Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 134
  2. Tenacity
     … You have a perception about it, which may be just a feeling in that spot. Or you may have a mental image. You hold on to that, and you resist the temptation to drop it in between the breaths. You get so that the out-breath goes into the in-breath, and the in-breath goes into the out-breath. It’s all one … 
  3. Delight in Conviction
     … There are a lot of potentials you have here for understanding yourself, understanding your breath, understanding the way you talk to yourself, understanding the perceptions you hold in mind—even the feelings you focus on. These are not just random things. They’re things that you play a role in shaping. With some good guidance, you can learn how to shape them well. The … 
  4. What Are You Doing?
     … Sometimes you come to the pain with a lot of stories around why it’s not fair that that pain is there, and/or you may be feeling bad about yourself. Maybe this pain is punishment for something—all kind of weird things the mind can carry on, even if it’s just basically noting the pain and the fact that it’s there … 
  5. Look at Yourself
     … No matter how much you feel that your desire to straighten other people out is a good desire, you’re looking in the wrong place. Remember the acrobats. You have to maintain your balance and in doing so, you help other people maintain theirs. If you’re reaching over to straighten out their balance, you’re leaning over. And of course, when you’re … 
  6. Daily-Life Dhamma
     … Breathe in a way that releases a lot of the tension you’re feeling. And for all the voices that say, “Oh, they’re going to treat me like a doormat, they’re going to treat me as if I’m a nothing,” remember that those are voices that don’t know the Dhamma. If there are people who look down on you for … 
  7. Mindfulness Immersed in the Body
     … We create a sense of who we are, partly out of the body, partly out of our thoughts, our perceptions, our feelings. We construct an identity around these things, and then we’re exposed to anything that would challenge that identity. The Buddha is basically saying we have a choice. There are other things we could identify with. There’s an interesting passage where … 
  8. Universal Truths
     … What you end up with is identifying yourself with a particular idea, or a particular feeling, a particular perception, and that becomes limiting too. So even though these questions may sound large and weighty and profound, they really aren’t. Ajaan Lee makes the comment many times that people tend to take high Dhamma and think that it’s low, and low Dhamma and … 
  9. A Producer Mentality
     … Some of us read that and we feel a little put off—if that’s what’s required, then we’re not up to it. Well, that’s what worked for his mind. And remember, at some points in the practice, you *will *have to be harsh with yourself, but it doesn’t work all the time. Think of Ajaan Lee. He was more … 
  10. Circumspection
     … With the sense of the body as you feel it from within, which has its aches and its pains, you find where its potential for pleasure is, and you maximize that. This is one of Ajaan Lee’s real contributions to the Buddhist tradition. The Buddha says to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, breathe in and out sensitive to the pleasure, but … 
  11. Determination
     … On the days when you don’t feel like holding to the precept, or when something really tempting comes along and tempts you to break the precept, you have to remind yourself: No. You put up an effort. This brings in another one of the perfections, which is the perfection of persistence, the perfection of effort itself. As for generosity, it includes giving and … 
  12. Worry
     … Learn how to breathe in a way that feels good regardless of the situation in the body, and you have something you can fall back on. Because if you want to think straight, you need a sense of well-being inside. Otherwise, the mind will be hungry, desperate, and will jump at anything. So again, you’re training the mind not to be overcome … 
  13. The Goldsmith
     … In other words, you breathe right through wherever in the body you feel there’s tension related to the thought. And you keep at it. But the effort here is much milder than the effort of trying to get the mind to settle down. Then finally there’s watching. This can apply to two different things. One is when the mind really settles down … 
  14. Meaning & Happiness
     … They like to content themselves with the idea that they did as best as possible by having a family and finding meaning in the family, and when the children start looking for something more than that, the parents feel threatened. They try to pull the child back into looking for happiness in relationships. Ajaan Fuang’s comparison is of someone who stepped in dog … 
  15. You Are Not Redundant
     … If you can learn how to look at what you’re doing and see the extent to which your feelings and your perceptions shape the state of your mind right now, you can do something about it. As the Buddha says, basically, you can take that principle all the way to the ultimate happiness. But even if you don’t go that far, the … 
  16. Older than the Cosmos
     … It makes you feel very small. But then the Buddha says we’ve been around longer than they have. This is just one universe, but we’ve been through many cycles of many universes, to the point where he says you can’t trace back and find a point where ignorance began and got the whole process started—and he was someone whose mind … 
  17. Body Contemplation
     … the embroidery, the fabrication around the actual feeling of pleasure—our thoughts of the kind of sensual pleasures we’d like and the sensual pleasures we’ve had. The free play of our imagination is what keeps pulling us back—because, in that free play, you’re free to lie to yourself, and the mind likes to lie to itself. After all, what are … 
  18. Effortlessness Through Effort
     … And then you learn to make a sport, say, out of shooting down your defilements, instead of regretting them and feeling nostalgia for them and saying, “Well, as long as they don’t do too much damage in the present moment, I’m okay with their being here.” When you let them in that much, it’s like the story of the camel that … 
  19. Skillful Distress
    I know a psychologist who has a map of emotions in terms of where you are in your head, in your intentions, and in your gut feelings. She’ll put you on the map, try to identify where you are, and then look at where you want to go. The map then lays out the steps from where you are to where you want … 
  20. Ups & Downs
     … Just have confidence that as long as you’re focused in the right spot, and the breath feels good, you’re doing the right thing. Remember all those in the past who hit troughs in their practice and yet were able to come out of the trough. There was nothing superhuman about them. They simply had the patience and equanimity to maintain a state … 
  21. Building Character
     … You have to watch out for the tendency to want to be a jhana junky or an insight junky—in other words, to go for the hits and then to feel frustrated when you can’t get the mind to settle down like before, to get the insights you had before, and you’re not in the zone that meditators like to get into … 
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