Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Discernment Through Right Effort… When you’re sick, what’s the appropriate amount of effort? How much effort can you put into the practice? What expectations should you have? When you’re feeling well, when you’re feeling healthy, how much more effort is appropriate? There’s also the issue of the particular issues coming up in your mind. Some of them require that you simply look at …
- Analyzing the Breath… So look at the body in a new light, from a new perspective, and see if it becomes more interesting to be sitting right here, not doing much of anything else, just staying with the body, exploring how it feels to be right here and not traveling around outside. If you try to lock the mind into the body, it’s like locking a …
- The Not-Self Discourse… When your feelings turn from pleasure to pain, they don’t ask permission. Your perceptions and thoughts can turn on you, and even your consciousness of good things passes away. So the first argument is that these things don’t lie under your control. The argument about control shows up only a few more times in the Canon. There’s one great passage where …
- Simplify… They feel overwhelmed, really put upon. But when you learn how to develop a greater sense of spaciousness in the mind, a greater sense of wellbeing in the mind, after a while you begin to realize it doesn’t depend on the level of energy in the body at all. The mind begins to have its own internal nourishment, its own internal place to …
- Levels of the Breath… And you’ve got feelings and perceptions and the intentional element fashioning them; that’s mental fabrication. These are the things you want to understand. You understand them by learning how to master them, bringing them all together—as we’re doing right now when we focus on the breath—and approaching their fabrication as a skill. What’s the most skillful way to …
- Pain & the Middle Way… Because when there’s pain in the body, it’s not simply just the feeling there in the body. Red alerts are being lit up in your brain. You mind gets worried about the pain. “Is this a sign that I’m going to lose my legs? Is this a sign that I’m going to be paralyzed?” All sorts of stories, or just …
- Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals… Adjust the breath so that it feels good. If any thoughts come up in the mind that would pull you away from the breath, just let them go. If you find that they’ve already pulled you away before you realized what happened, you can drop that thought. You don’t have to finish it. Just let it go. Leave the ends dangling. You …
- Patience & Urgency… Then, when you feel that your concentration is strong enough, you may want to test it. One way of testing it is to bring in a difficult issue—“Okay, let’s think about it for a while”—with the purpose of using your concentration to observe: How does the mind approach that issue? How does it relate to that issue? At what point does …
- The Truth of Perceptions… Where do you feel the warmth in the body in the midst of that stillness? Focus on that. Hold the perception of fire in mind. You could even have an image of a fire burning, but make sure that you’re also in touch with the actual sensation of warmth. Then remind yourself that there’s a certain amount of warmth throughout the body …
- Heedfulness for the Holidays… These are advertised as times of joy and fellow-feeling, but I’ve noticed a lot of people coming up to the monastery to get away. It’s really a very threatening time for a many people, and very stressful, all this forced companionship and forced good cheer. And the general message we keep getting from a lot of Dhamma teachers – you’ve got …
- One Thing Clear Through… Then you feel that you’re lighter as a result. But there are a lot of things we’re not ready to give up yet. So you look at where you are in the practice: What things can you give up for the sake of a greater happiness? Look around you. Again, it may be in terms of material things, it may be in …
- Don’t Underestimate Merit… Especially when you feel like you’re tired in the evening and say to yourself, “Well, that’s enough for tonight.” You have to ask yourself, “Well, have you done a little extra for others? Is that enough?” Push yourself a little bit harder, so that you can repay your debt to others. Learn to appreciate this happiness that spreads its goodness around. So …
- Sensitive to the Mind… the perceptions that hold you with the breath, and then the feeling-tones that you give rise to by the way you breathe. These are all very explicit in the instructions. And of course, when you’re with the breath you’re guaranteed that you’re in the present moment. But there are times when the mind is not willing to settle down with …
- Honesty & Integrity… Eventually, once that feeling of ease is solid enough, you can actually look into the pain and make it more the focal point of your awareness. Take it apart, this solid-seeming pain: Exactly how solid is it? What are the sensations that go into making it up? What are the mental acts?—your acts of perception, the narratives you have about the pain …
- Developing Discernment… There’s the sound of the crickets starting and stopping, there’s the arising of the breath, passing away of the breath, the arising of a feeling, the passing away of a feeling. But the purpose of seeing these things arise and pass away is to see what we’re doing as they arise and pass away, so that we can learn to act …
- Choices that Matter… It’s the energy you feel inside the body. But here again, you can perceive that in different ways, too. You have the choice of thinking of the breath energy coming in from outside, or you can think of it originating inside the body. You can have it originating at one point or two points, or think of every cell of the body breathing …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… With feelings or cravings, he was able to see how they arose, how they passed away, what their allure was, what their drawbacks were, and then how you escape from them through dispassion. That makes a lot of sense because these things are obviously ways of trapping the mind. What’s subtler is that he applied the same analysis to the five strengths: conviction …
- The Buddha’s Wisdom… That’s one of the reasons why the Dhammapada is so popular—short sayings that you can hold in mind and that make you feel peaceful. Because the way you talk to yourself is often very unwise, it’s good to have new voices inside. But the Buddha saw that for wisdom to stick, it had to be more than just wise sayings. There …
- A Safe Harbor… the body or the breath in and of itself, or the feelings that are related to the breath, mind states related to the breath, mental qualities related to the breath. That’s the theme of your concentration. So the practice of right concentration includes right effort and right mindfulness in its definition. It’s an organic whole, which means you’ve got a lot …
- Step Outside the World… Or your frame of reference can be feelings in and of themselves—simply the arising of a feeling, its passing away—or mind states or mental qualities. You choose a frame of reference and you stay there. These are the topics of concentration. As I said this morning, the Buddha didn’t draw a clear line between mindfulness practice and concentration practice. They shade …
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