Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 113
  2. Alone & Together
     … You’d better go check that with the Buddha.” So he does, and the Buddha says, “When you’re talking about karma, you don’t talk about the fact that all feelings are stressful. You’re talking about the fact that there are pleasant and painful and neutral feelings.” When you’re thinking about action, the question is: What kinds of action are skillful … 
  3. What Should & Shouldn’t Be Done
     … And then from the enlarged perspective, ask yourself, “What kind of breathing would feel good?” If there are parts of the body that are tight and tense, that are not participating in the breath, allow them to relax. And anything else that comes into your awareness right now, you don’t have to get engaged with it. Even the sound of the Dhamma talk … 
  4. Study & Practice
     … And you talk about the three kinds of feelings that come up from the actions. Because if you tell someone that all actions lead to suffering and stress, then why would they bother trying to do anything skillful?” In other words, you have to have a sense of when a particular teaching is appropriate and when it’s not. You learn part of this … 
  5. Mending the Social Fabric
     … There are people who feel that the institutions of our society should be aimed only at making money. They pooh-pooh the idea that they should be also engaged in helping with human values. This tears the society apart because it lacks goodwill. It reduces everything to dog-eat-dog—a society where no human being can be happy to live. Ideally, when you … 
  6. No Mistakes Are Fatal
     … Then there are the final set of building blocks, feelings and perceptions: feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain, and the labels you put on all these things. You apply all those to the breath as well. So you’ve got all the building blocks for your experience right here, and instead of building them into elaborate worlds, you very consciously don … 
  7. The Middle Way
     … She didn’t feel that it was fair. But he told her, “Look, who asked you to be born? Who asked you to be a human being? You were the one who decided you wanted to be a human being. So are you going to blame the human realm for being the way it is? This is where you wanted to come.” You’ve … 
  8. Switzerland Inside
     … The first is keeping focused on the body, or feelings, or mind, or mental qualities, in and of themselves; the second is putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. You need both activities to get the mind into concentration. The first is the actual concentration. For instance, at the moment, you’re keeping focused on the breath, in and of itself … 
  9. Precarious Knowledge
     … It’s in feelings and perceptions and thought constructs and consciousness, all of which are based on very changeable factors. When I was doing that collection of similes by Ajaan Chah, I noticed he had several similes where talked about the issue of scholarly knowledge versus meditation knowledge, or the approach of, say, Buddhist scholars as opposed to the approach of meditators. Scholars, as … 
  10. Genuine Goodness
     … What are the best ways to bring the mind to stillness? What are best ways to gain a sense of well-being in the mind? Focus on the breath, see how it feels. What kind of breathing feels best? In focusing on the breath, you’re also learning about the mind. As Ajaan Lee says, the breath is like a mirror for the mind … 
  11. A Sense of Time & Place
     … being with the breath all the way in and all the way out—being with the direct sensation of how it feels to breathe, and learning to relate to that in a way that feels comfortable, supportive, energizing or relaxing as need may arise. The important thing is to get a sense of familiarity here, that this is where you belong. This is your … 
  12. Working Hypotheses
     … So find any spot in the body that’s especially sensitive to how the breathing feels. It might be in the middle of the chest, in the stomach, in the middle of the head. Focus there because those really sensitive spots in the body—the ones that are really sensitive to the breath—tend to connect up with other sensitive parts of the body … 
  13. A Good Independent Self
     … You’re breathing; you’re talking to yourself; you’re dealing with perceptions and feelings—but you can learn how to do all three of those things in skillful ways. You keep on breathing, but now you breathe in different ways. You breathe with the whole body. You think of the breath energy coming in and out from different parts of the body. You … 
  14. Papañca
     … And from there, the Buddha says, you get into conflict, because once there’s an “I am”—you create it out of your sense of attachment to your body, to your feelings, your perceptions, your thought-constructs, acts of consciousness—that “I am” has to feed. It needs a world in which to feed. The problem is, you run into other beings, and they … 
  15. In the Details
     … When you’re sick and feeling physically weak, there’s only so much you can do. At times like that, you have to adjust your effort to what you can manage. But when you’re feeling stronger, you should look at the second gauge: what’s really called for at any one particular time in your practice. As the Buddha says, when you live … 
  16. “May I Be Happy”
     … The more good will you feel for yourself and for the people around you, the easier it is to be generous, to be helpful both to yourself and to them. So you simply start with that thought: “May I be happy,” like we chanted just now. I was once talking with one of the nuns from Chithurst and happened to mention that we also … 
  17. Housecleaning
     … When you really focus on what it feels like to be here, there’s tension here, tightness there, and pain in this and that spot. So you have to think of the meditation, especially when you’re just beginning to settle down, as housecleaning. Your first reaction may be, when you see the mess in the house, to want to run away again. But … 
  18. Think Outside the Ruts
    Think Outside the Ruts March 26, 2022 There’s a strange passage in the Canon where the Buddha talks about how we take the potential for a form, feeling, perception, fabrication, or consciousness, and we fabricate it into an actual aggregate of form, feeling, etc., for the sake of having that aggregate. It’s expressed in a strange way in the Pali, but the … 
  19. Judging Your Meditation
     … When the mind is feeling down, sometimes just some good, deep, in-and-out breathing, thinking of the breath going to different parts of the body, can wake you up, freshen you up, put the mind in a much better mood. Or if the mind needs steadying, you can breathe down into your feet, into your hands, or the middle of the spine. That … 
  20. Magha Puja
     … Find a level of breathing that feels soothing and energizing at the same time, one that goes deep down and refreshes the entire body and refreshes the mind. As Ajaan Fuang once said, if you’re going to doubt anything, at least don’t doubt the breath. As long as you know it’s coming in, it’s going out, you’ve got something … 
  21. Go, Do Jhana
     … How is the breath going? Where do you feel the breath? When the breath comes in, what are the sensations that let you know it’s coming in? When it goes out, what sensations let you know it’s going out? Are those sensations comfortable? If they are, let them be. If they’re not, you can change them. What this means is you … 
  22. Load next page...