Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 142
  2. Maintenance Work
     … It feels really refreshing to be there. Then you make it a game, seeing how quickly you can get there, how often you can get there, what other activities you can be doing at the same time. However — and I don’t want to spoil it for you — there comes a time when this gets boring, too. It’s boring, though, only because you … 
  3. A Rite of Passage
     … A feeling comes in, an emotion comes in—something comes in, and we just take it on without really thinking. So you need to step back and ask questions. Ask the right questions. Right now, as you’re working with the breath, it’s both stepping back—i.e., stepping back from your other thoughts—and asking some questions about the breath. What kind … 
  4. Dethinking Thinking
     … We feel that the pain is there first and the breath comes second. So reverse that. The breath is first. The pain is second. And the breath is something other than pain. It’s a physical element, but pain is something else. It’s that sharpness, that heightened sense of displeasure or discomfort. But once you untangle it from the solidity of the body … 
  5. Defeatism? - Anything But
     … So here, proper form is keeping the mind with the breath; keeping yourself centered here with a sense of wellbeing so that the mind and body feel good together. And then watch. Ask questions. Stick with it. And that way, your desire, instead of getting in the way of the practice—as desire sometimes can do—it gets tempered and becomes a base for … 
  6. Metta Math
     … The man, feeling the warmth, took the blanket off of his own accord—the lesson, of course, being that if you try to force your ideas of what’s right and wrong on other people, they’re just going to hold even more tightly to what they’ve been doing all along. But if you figure out some way to make them want to … 
  7. Timeless Dhamma
     … In other words, what ways of thinking about the breath can give rise to feelings of intense rapture? Thinking of the breath as a quality of the whole body, not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, changes the way you relate to the breathing process and enables you breathe in a way that’s more satisfying throughout the body, throughout … 
  8. The Wisdom of Wising Up
     … It also helps point out things you might notice in the breath, ways you can deal with the breath to help the mind to settle down and feel secure and happy. This can take time, getting the mind and the breath to settle down together. During that period of settling down, the mind can get discouraged and bored. It can find all sorts of … 
  9. Overconfidence & Underconfidence
     … Is there anything in your life where you feel you’re adding a little something, giving a little something of yourself more than you have to? That’s your hope in the practice. You’ve got the quality right there that’s going to push you on, that you can build on. So in looking for positive qualities in yourself, it doesn’t have … 
  10. Defilements at the Door
     … Where’s the craving here? What’s the craving based on? What feelings? What intentions? What acts of attention? When you look at dependent co-arising, you see that the really interesting factors are the ones that come before sensory contact: name and form, or fabrication. What perceptions fuel your greed, anger, and delusion? What intentions fuel it? What ways of paying attention to … 
  11. Something New
     … There are forms, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Out of those five, fabrications covers the widest variety of mental events. It’s the way you talk to yourself. It’s the way you think. It’s your emotions, your world views, your ideas of what you have to do, what you don’t have to do, how other people should be, how other … 
  12. Independent of the World
     … No matter who that person is, no matter what their background, you have to feel sorry for them. So again, you have to learn to think in a way that maintains your own independent goodness. Think of the Buddha himself: Who told him to become Buddha? It was his own aspiration, it was his own independent decision that that was what he wanted to … 
  13. Good for What Purpose?
     … To begin with, it makes it a lot easier to live with the pain and not feel oppressed by it. It doesn’t invade your mind and remain. At the same time, you learn the arbitrary nature of your perceptions. It does get you thinking about the arbitrary nature of your sense of who you are, and of those various stables of selves you … 
  14. The Meaning of Insight
     … So the fox says, “Well, you dig a hole in the ice, then you stick your tail down into the hole, and if you feel anything nibbling at the end of the tail, you pull it out, and there you’ve got your fish.” So the wolf does as he’s told, and the fox gets out of there as fast as he can … 
  15. The Safety of Dualities
     … mind, you begin to see these acts of fabrication—bodily fabrication: breath; verbal fabrication: directed thought and evaluation, in other words, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication: feelings of pleasure or pain, neither pleasure nor pain, and then perceptions, the labels you apply to things. All of these things are actions and they can take you in different directions. Take … 
  16. Slogging Through Difficulties
     … So even if you don’t feel that you’re developing anything else in the practice, you are developing patience, you are developing equanimity. Those are important qualities to master. Then, around those qualities, you want to develop discernment. In other words, if your patience keeps thinking about how long you’ve had to be patient with a particular difficulty or your equanimity is … 
  17. Body & Food
     … What do we normally feel disgust for? Usually things that we’ve been eating, feeding on. Then we realize we don’t want to feed anymore. When you stop feeding, you stop clinging. That’s when there’s an opportunity for the mind to look for a different kind of happiness, a happiness that doesn’t need to feed, doesn’t require a body … 
  18. The Allure of Sensuality
     … Why does the other one feel so horribly betrayed? It’s because their image of themselves, the image of their relationship, is suddenly destroyed, and that’s what they were actually holding on to more than anything else, to compensate for the degradations of their sensuality. So, look into your self-image in the pleasures you go for. Try to see where you’re … 
  19. Momentum Through Restraint
     … Then, to keep the mind from feeling starved, you give it something good to focus on, which is why we work with the breath, trying to make the breath comfortable, trying to make the breath energy interesting in the body, realizing that, if you have any chronic illnesses or chronic pains, you can use the breath energy to help alleviate those illnesses and pains … 
  20. Boring
     … So when you find yourself feeling bored, ask yourself, “Is there some way I could pay closer attention? Is there something going on here that I’m not curious about or not learning how to question, taking too much for granted?” Because that’s a lot of what the problems in the meditation are: things that you just take for granted. They’ve “got … 
  21. The Flamethrowing Mind
     … beings to begin with. But then we apply it in a lot of the wrong places. Think about the process of becoming. It starts out with some pretty unpromising raw materials: feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness—very simple things that are not very lasting. In fact, they’re very ephemeral. Yet we want to create a sense of our identity as a … 
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