Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 148
  2. Skills to Make a Difference
     … Try to be really sensitive to how the breath feels. He says it’s like sifting flour to make a cake or sifting sand to use to make clay tiles. If your sifter is coarse, you’re going to get coarse sand, and the tiles will have low quality. But if you have a fine sifter, then you get better sand, better tiles. In … 
  3. Part V : Finding a Teacher
     … It could be clinging, it could be craving, it could be feeling, intention, attention, verbal fabrication, mental fabrication, or bodily fabrication like the breath. When you think about dependent co-arising and all the various ways that suffering and stress can arise in the mind, it’s useful to know that whatever the factor that’s coming or contributing to that, all you have … 
  4. Actualizing Your Potentials
     … Your awareness can step back and look at it, realizing that the perceptions and feelings of that world, if you pull them into the mind, can cause you to suffer. But you don’t have to pull them into the mind. When you keep that sense of distance, you can deal with setbacks a lot more effectively, remembering that the most important thing is … 
  5. Multi-Dimensional Dhamma
     … The passion that we feel for the objects of the senses, including objects of the mind, is the fetter that keeps us tied. The objects themselves don’t tie us down. We’re the ones who latch on to them, and our clinging is what keeps us trapped. This fact is reflected in the image the Buddha uses to talk about passion, the way … 
  6. Active Truth
     … And the only way you can do that is to put the mind in a position where it doesn’t feel threatened by the stress. That’s what the path is for — and particularly the heart of the path: Right Concentration, putting the mind in a state of ease, even rapture, focused on one thing. This gives the mind a sense of power, a … 
  7. To Delight in the Path
     … That’s when you really feel safe. That’s the main safety in life—when you know you’re not going to do anything harmful. Which means, of course, that the only dangers you have to watch out for are the tendencies the mind still has where it could do something harmful to others, could do something unskillful. But you delight in the fact … 
  8. Preparing to Meditate
     … So, when the Buddha teaches us to reflect on our virtues and reflect on our generosity as a way of bringing the mind to a state where it feels confident in itself so that it can settle down, you’ve got to have some generous actions, you’ve got to have some virtuous actions to reflect on. You can’t just make them up … 
  9. Mindfulness Defined
     … So you do what you can to make the breath a place where you can stay concentrated, where the mind can feel more and more at home. In this way, evaluation is an important part of the practice: getting a sense of what’s pleasing to the mind, and adjusting things so that it’s happy to settle down. You can play with the … 
  10. The Pursuit of Excellence
     … It feels really, really good. But you also realize that in order to maintain that pleasure, that sense of stillness, you have to work hard. It requires an unending effort. When that fact hits you, that’s when you think: “Maybe something unfabricated would be better.” When the opening to the unfabricated comes, you go for it, and you realize: It is much better … 
  11. Train Hopping
     … As soon as you feel solid and secure in that spot, then you can spread your awareness to fill the whole body. This is useful in a lot of ways. To begin with, the mind doesn’t like to be constricted. This is one of the reasons it likes to hop trains. If it stays with one train of thought for a while, that … 
  12. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … The fool is the person who doesn’t recognize his foolishness, who feels that only the subtle, abstract teachings are good enough for him. If you remember that wisdom begins with your willingness to recognize your foolishness, that teaching will carry you far. Ajaan Lee once made the comment that we tend to confuse things. We think the teachings that seem basic and simple … 
  13. Birth Is Suffering
     … We get hands-on experience with bodily fabrication in the breath, verbal fabrication in the way we talk to ourselves, and then mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—seeing how we put these things together to create a state of concentration. Then, as the concentration deepens, some of them will peel off. That’s how you see that they are distinct. The first one that … 
  14. Working Hypotheses
     … To begin with, there’s the need to adjust the breath so that it feels just right. But when it gets just right, you don’t have to adjust it anymore and then you just allow your awareness to settle in and be one with the breath. This gives rise to a strong sense of energy. The Pali term is rapture, pīti, which can … 
  15. Paying Off Your Debts
     … I know some people who feel that after they’ve made a fair amount of merit and a fair amount of progress in their meditation, they can afford to be a little sloppy. After all, they’ve got a lot of money in the bank. They can afford to squander a little bit here and there. But you never know how much money there … 
  16. Standing Outside Your Thoughts
     … Think about the sense of disgust that that young person would feel. Okay, you should try to develop that same disgust for your thoughts. In this case, you look at yourself as being fastidious. You don’t want to get involved in things that are dirty or beneath you. Think of your thoughts of anger or lust as dead snakes, dead dogs. In this … 
  17. Therapy for the Mind
     … the little blips of perceptions or feelings that are used to justify going with a particular defilement—your lizard brain’s contribution to the whole conversation. The lizard brain may not be articulate, but it is powerful. Still, there will be a conversation going on in the mind. You have to learn how to run that conversation in such a way that you’re … 
  18. Who Are You Trying to Please?
     … As you look for happiness that’s really long-term, you inevitably find that it has to be a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody else, partly because it just doesn’t feel right harming other people, and secondly, because on a purely pragmatic basis, long-term happiness can last only if it’s not harming anyone else. That blurs the distinction between your … 
  19. Why the Breath
     … They do this partly because of the familiarity—they feel better doing something they’re familiar with—and partly because they haven’t really examined what they’re doing, and what the results are, and how they might be improved. We’ve talked many times about the Buddha’s instructions to his son Rahula: Before you do something, look at your intention and ask … 
  20. Perfection in an Imperfect World
     … This is what happens when you push yourself a little bit more than you would feel comfortable with. You stick with it, stick with it, stick with it, and if you look for it, you’re going to find something in there—a resource you didn’t realize you had. So learn to perceive the fact that you have more inside of you than … 
  21. Your Highest Aspiration
     … If you look at these things carefully, you begin to realize that the drawbacks way outweigh the advantages, especially when you’re coming from a feeling of fullness, well-being. The simple stress that comes from that craving and clinging becomes more and more apparent. You come to realize that it’s not really necessary. We used to think that to be happy we … 
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