Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. Analyzing Suffering
     … Feeling is active in that it feels pleasure or pain. Perception is active in that it perceives things like colors. In other words, it can label blue as blue, and green as green, and red as red. Fabrication is what takes the potentials for each of these aggregates and tries to turn them into actual aggregates. It takes a potential for feeling and changes … 
  3. Anger
     … Things you would never in your right mind think of doing or saying, you suddenly feel that you have the right to do or say. You feel released from constraints. What’s happened, though, is that you’ve got blinders on. Your sense of shame is blinded. Your sense of compunction, thinking about the consequences of your action: That gets blinded too. It’s … 
  4. A Centered but Broad Awareness
    Take a couple of good, long deep in-and-out breaths, and then try to breathe in a way that feels good and refreshing for the body. If long breathing doesn’t feel good, you could change the rhythm. Try to find a rhythm and texture that feels right for you. Or ask yourself, “What parts of the body need energizing? What parts of … 
  5. The Buddha’s Cure
     … Now, we do this based on symptom management because the mind finds it a lot easier for the different members of the committee to talk reasonably when you feel well inside, when the breath is flowing nicely, the body feels balanced, you don’t feel irritated because you’re not creating irritation inside. You’re not holding on to irritation inside. You’re letting … 
  6. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
     … As you get more and more sensitive to it, you realize you can feel it anywhere in the nervous system, all the way out to every pore. But in the beginning, focus on whichever spot you find it easiest to notice the breath. And allow yourself to breathe in a way that lets that spot feel comfortable, so that it feels full and at … 
  7. Sober Up
     … Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and see how it feels. If it feels good, keep it up. The question may arise: Where should it feel good? For instance, it may feel good in the rib cage, but not so good in the shoulders. As you breathe in, there may be a tightness in the head. Well, see if … 
  8. Groundwork
     … Each time you come back, reward yourself with a breath that feels especially good. What would feel really gratifying right now in terms of the breath energy in the body? Sometimes all you have to do is pose that question in the mind, and the body will respond. And how can you maintain that sense of feeling gratified as you breathe in and out … 
  9. A Generosity of Spirit
     … It makes the mind more sensitive, more inclined to settle down with a sense of well-being, and to feel good about being here with that sense of well-being. I’ve run into people who, when they attain a sense of well-being in the meditation, don’t feel right about it. They feel like they don’t deserve it. But if you … 
  10. In & of Themselves
     … When you find a way that you can get the mind and the breath together with a feeling of well-being, a feeling of pleasure, or a feeling of equanimity, then you can put some of the thinking aside, and just be with the sensation of the body in and of itself. You’re getting closer and closer to the “in and of itself … 
  11. Play with the Breath
     … Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and see if it feels good. If a long breathing does feel good, keep it up. If it gets tiresome after a while, you can change. Longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter: There’s lots to play with there, just with the in-and-out breath. When we talk about … 
  12. To Be Worthy of the Dhamma
     … In the tetrad on feelings, you start out with energizing feelings of rapture, and soothing feelings of pleasure. You do what you can to induce these feelings as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Then you begin to realize that these are mental fabrications. They’re going to have an impact on the mind, so you try to calm that impact down. You … 
  13. Remember This
     … So this is the framework you’re trying to remember when a feeling comes. It’s not so much, “It’s my feeling,” or “I like it,” or “I don’t like it.” The question is, “Where does this feeling lead?” This brings your feelings and mind-states into the realm of right resolve. As the Buddha said, the first thing that really got … 
  14. How to Change
     … There are potentials for them to arise, and what you do with those potentials will determine what feeling you’re going to feel. The Buddha’s telling you to replace one kind of feeling with another feeling. Replace household grief with renunciate grief: the realization that there is a goal, other people have attained it, you haven’t attained it. There’s a grief … 
  15. The Third Frame of Reference
     … In other words, when the mind feels a desire for something, when it feels angry about something, when it’s deluded about things, when it feels constricted, you don’t just leave it there. You ask yourself: What is it lacking? This comes from the Buddha’s explanation of breath meditation. As you know, those instructions come in sixteen steps divided into four tetrads … 
  16. The Brahmaviharas on the Path
     … That’s something you can wish without feeling hypocritical. It’s not make-believe. So that’s one area in which you start developing right view in the process of developing goodwill. Then you take it further, by learning how to develop a feeling of goodwill that you really feel down into your bones. How are you going to do that? You can’t … 
  17. Passion, Dispassion, Compassion
     … Compassion, in terms of its etymology, means you feel the same thing, or you feel with somebody else. When somebody is suffering, compassion of that sort is a painful emotion. You feel part of their pain as well. For most of us, we live in a state of obsession with our pleasures, so that only if we feel somebody else’s pain will we … 
  18. Feeding on the Breath
     … Decide whether it feels good or not. If it doesn’t feel good, you can experiment. Fix new food. In other words, breathe in different ways, think about the breath in different ways that help the breath energy to flow more smoothly, so that the body feels energized by the breath, and the mind feels it can settle down with a sense of well … 
  19. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … The different appearances of feelings are different feedback loops. A feeling comes, say, after sensory contact. Well, it doesn’t have to go to craving. You can cycle it back through fabrication, where you run it past your breath again. You run it past directed thought and evaluation. In other words, you can reconsider it. You run it through name and form. You learn … 
  20. Wearing the Breath
     … Where do you feel the flow of energy as the air comes in, the air goes out right now? Where is it most prominent? Focus your attention there and try to figure out which ways of breathing feel best. Again, you’re feeling it; you’re wearing it. It’s what nowadays we call proprioception: your sense of the body as you feel it … 
  21. Pleasures & Pains on the Middle Way
     … Does it feel good? If it feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change the rhythm of your breathing. You can think of all kinds of variations: shorter’ even deeper or more shallow; heavier, lighter; faster, slower. Experiment with different ways of breathing to see what feels best right now. Gaining a sense of pleasure in the breath is an important principle … 
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