Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 14
- A Total Training… Try to find what way of breathing feels really good right now. It could be long breathing or short breathing, fast or slow, heavy or light, deep or shallow. Experiment to see what feels best. When you find a rhythm that feels good, stick with it until it doesn’t feel good anymore, then change it. Try to keep tabs on what the body …
- Bodies & Minds Outside… And the same with feelings, mind, and mental qualities: You can focus on them either internally, externally, or both. Internally, it’s pretty obvious what he’s talking about: your own experience of body, feelings, and so forth. But what about externally? If you believe that mindfulness means simply being aware, how are you going to watch other people’s feelings or mind states …
- An Hour of Bliss… But if you pay attention to how the breath feels in the body, you begin to realize that you can breathe in a way that feels good in the stomach, feels good in the chest. This is good for the different organs in your body. Breathe in a way that your shoulders don’t tense up as you breathe in, and you’re not …
- Delight in Persistence… You might say, “The real elements are oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and all the other chemical elements.” But how do you feel carbon? How do you feel oxygen? You don’t directly feel these things but you do feel the warmth. You feel the solidity. You feel the coolness. You feel the energy. So you work with what you feel. Then you ask yourself, “Is …
- Doubting the Buddha… Try to be very sensitive to how the breathing feels, figuring out which way of breathing feels right coming in, feels right going out, and then try to maintain that. It’s the maintaining that’s going to let this very ordinary-feeling breath become more and more refreshing. Try to breathe in a way that doesn’t put a squeeze in the body …
- Free Not to Suffer… Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels good right now: long, short, heavy, light, fast, slow, deep, or shallow. You could spend the whole hour focusing on just that issue, getting to know the body right now, to see what feels really good. If you’ve found a way of breathing that feels good, think of that sense of comfort …
- Past & Future in the Present… How does the breath feel? Where do you feel it when you breathe in? Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths to begin with. Notice where you feel the breath and how it feels. Does it feel comfortable? Or is it too long, too short, too heavy, too light, too fast, too slow? You can make adjustments if you want …
- The Riddle Tree… Some people as they are meditating tend to focus on the issue of feeling: which feelings are pleasant and how to relate to pleasant feelings. Sometimes you find it easy to stay focused on the breath and have a pleasant feeling alongside the breath, and yet not get distracted. Other people have a real problem. As soon as a pleasant feeling comes up, they …
- The Uses of Fear… We don’t like the feeling of fear. The experience of fear is very uncomfortable. We feel small, weak, and threatened. This feeling can become unskillful when it gets mixed up with greed, aversion, and delusion. But a clear-sighted sense of fear combined with confidence that there is a way out can actually get you on the path. This combination of fear and …
- Fear of Concentration… In a case like that, you’ve got to tell yourself that there must be some spot in the body where you feel safe. Try to find that one spot. Take that as your beachhead and then gradually expand your awareness as you begin to feel comfortable. As for any images that come up, any memories that come up, you just let them go …
- Lessons in Fabrication… Then there’s mental fabrication, which is composed of perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the images you have in mind to name things, identity things, recognize things, remember things. Feelings are feeling-tones, not emotions so much as just the tone of the feeling: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. It’s through these activities that we shape the present moment. It’s also …
- Tranquility & Insight Together… Notice where you feel the breathing. We’re talking about that, the breathing process. Where do you feel that? Does it feel comfortable? Does it feel nourishing for the body? If it doesn’t feel nourishing, you can change. You can try longer breathing or shorter, heavier or more shallow, deeper, lighter. Try to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body …
- Do Jhana… Get a sense of what long breathing feels like; what short breathing feels like. Breathe through whichever way feels best. That’s the calming. The insight comes from spreading awareness to fill the whole body and then, as the Buddha said, calming bodily fabrication. This is why it’s important to know what he means by fabrication. It also gives insight into what it …
- Learning from Labor… You have to be on top of what kind of breathing feels good each time you breathe: what kind of feelings you can create by the way you breathe, different feelings of pleasure in different parts of the body. When you have a feeling of pleasure, how do you spread it around? Think of the image of the bathman kneading water through the dough …
- A Recipe for Jhana… And be sensitive to how comfortable the breathing feels. What kind of breathing feels best right now? The best way to answer that question is to allow yourself to breathe in different ways for a while. Think, “long breathing,” and see what happens. Then you can think, “shorter breathing,” to see how that feels, and decide which one you prefer. You can think “deeper …
- A Room of Your Own… But if you can learn how to be gentle and perceptive with the comfortable spots, then the uncomfortable spots will feel less threatened by your attention and they can begin to open up. They, too, can be brought into the compass of the sense of ease, feeling at home in the body. Some of your inner barriers begin to break down. One of the …
- Fixing the Present… He also talks about calming mental fabrication, looking at the feelings you have—and “feelings” here doesn’t mean emotions, it means feeling tones: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain—and looking at your perceptions, the images running around in your mind, giving rise to greed, anger and delusion, fear, panic, whatever. You want to calm both the feelings and the perceptions. And a …
- A Good Place to Stay… Notice where you feel it, and notice how it feels. If it feels comfortable, stick with that rhythm of breathing. If it doesn’t feel comfortable, you can change. You can try a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. See how that feels. See if it feels nourishing and refreshing. And as long as it does, keep it up. When it …
- Negative Emotions… Why does it feel lust? Why does it feel attachment for this?—a thing that really doesn’t deserve lust, or really doesn’t deserve attachment. The same goes for anger. Try to feel compassion for yourself, compassion for the other person, compassion for the situation, so that you can let go of the object and turn around and look at the state in …
- Skillful Selfing… So with the breath, this means remembering to be sensitive to how the breathing feels in the body. The Buddha doesn’t say that you have to focus on the breath in any particular spot. You can focus anywhere in the body where the sensation of breathing feels good, or at least feels prominent and you can follow it carefully, clearly, knowing that “Now …
- Load next page...
