Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 129
  2. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … So if you’re feeling discouraged, find some ways of soothing the mind. On the contrary, if it’s simply being ornery—and that happens a lot too—that’s when you’ve got to be stern. This is where the Buddha recommends recollection of death. Death could come at any time. I’ve been told that, according to the Thai Wat Metta social … 
  3. An Admirable Friend — In Memory of Luang Loong
    Bring your awareness to the breath, wherever you feel it in the body. And allow it to be comfortable. As you stick with the breath, you’re developing good qualities in the mind. It’s called *bhavana *in Pali: developing mindfulness, concentration, discernment, persistence. Underlying all this is the conviction that this is really useful, this is really a worthwhile project: training the mind … 
  4. Nimble with Your Questions
    We keep coming back to the same place—the breath coming in, the breath going out, how you feel the breath energy in the body—because we want to get familiar with this territory. We want to know it all the way in, all the way out, and to see the different things the breath can do until we get familiar with all its … 
  5. Reflect
     … How does your breath feel right now? Is it a good breath to settle down with? You’ve got to learn how to get the mind and the breath to settle together snugly, the same way that a carpenter would try to work with two pieces of wood so that they would fit snugly together. Sometimes you work on the breath—changing the way … 
  6. Alone Together
     … It’s easier to live in constrained circumstances when you feel that you’ve got abundance within those circumstances. And having a sense that we’re all in this together makes it a lot easier to put up with other people’s idiosyncrasies, other people’s foibles. There was a group of monks I knew who went up into northwestern Thailand and lived out … 
  7. Be Observant
     … little tiny ideas, perceptions, feelings. If your vision isn’t all-around, they can start growing. So come to the meditation telling yourself that you’re here to observe. You’re here to watch, which means when the meditation goes well, you watch it. When it doesn’t go well, you watch it—not to be equanimous about it, but simply to learn. At … 
  8. The Thread of Mindfulness
     … Or if you can hold onto the next rung a little bit but then find that it’s getting a little slippery, go back to where you feel more solid. The burden of the concentration lies right in this act of being mindful. That’s why it’s so important to realize that when the Buddha was teaching mindfulness and concentration, they were meant … 
  9. Look at Yourself
     … You get to know these things really well—what’s a perception, what’s a feeling—by using them to get the mind into concentration. You get hands-on experience with these different kinds of fabrication, so that when the time comes to analyze them for the purpose of dispassion, you know what they are. They’re not just concepts. They’re things you … 
  10. The Buddha’s Encouragement
     … You’ve got the form of the body, the feeling of pleasure that you’re trying to develop, the perceptions that hold you here, the intentions, the thought fabrications that keep you here, and your awareness. All the aggregates are right here. They’re all doing their thing. And of course, we want to learn about the aggregates, so this is a good place … 
  11. The Buddha’s Narratives & Yours
     … It allows you to ask yourself, “Do I really want to go into that?”—especially if there are a lot of hard feelings around who’s innocent, who’s guilty. In the larger frame of things, everybody’s been innocent, everybody’s been guilty. It gets so that you can’t trace how far a particular incident goes back. The long-term karmic ancestry … 
  12. Breathe Easy
     … You can have all the physical food you might want, and the body can still feel starved if the breath is starved. There’s no one forcing us to breathe in a way that’s difficult. There’s no breath police. They haven’t privatized the breath. It’s all yours. So try to realize the full implications of that, expand your sense of … 
  13. Strength of Discernment
     … As for the people beyond that, that depends on our capacities, our time, our energy, where we feel we can be of help. That’s worthy of attention. As for what’s going to happen in the future, again, you ask yourself: “Where should I focus my attention right now? There are certain qualities I’m going to need to deal with the future … 
  14. The Language of the Heart (2)
     … Now, of course, I had my problems adjusting to the culture over there—and it may have been because I was learning the Dhamma in a second language—but there was sometimes a feeling at the very beginning that it was almost like make-believe: “Okay, we’ll take this on as a game.” I didn’t consciously think of things in quite those … 
  15. No One Size Fits All
     … perceptions and feelings. In both cases, the Buddha says, once you see that process of fabrication, you learn how to calm it. In that way, you’re doing both insight and tranquility at the same time. Then there’s verbal fabrication in the instructions themselves. You’re telling yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body, breathe in and out sensitive … 
  16. Choosing to Believe in Your Choices
     … They’re shaped by your thoughts, shaped by your feelings. But each present moment is something you approach with an intention. And your experience of the intention actually comes prior to your experience of the senses. So your new karma in the present moment is something that you experience prior to your experience of the results of old karma, which means that you’re … 
  17. Giving Weight
     … If you try to resist the flow, you’ll always feel it. Yet so much of the time, we place our center of awareness outside, trying to provide it a place where it can stay outside, thinking that it’s going to be safer out there. If you’re outside, you think you can keep track of what other people are thinking or saying … 
  18. Pitching Your Tent in the Present
     … So you have breath, a feeling of pleasure, and awareness all spread out together, so that the present moment is a spacious place to stay. At the same time, you’re developing good qualities in the mind: mindfulness, the ability to keep all this in mind, alertness to what you’re doing, and ardency, the desire to do this well. These are all potentials … 
  19. Noble Treasures
     … I would feel ashamed to do it.” And based on that sense of shame, you don’t do it. It’s your motivation for being virtuous, your motivation for avoiding harmful behavior whether it comes under the precepts or not. Compunction, which goes along with shame, basically focuses on the results of the actions. You realize, “I can’t be apathetic. I care about … 
  20. Pay Careful Attention
    We live in a culture where people tend to be careless about what they say—saying things that are not true, saying things that are divisive, saying things with the intention of hurting other people’s feelings, or just opening their mouths and saying whatever comes out—all of which are forms of wrong speech. When people are careless of what they say, we … 
  21. Put Your Books Back on the Shelf
     … When you find that you can stay with the breath comfortably and things feel good, then you can put aside all the directed thought and evaluation, the chatter about the breath. Just be with the breath. And at this point, you don’t have to make any comments on it at all, aside from just, “Breath, breath, breath.” I remember one time—when I … 
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