Search results for: "Feeling"

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  2. Dwelling in Emptiness
     … And you want to make it a place where you really do feel comfortable dwelling. So approach it step by step like this. Ajaan Lee’s image is of throwing a rock in a smelter: As you raise the temperature, the different metals separate out. First the tin separates out, then the lead, then the silver, then the gold. In the same way, as … 
  3. Patience Is a Skill
     … Remind yourself that there are a lot of things you can’t figure out ahead of time, so you’re going to learn as you feel your way. As you get a better intuitive sense of what’s going on, then you can know where to push, where not to push. Again, like the farmer: The farmer knows not to pull the plant up … 
  4. The Courage to Set Yourself Free
     … That means viewing it from a position where you don’t feel threatened by it. This is why we work with the breath to make it comfortable. Then we can look at the pain simply as a phenomenon to be studied. Taking that attitude immediately changes the relationship. You’re not running away from it. You’re stopping and you’re looking at it … 
  5. Learning by Doing
     … You’re trying to create a feeling of well-being—that comes under both name and mental fabrication, too. Underlying this, there’s the fact that you’re simply paying attention to the breath, and you have the intention to stay here, all of which come under name. This is how you learn about these thing—not by trying to watch them passively, because … 
  6. In Your Power
     … right at the body in and of itself, at feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves—ardent, alert and mindful putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, taking these things simply as events in and of themselves. Then you watch to see what skillful and unskillful mental states come up around … 
  7. Go Out of Your Way
     … Part of the reason, of course, is that we don’t want to be in your face with making people feel they have to give, or that we’re pleading with them to give, or begging for them to give. It’s funny: They talk about the word bhikkhu coming from a word meaning request, yet Ajaan Fuang would also say, “We’re not … 
  8. Practice Without Gaps
     … It’s basically, “I’ll observe it when I feel like it and not when I don’t.” In that case, the precept hasn’t been given the honor it deserves because, remember, the Buddha said we have to respect the triple training, and that means respecting the precepts. When we respect our likes and our dislikes more, there’s no training there, except … 
  9. The Tricks of Denial
     … And that’s when you use the Buddha’s analysis for how to deal with the perceptions, or the feelings or the other types of fabrication that do have a pull over the mind. You look for them arising. You look for them passing away. Sometimes we read about how discernment is simply knowledge of the arising and passing away of phenomena. That’s … 
  10. The Perception of Space
     … One night she was meditating, and a voice came to her as she was meditating and said, “You’re going to die tonight.” She so figured, “Well, if I’m going to die, I should die meditating.” So she sat there and she said that she had the feeling that her body was like a house on fire. She tried to focus here, and … 
  11. Exploring Contentment
     … your intention, whether conscious or subconscious, in how you want the body to feel in the present moment, which is going to shape the rate at which you breathe, the depth, the speed, the length of the breath. There’s an element of fabrication that goes into this that you really want to get to know. And the best way to get to know … 
  12. Four Determinations
     … But often the mind feels at loose ends if it’s not talking to itself. So, you have to learn how to be with the state of mind where there’s just a perception holding you in place. That’s an example of what you can look for. As for calm helping with your discernment, the more still the mind is, the subtler things … 
  13. Bedside Dhamma
     … When they’ve been thinking about the unskillful things they’ve done, and then something really miserable opens up, and they feel, “Oh, here’s my punishment coming to get me,” they just go into it, where they don’t have to. The types of karma where you have to go to hell, say, after this lifetime are very few. But if the mind … 
  14. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … Ardency is defined in the texts as the feeling you have when you realize that there are unskillful mental states in your mind and they’re dangerous; that if you don’t get rid of them there’s going to be danger. If you don’t give rise to skillful states, there’s going to be danger. This quality is very closely related to … 
  15. Social Anxiety
     … In the beginning you may feel unprotected. Don’t listen to those voices. Those are voices that took over your mind when you were a little child and didn’t know anything. That was the best you could do at that time, but now you’ve got more skills, better skills, more understanding. Learn how to reason with those voices: “Here’s a good … 
  16. Cooking with Kamma
     … You’ve got body, filled with a feeling pleasure and filled with awareness. These are all things that we have already. You just learn how to make use of them and turn them into your concentration food: the sense of rapture, the sense of well-being that comes when the mind gets settled down like this. The Buddha describes this in his analogy of … 
  17. Planting a Tree
     … The Buddha said that when you start feeling discouraged, remind yourself that you started this practice because you love yourself. You want to put an end to suffering. Have you stopped wanting to put an end to suffering? Well, no. It’s just that the progress is coming more slowly than you might have wanted or anticipated. But you can’t let that become … 
  18. A Culture of Restraint
     … knowing how much you can rein the mind in, when you have to give it a little extra leash, so it doesn’t feel too confined, too cooped up, but at the same time knowing how much is too much — this is something you have to learn over time. So think about the environment you’re creating in your mind, the environment that allows … 
  19. A Radiant Practice
     … Simple things like cleaning up the place, little acts of kindness, anything that makes you feel good that you’ve gone out of your way to do something good: That’s merit. It’s the same with virtue. There are areas where you could have said or done something that was not quite honorable, but you said No to that temptation. You decided you … 
  20. Resilience Plus
     … And make sure you don’t feel oppressed by what they’ve done or what they’ve said. Think of your mind as being as large as the earth, as inflammable as the river Ganges. Now, if we were to stop right there, that would be simply a lesson in non-reactivity. But the Buddha doesn’t stop there. He says you’ve got … 
  21. Two Kinds of Seclusion
     … Once you’re able to locate the most obvious sensations of the breath and stay with them for a while, start exploring how the process of breathing feels in other parts of the body. Sometimes you find certain parts are missing, such as a shoulder or parts of your back, parts of your torso. Suppose your shoulder seems to be missing. If you can … 
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