Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 121
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… Then you find that even the need to breathe in and breathe out feels oppressive. Your sensitivities have been heightened at that point, so you allow the body just to be there. Because your awareness fills the body, breath energy fills the body, and the mind is very still, the body doesn’t need to breathe. And you don’t have to force it …
- The Thinking Heart… Try to breathe in a way that, at the very least, feels okay. If you learn how to protect that sense of being okay right here, you’ll find that it’ll grow into a sense of ease. That sense of ease not only gives you a good place to stay and encouragement on the path, but it also allows you to look at …
- Four Determinations… You energize yourself with rapture and feelings of pleasure, and then you calm mental fabrication even to the point where perceptions and feelings stop. That’s the direction we’re headed. Now, you don’t just suppress these things. You have to calm things down through understanding. In other words, you’re practicing calm and insight together. The insight comes in seeing things in …
- In Debt to Generosity… If, however, you see the gift is inappropriate or that it’s going to be harmful to your practice, then you can refuse the gift, but you want to do it in such a way that you’re not hurting the other person’s feelings. An important lesson in the practice is to learn the humility of a recipient. Years back, when I was …
- Matters of Life & Death… It’s as if you find yourself floating, and it feels just right. There’s a weightlessness, a lightness to the body, a lightness to the mind. The mind can comment in all kinds of ways. It can say, “Oh my gosh, it’s wonderful. How do I keep this going? Isn’t this great? Or what’s next?” Either way, you disturb the …
- Desire Is Part of the Path… Your feelings are activities. Your perceptions are things you do. Thought constructs, fabrications are things you do. Consciousness is something you do. And we’re addicted to these activities. With the path, the Buddha is giving us something better to be addicted to as we get the mind into concentration. He himself said he got on the right path when he realized that he …
- Breathing to Awakening… not that you’re pumping up air into the lungs so much, but you get a sense of when the nerves of the body feel depleted and when they feel full of energy. Again, it’s not a frenetic energy; it’s a good, solid energy—Ajaan Lee calls it a solid energy. And what way do you breathe to give rise to that …
- Training Your Selves… You latch on to something—to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, fabrications, consciousness. In latching on to these things, you make yourself subject to things that you don’t want. So there is a way out that doesn’t involve just being accepting or resigning yourself to the way things are. We were talking today about the translation of dukkha sometimes as unsatisfactoriness. It …
- Fully Here… What direction does the energy go when you breathe in? Does the energy in the body feel coordinated? Or does one part seem to be fighting against another part? Centuries ago, there was a Japanese master, Hakuin, who suffered from what he called Zen sickness. When you read his description of it, it was basically the problem where, as he was breathing in, he …
- Stay… When you’re feeling anxious, you breathe in a certain way. When there’s greed, when there’s lust, when there’s anger, you have different ways of breathing. You can learn how to read the breath and the mind in this way. You gain a better sense of when the mind is in a state where it can be relied on and when …
- Gifts of Noble Wealth… You’re refraining from doing the kinds of things you’d like to do just because you feel like doing them. You start thinking about the consequences, which helps you to avoid bad consequences—and that’s an important form of wealth. Virtue here is supplemented by shame and compunction. Shame does not mean being ashamed of yourself as a bad person. It means …
- The Saints Don’t Grieve… The Mahayanists feel that bodhisattvas have more freedom because they have a foot in both worlds, they say. Well, nirvana is the opposite of being stuck. For one thing, it’s not a place. When there’s no place, there’s no being stuck anywhere. Second, the person who attains nirvana is totally undefined, with no restrictions whatsoever. From the outside it looks uninviting …
- The Uses of Concentration… No matter how much they sound like you—no matter how much they seem like your true feelings, your true desires—you decide you can pull out, you know how to pull out, and that way you can look at the defilements from the outside. That makes them a lot easier to deal with. So concentration is what gives you a place to stand …
- Perfecting the Mind in an Imperfect World… When someone says, “Where should this be given?” the monks can’t say, “Well, give it here, give it there.” They simply say, “Give where you feel most inspired or where you feel that your gift would be well-used, well cared for.” We certainly can’t say, “Don’t give to this person, give to that.” Or, “Don’t give to that monastery …
- An Enduring Cheerfulness… You see the ironies of life and you’re able to step back from them, without feeling totally wound up in them. After all, it’s when you step back that you see the ironies. As the Greeks used to say, it’s the gods who laugh. The gods see human beings so upset about human events, but the gods are at a certain …
- It’s up to You… We’re going to be holding perceptions and feelings in mind: labels for how the breath goes in the body, how we’re related to the breath. Where are you in relationship to your breath right now? Are you above it? Behind it? Surrounded by it? Which of those perceptions is most useful? I’ve found that the perception of being surrounded by the …
- Justice vs. Skillfulness… He simply recommended that you give where you feel inspired, where you feel the gift would be well-used. That applies not only to material gifts but also to gifts of your time, gifts of your energy to improve things in the world. It’s up to you to decide where you want to make your mark, who you want to help, realizing that …
- Wide-open Awareness… Allow it to relax and then take that relaxed feeling as your standard. That’s what you want to hold onto, or maybe better, that’s what you want to keep tabs on. You don’t want to hold on in the sense of grasping, because when you grasp it, that tightens it up again. Just keep tabs on it, keep your finger on …
- Conviction & Confidence… It gives rise to the feeling that you might as well go ahead and die and get it over with, if that was going to circumscribe the totality of your life. But thinking about the possibility that true awakening can be found through your efforts: that breaks through those circumscribed limits. That’s not part of anybody else’s plan, but that can be …
- Practicing for Dispassion… We work with all the techniques for giving rise to energy when we’re sleepy, and ways of talking to ourselves when we feel restless or anxious or overcome with uncertainty. We have to realize that no matter what’s going to happen in the future, things are very uncertain. You can’t nail down your plans, but you can expect that there will …
- Load next page...
