Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 140
  2. A Good Path to Be On
     … The power of your intentions gives meaning to acts of generosity, gives meaning to feelings of gratitude. These are the things that make the human realm livable. Yet the way the Buddha explored teaching on karma goes beyond that. He says you can develop the skills of virtue, concentration, and discernment so that they can lead to total freedom. Think about that. Whenever you … 
  3. The Human Condition
     … You may feel that you’ve earned it, but if the world gives it, the world can take it away. Instead of taking these things personally, you use the gains, you use the status, for whatever purposes you find skillful. When you lose these things, you can learn lessons. You can turn loss to a useful purpose as well. At the very least, you … 
  4. Dhamma Is a Quality of the Heart
     … He called it the highest happiness, but he said that it wasn’t a feeling of happiness, so it doesn’t fall under the aggregates. What that means, he doesn’t say. He also said that it was a kind of consciousness, a consciousness without surface, outside of space and time. He never explained how that consciousness was related to the consciousness in the … 
  5. Taking a Stance
     … Raṭṭhapāla says, “Okay, even though they’re your courtiers, can you order them to take some of the pain of the illness and share it out, so you don’t have to feel so much pain?” The king says, “No, I’ve got to experience that pain alone.” That’s what is meant by “the world offers no shelter.” “The world has nothing of … 
  6. Skills Needed at Death
     … the way you fabricate the in-and-out breath, the way you fabricate your thoughts, the way you fabricate your perceptions and feelings. Try to be as really clear as possible around these things. In particular, the perceptions: One of the points that the forest ajaans make again and again is that if you want to understand all five aggregates, get so that you … 
  7. Faith
     … I asked her, “What would you like to hear tonight?” And she said, “I’d like to hear a talk on faith.” And something inside me had a sinking feeling because I knew everybody else in the room was not going to want to hear about faith. But I posed the question at the beginning of the talk, “I’d like to see a … 
  8. Some Assembly Required
     … Things come up from the past, and as the Buddha said, we take these potentials and shape them into forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—for a purpose. Our primary purpose is simply to have these kinds of experiences so that we can then use them, to get some pleasure out of them. That means that our experience is purposeful. We’re not just … 
  9. Help Others, Help Yourself
     … And the suffering we feel, of course, is inside. Sometimes you just can’t get into somebody else, to what’s going on inside them, either because they’ve put up a wall or because they’re getting to that stage in life where they’re just not able to register things. There was a time when I was in France and I had … 
  10. Fear of Death
     … You feel more comfortable not latched on to the body. It’s in this way that you prepare yourself. It’s what the ajaans are fond of saying: When we practice meditation, we’re practicing how to die well. The skills we’ll need at that point—the skills of being mindful, learning how not to go for distractions, learning how to stay firm … 
  11. Shame & Acceptance
     … We also have to notice, “What are we doing right now to shape this experience, and how can that shaping activity be changed?” We have to remind ourselves, “What lessons have we learned that can help us shape experience in the most skillful way?” The different teachings on mindfulness give us a framework—either in terms of the body, or our feelings, mind-states … 
  12. The Meaning of Happiness
     … So if you have that feeling around the word “happiness,” remember that sukha covers a lot of other things as well. The Buddha himself said that another word for happiness is acts of merit. Merit is another one of those words we have trouble with—it sounds like merit badges and Brownie points—but what he’s saying is that happiness lies in the … 
  13. Stay Centered
     … Sometimes you feel committed to finish the sentence, to see where it’s going. But then, at the end of the hour, when the bell rings, you just drop the meditation without any sense that you’ve got to tie it up nicely first. That tells you something about your priorities. The meditation is something you throw away, which is not the attitude you … 
  14. The Good We Already Have
     … It will seem more and more natural to breathe in a way that feels comfortable coming in, going out. That way, you take a quality already there and make the most of it, simply by your continued attention. Other good qualities both in body and mind can develop in the same way—just by focusing your attention on them, giving them the right chance … 
  15. Intelligent Design
     … They’ve noticed how people immediately after a catastrophe feel a bizarre sense of euphoria. They develop a sense of common purpose as they drop their normal concerns and band together to rebuild, to recover. Then, after a while, once things get back to normal again, everybody goes back to their old ways. As one researcher pointed out, right after a catastrophe there’s … 
  16. At the Door of the Cage
     … Normally the mind will not incline to the Deathless unless it feels that that’s the only way out. Otherwise it’s always going to find some other place to go, some other corner to hide in. So you need to remember that the teachings on, say, the three characteristics — inconstancy, stress, and not-self — are part of a course of training, and that … 
  17. Intelligent Restraint
     … Ask yourself, where are those bones right now? Do you feel any tension around them? If you do, relax it. Breathe in and breathe out, in a way that doesn’t start the tension back up again, and then move onto the next joint in the fingers, and the next. The bones in the palms in the hands, the wrists, up the arms. Then … 
  18. Anybody Home?
     … form, feelings, perceptions, mental fabrications, acts of consciousness coming and going, coming and going. They’ve been coming and going in all kinds of zigzags. You want to learn how to see that they’re really not worth getting involved with. He represents this by the little children suddenly getting sick and tired of their mud houses, realizing they’re nothing but mud, and … 
  19. Death Is Normal
     … If it doesn’t feel so good, you can make it shorter. You can try deep breathing, shallow breathing, heavy, light—all kinds of ways of adjusting your breath. As you’re adjusting the breath, you’re in the present moment. Your mind is focused here. Anything else that comes up at the moment, you can just let it pass, let it pass. You … 
  20. Today Is Better than Yesterday
     … Everything seems to be kind of old, and you’re not expecting too much anymore, so you don’t feel all that encouraged to put in much effort or to pay a lot of attention. That cynical attitude is one you’ve got to put aside. You’ve got this breath right here, right now: How can you make the most of it? And … 
  21. A Confident Ego
     … And if you have the wrong set of shoulds in your mind, a wrong set of obligations that you feel, they can wear you down. On the other hand, if your wants take over, they have no rhyme or reason at all, and they can destroy your life. So you have to figure out some way to negotiate between the two. This is the … 
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