Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 147
  2. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … In the same way, you get the breath just right, and then you think of ways of spreading that just-right feeling throughout the body to give the mind a good place to stay. And don’t throw it away when you leave the meditation. You’ve got to take it with you. We tend to blame the world outside for our lapses: There … 
  3. Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out
     … I know a lot of talented people who basically phone it in, feeling that they’re good enough, so they don’t have to put much effort into it. But they don’t learn anything. You have to regard your life as a skill because, as with any skill, if you do it poorly, the results come out poorly, and the results can have … 
  4. Visakha Puja
     … There has to come a point where you get disenchanted with the way you identify with your body, the way you identify with your feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, even your sensory consciousness, seeing that these things are inconstant. You can’t really depend on them. They’re stressful. They can’t provide the true happiness you want. And they’re not-self: They’re … 
  5. Technique & Attitude
     … Some people claim, say, with the precepts, that setting up standards like that is setting yourself up for feelings of inadequacy. But that really misunderstands the whole point of having goals. Can people live without goals? Can people be happy if they know that their goals are low? The only real self esteem you can live with is if you act in ways that … 
  6. The Psychology of Self
     … The psychologist’s term is sublimation, where you learn how to find pleasure some other, more skillful, way, so you’re not just feeling frustrated. In the Buddha’s teaching we don’t have a term for that, but the Buddha does talk about taking delight in being on the path. When you’re generous, think about what a good thing it is to … 
  7. Defiant Like the Buddha
     … With these kinds of things, the Buddha said, “Put them out.” But there’s one negative mind state where he says, “Allow yourself to express it as long as you feel that something is accomplished”—and that’s grief. That one, he says, actually can be converted into something skilful. As he says at one point, it’s because of our suffering that we … 
  8. To Have a Purpose
     … In other words, you take the things that you’ve been holding on to and that have been causing you to suffer—feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs—and you turn them into the path that will take you across. Like right effort: That requires a lot of thinking, a lot of fabricating of your thoughts, because you’re doing this for a purpose. When the … 
  9. We All Start with an Impure Heart
     … Grace is when you feel inclined to do something skillful, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the mind getting in the way, so it becomes very easy to do what’s skillful. As for acts done with dignity, those are the ones where part of the mind wants to do something skillful, and part of the mind wants to do something … 
  10. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … If you cling to them in the right way, they can actually become part of the path—these activities the mind does in terms of feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. This is how we make the path. And we look after it. That’s another aspect of Ajaan Lee’s teachings on not-self. He noted that some people just give up and say … 
  11. The Burning House
    The Burning House May 4, 2016 We focus on the present moment so that we give the mind a sense of feeling at home here. This is the place where you belong. Now, for most of us, we don’t live here. We live in the past, we live in the future, and come running through the present moment just for a moment, like … 
  12. Generosity & Virtue as Skills
     … So when there’s the impulse to kill, even if it’s a case where you feel that you’re in danger or someone you love is in danger, you have to remind yourself that there are other options. Even with something like dealing with the issue of termites: Once you’ve decided to make the vow to yourself that you’re not going … 
  13. Three Levels of Refuge
     … When you find that you’re going to go for the short term, how do you dissuade yourself? When you don’t feel inclined to go for the long term, how are you going to convince yourself that it’s necessary? This is why heedfulness is so important. All too often, you hear that we’re simply learning to open up to our innately … 
  14. Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse
     … He came back one night and said, “You know, the number of people who die and hang around their bodies is really large.” You get the feeling he was probably walking around, sending them off. So you don’t want to hang around. And the best way not to hang around is to think beforehand about what’s going to happen to the body … 
  15. Right Action
     … As the Buddha pointed out, when a hindrance is particularly strong—as when there’s the desire to get engaged in sensual passion, or you’re feeling thoughts of ill will, restlessness, and anxiety—you don’t recognize the fact that those thoughts are unskillful. That’s one of the main problems with the hindrances: They blind you; they get you to see things … 
  16. Practicing Your Scales
     … If we were deprived of that sense of self—and this is why so many of us resist the idea of letting go of that sense of self—we’d feel that we’d be deprived of our potential for pleasure, or of the sense of self that’s experiencing the pleasure. The craving for this kind of identity is called craving for becoming … 
  17. Meaningful Freedom
     … But the fact that people feel directionless, purposeless, and it’s really painful, shows that we instinctively know that we want to have some power over our minds, want to have some power over our lives, and that we’re moving in a positive direction. As the Buddha said, we create our aggregates out of the potentials from the past, for the sake of … 
  18. Trust in the Power of the Mind
     … It’s good that he’s placed his trust in us, and it feels good to have that trust placed in us, but now it’s up to us to live up to that trust.
  19. Large-hearted Goodness
     … learning how to feed off of the sense of well-being that you can create inside as you watch the breath, adjust it here, adjust it there, figuring out what kind of breathing feels good right now. Then, as the needs of the body change, you keep up with them. Think of that sense of well-being spreading through the body. Think of it … 
  20. Sense Restraint
     … As the Buddha said, the aggregates form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness have their pleasant side and their unpleasant side. If they didn’t have the pleasant side, we wouldn’t fall for them. But they do have their pleasures. When the Buddha says that all fabricated things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self—it’s true. But then they have their constant … 
  21. Animals in the Mind
     … You feel like you’re being assaulted. But what’s actually happening is that you’ve opened the door. You’ve created a bridge for these things to come in. You’ve abandoned your space and you’ve left the doors open and actually gone out and dragged a few things into the house, so of course these things are going to wreak a … 
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