Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. The Trick to Staying in Place
     … If you notice you have any stress, feelings of dis-ease, or any sort of habitual patterns of tension or tightness in the body, you can learn how to breathe in ways that loosen them up. This game you play with the breath, this experimentation, actually starts having visible important results. You feel more comfortable in your body; you feel more at home in … 
  3. Messaging Your Mind
     … In other words, you’re not going to think about the breath in relationship to anything else at all, just the breath feels as it comes in, how it feels as it goes out. The second activity is to put aside any interest in the world outside. No matter how wonderful your thoughts may be—interesting, insightful about the world—they’re not wanted … 
  4. What You Bring to the Meditation
    Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and see how it feels. Does it feel good? If it feels good, keep it up. If it starts feeling labored, you can change the rhythm. You can shorten the in-breath, you can shorten the out-breath, or you can shorten both of them. They can be longer or shorter, heavier or … 
  5. The Questions of Suffering
     … Feelings feel. Perceptions perceive. Fabrications fabricate thoughts, and consciousness cognizes. These are activities, and we cling to them, which means we try to get our sustenance out of them. We try to feed off of these things. That’s why we suffer. How do you feed off feelings? You want pleasant feelings. Whatever sensation comes in, you grab onto it and try to squeeze … 
  6. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … How do you feel your body from within? Your feet? Your hands? Your arms? Your torso? Your head? Just try to be in touch with that. Try to get on familiar terms with it. When you’re on familiar terms, then you can feel warm when you want to feel warm, cool when you want to be cool. When the body’s feeling heavy … 
  7. Right Next to Ignorance
     … Otherwise, the feeling tone will take over, and you’ll zone out. But you’ve got the feeling right here. You can look right here at the feeling, how you respond to the feeling of pleasure. When it seems to be too gross—even the pleasure gets too gross—then there’s a feeling of equanimity. How do you understand that? The Buddha says … 
  8. Everything’s Right There
     … There are feelings, too. Are they comfortable? If not, you can make changes. See if the way you breathe is going to have an effect on those feelings. Try longer breathing, shorter breathing; deeper, more shallow; heavier, lighter. Learn to read the feelings that come about as a result of paying attention to the breath. When the Buddha talks about being mindful, it’s … 
  9. Focal Points
    When you focus on the breath, it’s important that the breath feel very refreshing: that it feels really good to breathe in and then breathe in again, breathe in again, that there’s a part of the body that feels really gratified, really nourished by the breath. Part of this involves choosing your spot to focus on, what Ajaan Lee calls the resting … 
  10. The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness
     … What rhythm of breathing would feel really good right now? Would it be longer breathing or shorter? Or you can try in-long and out-short, or in-short and out-long. How about deeper or more shallow? Heavier or lighter? Which part of the body, breathing, feels good? Does it feel good to be breathing mainly with the abdomen or mainly with the … 
  11. Choiceful Awareness
     … Mindfulness gets you focused on body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities, in and of themselves, all of which are the basic components of concentration. “Body,” here, of course, is the breath. Feelings: The feeling of ease that you’re trying to create with the breath, or the feelings of pain that may distract you. You have to learn how to deal with those feelings … 
  12. Eyes in the Back of Your Head
     … Why do the muscles feel tightened there? Can you consciously loosen them so that you can connect things up? Do this throughout the whole body, so that there’s a sense of connection. Once you’ve got that sense of connection, you can try settling down in one spot and see if you can maintain that one spot and feel connected throughout the whole … 
  13. The Buddha’s Secret Weapon
     … Try to get a sense of what breathing feels best. This may involve playing with the length of the breath, the heaviness of the breath, or your sense of how the breath comes in and out of the body. All this comes under evaluation, one of the factors of the first jhana. When you find something that feels really comfortable—a nice breathing sensation … 
  14. First Principles
     … When people would come and ask him questions about their meditation, he would say, “Well, how does it feel to you?” In other words, don’t look at the words in the book. Look at how your feelings are responding to what you’re doing. Learn how to read those feelings, finding out which feelings are actually telling you something important, which feelings are … 
  15. Training Heart & Mind
     … How is the breath doing? Does it feel right? Where could it feel better? Once it feels good, how can you maximize that pleasure? For the mind to settle down and be really still, it needs a sense of ease and well-being. So when you notice that the breath feels good, think of the breath energy spreading from that comfortable sensation, allowing it … 
  16. What You’re Bringing
     … When the breath comes in, where exactly do you feel it? Only in the places where you thought you might feel it, or are there other places as well? Where does the energy flow? Do you feel breath energy coming down through the shoulders? Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it’s coming in from the front; sometimes in from the back. Different places in the … 
  17. The Karma of Self
     … The relevant teaching was the fact that there are three kinds of feeling. There are pleasant feelings, painful feelings, and feelings that are neither pleasant nor painful. That way of thinking about feelings is useful when you’re thinking about what you want to get out of your actions. If you think that everything you feel is going to be stressful, then who cares … 
  18. Time to Heal
     … It feels good coming in, feels good going out. If it doesn’t feel good coming in and coming out, you can ask yourself, “Well, why?” You’ve got the time and the opportunity to give total attention to your breathing. After all, the breath is the force of life, and if this force of life feels constricted, tight, strangled, it’s going to … 
  19. Obsessive Thinking
     … You feel compelled to think this way; you feel you ought to think in this way. Especially with worries: There’s a part of the mind that says, “If I don’t worry enough, I’m not preparing for the future,” and you feel virtuous about worrying. Or with grief: There are times when you feel, “If I’m not feeling grief, I’m … 
  20. Monologue on the Breath
     … Just keep thinking about breath, breath, breath, and then notice when it’s coming in, notice when it’s going out, notice where you feel it, and notice what the feeling feels like. Is it warm or cool? Comfortable or not? If it’s not comfortable, what can you do to make it more comfortable? That’s the kind of evaluation you’re going … 
  21. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … How does this breath feel? How does that breath feel? Where would it feel good to breathe right now? Which part of the body needs a larger dose of good breath energy? In this way you get more and more in touch with the immediate feeling of your body so that your linguistic habits can show immediate benefits. It feels good to breathe this … 
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