Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. Look after Your Baby
     … Talk yourself into feeling that you are competent to do this. To bolster your concentration, think of those four other strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, and discernment. If the concentration is weak, you have to strengthen those as well, and the concentration will become stronger along with them. Then the little bits and pieces of concentration begin to connect. Not that they flow on their … 
  3. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … If you can’t get certain parts of the body to feel comfortable, then you can’t really spread your awareness. There are bound to be times when sections of the body just don’t respond. Allowing your awareness to spread, being conscious of the awareness that’s already there, can actually help you overcome the problem. But if you tie your hands and … 
  4. Goodwill Is Respect
     … So we’re converting it to our purposes, and sometimes we end up feeling really tired. You may not have done much physically in the course of the day, but your mental activity has been wearing out the breath energy because you’re not giving it full room in your body. So give it the whole body. The whole body can breathe in, the … 
  5. Enthusiasm
     … Often this will happen when your energy level is down, and you least feel like working with the problem, but that’s when you’ve got to give yourself encouragement to get your energy back up. We’re all adults by now. We should have some experience in knowing how to motivate ourselves and keep the motivation going. Wherever you’ve learned that particular … 
  6. Expert’s Mind
     … The reference points could be the body, feelings, mind states themselves, or individual mental qualities. But we start with the body. This is why we focus on the breath. Of the different aspects of the body, the breath is closest to the mind. It’s most sensitive to the movements of the mind and it in turn exerts a positive or a negative influence … 
  7. Count Yourself Lucky
     … All too often we tend to identify with them, “This is the real me, this is how I really think about things.” Well, again, if everything is fabricated, the question is, what is the real you in there? It’s one of the feelings coming up in the present moment that you’ve happened to focus on. We’re not asking you to deny … 
  8. Commit & Reflect
     … Look at the way you breathe, look at the way you talk to yourself, look at the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on. How can you work with these things to undercut the mind’s desire to go with those unskillful habits? In other words, you really do have to put forth an effort. There are very few images in … 
  9. Using Right Resolve Rightly
     … In other words, you use your directed thought and evaluation to get the mind snugly with the object—like one of those wooden Chinese puzzles where the pieces of wood are fit together very nicely, very precisely—so that it feels just right to be here. Then you drop all that other thinking and maintain that sense of just-rightness. There will be a … 
  10. Sober Up
     … You have to look at the way you’re breathing, you have to look at the way you’re talking to yourself, you have to look at the perceptions you hold in mind and the feelings you focus on. You have to see where they’ve been kidnapped by your defilements, and where you’ve got to exert yourself to get them back. The … 
  11. Balanced Concentration
     … So bringing the mind into the present moment and getting it to stay here is not just a matter of feeling comfortable and at ease with the object. That is one essential elements, but also it requires understanding what the mind does, how the mind moves out, how the mind moves back in, why it moves. So regardless of whatever issues you have in … 
  12. Open Door Meditation
     … All too often we feel that because it’s not really meditation time, it’s kind of quasi meditation time, we don’t have to be as strict with ourselves. But again think about the refrigerator. If you’re going to keep things cold in the refrigerator when the door is open you’ve got to generate a lot of cold. Which means that … 
  13. This Fathom-Long Body
     … So if you want to understand the movements of the mind, if you want to understand how the mind creates a sense of self, how it can begin to let go of that sense of self, or to stop creating it, first by creating more skillful feelings of self until you can get them more and more refined, until finally you can let it … 
  14. From Heedfulness to Purity
     … Tell yourself, “There must be something better than this.” If there’s the least little bit of stress, the least little bit of feeling burdened in the mind, there’s something wrong. Of course, where do you look for the something wrong? You turn around and look inside. You try to see the stress arising, the stress passing away. And try to notice, “What … 
  15. A Fool for Sensuality
     … As I was saying this morning, when you think of the different parts of the body and you go down the list — hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh — try to have a feeling in your body for where those parts are. But the image is also going to be important, because we live by images. When we die … 
  16. Cultivate a Limitless Heart
    Cultivate a Limitless Heart November 24, 2015 We each have our own sufferings that no one else can feel. And the work to put an end to suffering is often something that no one else can even see. As we’re focused on our own issues, things can get very narrow. On the one hand, it’s good that the sufferings that weigh down … 
  17. A Skillful Attitude
     … You’re not here just to enjoy yourself in the present moment or to enjoy the feeling of being here. There’s also the enjoyment that can come from learning a skill, mastering a skill, seeing that you actually are getting better at it. And as you meditate, you find yourself leaning more and more in that direction all the time. As new challenges … 
  18. Skillful Desire
     … Simply having an alternative place to stay aside from your pain, aside from the sorrows and ups and downs of daily life, puts the mind in a much better position to deal with those things and not feel threatened by them. For instance, if you’re sitting here with a pain that doesn’t go away when you breathe through it, at least you … 
  19. Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation
     … You’ve got to develop your powers of evaluation, one, to evaluate cause and effect; and two, to figure out, okay, what’s a good effect? And when you’ve got something good, what do you do to develop it, to make the most of it? So you focus on the breath and find which way of breathing feels good. Once you’ve got … 
  20. Tuning Your Lute
     … You can imagine how Soṇa feels—an unskillful thought has gone through his mind, and the Buddha shows up. He was lucky that he had the Buddha doing that. A lot of us sit here with unskillful thoughts going through our minds, and yet nobody shows up to warn us. The Buddha asks Soṇa about when he was a layman: “When you played the … 
  21. Guiding Truths
     … But the actual experience of pain, how it feels: That’s something they can’t account for. And so from the Buddha’s point of view, a lot of what they have to say is beside the point. The real question is, what is the direct experience of pain, suffering, stress? What causes it? You ask what causes it so that you can put … 
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