Search results for: "Feelings"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- Cultivate a Limitless HeartCultivate 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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