doesn’t feel one way or the other about them. Wind blows foul things around, and it blows fragrant things around, and it doesn’t get disgusted by the one or excited by the other. So having established this principle of equanimity, this principle of not letting your mind get elated by … 
  14. Recovering Your Balance
     … Watch the feelings. Those four frames of reference are all right here. You’ve got the breath, which is the body. You’ve got the feelings associated with the breath. You’ve got the mind state that’s either staying with the breath or not staying with the breath, and the mental qualities that you can use to deal with anything that’s going … 
  15. In the Land of Wrong View
     … These are the people you want in your inner circle of friends, the ones you go to for advice, the ones whose values you really feel at home with. Of course there’s the question of how many of those people can you find. If you have trouble finding them outside, you’ve got to develop this set of friends inside. This is one … 
  16. Changing the Pleasure Equation
     … It can soothe you when you’re feeling disturbed or irritated. It can provide you with a comfortable home when you’re feeling alienated from the world around you. And it can provide the mind with a better place to feed. That’s the Buddha’s primary image for the activity of the mind: When we take on the identity of a being, we … 
  17. Virtue Fosters Concentration
     … realizing, “Okay I don’t want to cause harm down the line because it’s going to be me down the line receiving that harm.” Whatever ways you can find of getting yourself to stick with the precepts effectively and learning how to feel at home with them: Those habits are going to be useful the next time you sit down to meditate, because … 
  18. Freedom Undefined
     … When you hold onto any of the other aggregates, you’re classified as a feeling-clinger, a perception-clinger, a mental-fabrication-, or consciousness-clinger. You create your identity by what you cling to. This is why the Buddha never answered questions about what a human being is, because a human being can be almost anything. So this noble eightfold path that we’re … 
  19. Your Mind is Lying to You
     … They were perfectly okay now with taking drugs; they didn’t feel bad about themselves for taking drugs. And the therapist was beginning to realize that this was not an advance. It was actually a setback. There’s a lot of that in psychotherapy. Therapists will tell you that there are a lot of fellow therapists who are afraid they’re going to lose … 
  20. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … just how the breath energy works in the body – where you feel the breath energy. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? Say that the stomach expands; the diaphragm expands to pull the breath in. Actually, the sensation of the stomach and diaphragm expanding is also part of breath. That’s what allows the air to be sucked into the lungs. The … 
  21. Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea
     … The concentration we’re doing right now has form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness—all right here. We want to get to see that when we put these aggregates together in this way, even though they do involve effort and there is some pain in the practice, it’s worth the effort so that we can look dispassionately at other, more blatant forms of … 
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