Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 119
  2. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … As with every form of meditation where there’s a phrase that you repeat, there comes a point where, if you really want the mind to settle down, you have to drop the phrase and just be with the feeling tone. What you’re doing right now can make a difference if you understand, if you have a set of skills to handle whatever … 
  3. The Context for No Context
     … You see your body as something separate, your feelings as something separate; your perceptions, your thought constructs. Even your sensory consciousness: You have to see that as something separate—separate both in the sense that these are individual events that arise and pass away, and in the sense that they’re separate from your awareness, your sense of you. You want to pare back … 
  4. In Line with the Dhamma
     … What’s it made of? It’s made out of forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and acts of consciousness. That’s it. We’ve cobbled our sense of self out of these things. When you actually look at them, you can see that there’s really not that much there. These things keep changing and changing and changing, so how could we find any … 
  5. On Deserving to Be Happy
     … I don’t know how many people I’ve seen who work hard at finally getting the mind to settle down, and there comes a sense of ease and well-being, and then they don’t feel right about it, as if they don’t deserve that well-being. You have to remember that the Buddha never talked about people deserving or not deserving … 
  6. Dhamma in Line with the Dhamma
     … So we should learn how to get beyond our hunger—in other words, find something that will enable us not to have to feel hunger ever again. There will be a sense of fullness, a sense of completeness, and it’s from that completeness that we learn how to develop dispassion. In other words, we’re not starving ourselves. We train the mind so … 
  7. Fabricating the Present
     … There’s body, feelings, mind-states, and the mental qualities that are either helping or hindering you in seeing what’s going on. It’s all here. If you want to see the relationships among these things, you watch right here. You don’t watch anywhere else. What are you watching for? Well, you want to see the how the mind shapes things. Ajaan … 
  8. A Haven for Inner Wealth
     … When the breath feels comfortable, the mind has a sense of feeling well fed. Otherwise, it’s going to go off and look for who knows what as its food. But if we have a sense of well-being here, that’s one level of feeding the mind. But the intention to stay with the object of concentration: That’s the real food here … 
  9. Many Desires, Many Selves
     … See where there are perceptions or thought fabrications or feelings that go together to build up this state of becoming. All kinds of things go into this. When we learn these impersonal terms, we realize that if we look at our desires impersonally, it’s a lot easier to pull ourselves out of them. That’s what we’re trying to do as we … 
  10. A Soiled, Oily Rag
     … To get the mind in the right place to be able to do this and not feel threatened by the idea of letting go, you develop the path, a healthy sense of self that comes with virtue, the sense of well-being that comes with concentration that also allows you to settle down and look at things clearly. You look first at your other … 
  11. A Noble Path
     … being generous where you feel inclined to be generous, where you feel inspired, and making the promise to yourself that under no conditions are you going to harm anybody. As the Buddha said, this is a gift of unlimited safety. There’s that verse in the Karaniya Metta Sutta where the Buddha says that just as a mother would risk her life to protect … 
  12. The Ten Priorities
     … It’s a matter of finding a place where the mind can be centered and feel at home so that instead of dwelling on the difficulties of the path, we find our inner strengths. Then the difficulties don’t seem so difficult after all. They’re bearable. The tasks we encounter along the path are doable because we don’t waste our energy in … 
  13. The Best of a Bad Situation
     … People make merit because they feel the merit will protect them. One of the most popular sayings there is that the Dhamma protects those who practice the Dhamma. People go to monasteries hoping for protective blessings. There’s a huge market in protective amulets. What it comes down to is that people there have a very strong sense of how unstable society is, that … 
  14. The Meaning of the Body
     … One way of dealing with pain — once the mind settles down and can actually look at pain and not feel threatened by it — is to ferret out, when you have a feeling of pain, exactly which sensations are the pain sensations and which sensations are the body sensations — again, the four elements: solidity, warmth, coolness, movement. We tend to glom the whole thing together … 
  15. Refuge & Strength
     … I was talking with someone last weekend who was saying that the thought that your actions have consequences makes you feel very stressed out. And you wonder what kind of world that person would want to live in, where actions didn’t have consequences. The fact that our actions have consequences means that there’s hope: that we can learn how to develop our … 
  16. The Dhamma Wheel Shakes Up the World
     … Then they say, “Ah, it feels so much better not to be twisting the horn anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t exert any effort at all”—which is better than twisting the horn, but you still don’t get the milk. There are very definite shoulds and should nots here. The shoulds, of course, are conditional on your wanting to put an end to suffering … 
  17. Inner Negotiating Skills
     … to create a sense of lightness when you feel heavy, a sense of heaviness when you feel light-headed. It can improve the circulation in the different parts of your body; it can provide you with a sense of well-being that spreads through all the nerves, out to the pores. It’s not only pleasant, but it’s also just fascinating—this element … 
  18. Respect, Confidence, & Patience
     … You can be more realistic about what you’re undertaking here, which is the total re-training of the mind, learning radically new habits in how you relate to the body, how you relate to your feelings, how you relate to your perceptions, your thought- constructs, even how you relate to consciousness. The Buddha points out that we tend to relate to these things … 
  19. Self-Reliance
     … You evaluate what you’re doing, how the breath is going, where it feels right, where it doesn’t feel right, and you make adjustments. So appropriate attention doesn’t just sit there and look at things. It also moves you in the right direction. When you see that something’s skillful, then you realize there’s a duty that goes along with it … 
  20. Not-self as a Raft
     … form, which is your sense of the body; feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perceptions, the labels that you put on things; thought fabrications, the way you put thoughts together; and consciousness, which is aware of all these things along with itself. These are all activities and we cling to them. That’s what the suffering is: the act of clinging. We … 
  21. A Sense of Yourself
     … Even with some really negative stuff, stuff that’s obviously negative, there’s part of the mind that feels that you’re being virtuous or being wise or being practical, realistic, by holding on. But if it’s making you suffer, you don’t have to hold on. That’s the message of the four noble truths. So you examine yourself in terms of … 
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