Search results for: "Feelings"
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- You Can Make a Difference… At the same time, you leave them unprotected because if they have any impulses to do things that are unskillful, they feel that they can’t fight the impulses, so they’ll just go along with them. He said that a teacher’s duty was to protect students, and one of the things he was very adamant about protecting other people from was the …
- Inner Wealth Management… You’re feeling surrounded by the breath, feeling at one with the breath. The pleasure will be there at the same place, but don’t shift your focus away from the breath to the pleasure. That’s how you use your wealth properly. And as for hanging out with good friends, this applies both outside and inside. Your inside good friends are all the …
- Encouraging Perceptions… What’s called the bodily fabrication aspect of the in-and-out breath has an impact on the movement of energy in the body, and the way you feel the body is going to get more and more subtle, more conducive to the mind’s settling down. All these perceptions are true to some extent, it’s just that some of them are more …
- Perception… They can look at the pain center in the brain to see whether it’s activated or not, but they can’t tell you how your pain feels. So just the physical pain itself has a lot of mental factors, and the most important one is the factor of perception — the way we label things. Sometimes the word “sañña” is also translated as “memory …
- You Are Not a Textbook… We tend to have the feeling that wisdom is going to be a textbook affair. But your mind is not a textbook. You are not a textbook. The textbooks are there, but where did they come from? They came from people’s experience and they’re meant to point you back to your experience—and particularly to make you sensitive to what you’re …
- Creating a New Self… The self that feels wounded or wronged: That’s one of the most difficult ones to get past, because there’s a certain satisfaction in playing the victim. Whatever anybody does to you has to be bad because you’re wounded or you’re wronged. That way you can justify a lot of things to yourself. But whatever the sense of self, if it …
- Understanding Pain… It doesn’t have to be intensely pleasant but just pleasant enough so that you feel at ease settling there. Meanwhile, the mind is going to keep telling you, “There’s pain, pain, pain over there, focus over there.” You don’t have to listen to it; you don’t have to believe it. Sure enough, there may be pain there, but you don …
- One Thing Clear Through… But that doesn’t mean it’s a middling feeling, halfway between sensual pleasure and sensual pain. It’s a pleasure of a different sort—the pleasure of form, the body as you feel it from within—which doesn’t have the drawbacks of the pleasures of sensuality. You focus on the breath. You become aware of the breath energy throughout the body as …
- Persistence: Lift Your Heart… Sometimes we feel like doing that, and sometimes we don’t. After all, our conviction, as long as it hasn’t been verified or confirmed, will still have some holes. You have parts of the mind that are on the side of the Buddha, and parts of the mind that are on the other side. A lot of right effort is learning how to …
- Happiness is a Skill… the form of the body in the breath; the feeling of pleasure that comes when the breath feels good; the perception—the mental image of the breath being the energy going throughout the body—that holds the breath in mind; fabrication, the conversation you hold with yourself about the breath as you’re evaluating it; and then consciousness, which is aware of all these …
- Between Either & Or… So you go thrashing back and forth, feeling that you’re either too passive or too aggressive. It’s not the passivity or the being aggressive that’s the issue: It’s what your intention is when you’re dealing with people. Look at the Buddha. In some cases he would totally avoid getting into arguments, and in other cases he’d pursue an …
- Sorting Yourselves Out… Even though you may feel a resistance, as if that person doesn’t deserve it, or, “I’m going to be trapped in that person’s net if I think nice things about the person,” you have to remind yourself: “No, you’re doing this for your own protection, so that when you’re dealing with that person, you’re not going to do …
- Lust… You create a sense of ease and wellbeing in the body; that feeling makes it a lot easier to let go of the need for immediate gratification through your defilement. You can say, “Look, I’ve got this pleasure here. Why not focus on the pleasure that’s already here, rather than on the false pleasure you’re dreaming about?” As you relax your …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… It doesn’t feel like an onerous task at all. In fact, it becomes your sport, to see how you approach the issues of greed, anger, and delusion in the mind, all the various cravings in the mind, but not as someone who’s hungry. After all, that’s exactly what craving means. It’s a kind of hunger, a kind of thirst. If …
- Can All Beings Be Happy?… such as divisive tale-bearing, where you’re trying to break people up, break up a friendship because you feel threatened by the friendship; hurtful speech; idle chatter, the kind of talk that accomplishes nothing, that’s a lot of froth. In any social gathering you may need a little social grease to keep things going, but you have to remember that too much …
- Restraint… We may feel confined by the restraint. But remember that even measureless goodwill, measureless compassion, measureless empathetic joy, measureless equanimity are forms of restraint. You develop these measureless attitudes so as to be very careful about what you do. You realize if you really have goodwill for all beings, you don’t want to harm them. That means you have to say No to …
- Ways to Think… It helps you deal with things coming up in the mind so that you don’t have to identify with a particular feeling, a particular emotion, a particular way of doing things. You can evaluate it simply in terms of whether it’s skillful or not. If you’re doing this with a mind that’s well-concentrated and you have a sense of …
- A Questioning Attitude… They come under the physical aggregate, the aggregate of form, which is different from the feeling aggregate. So when you’ve got those sensations accounted for, what’s left? Where is the pain? You see it flitting around. You’ve unglued it. You see it as something separate. Then there’s also the perception of the pain. You want to learn how to see …
- Four Noble Questions… Sometimes there are certain sufferings that we really identify with, some sufferings we feel have a moral value. Those are the ones that are really hard to let go, such as getting over the grief over someone we’ve lost. You feel that if you don’t suffer over them, you’re being disloyal. But as the Buddha said, that’s not the case …
- Smoothing It… So don’t focus on how lonely you feel or how much you like talking to other people. Realize that you now have a chance to start questioning the perceptions you’ve picked up from society. This is one of the things I appreciated about Ajaan Fuang when I first met him. I’d been living in Thailand for two years and pretty much …
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