Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Work with It… It may be through the way you’re breathing, or the way you’re talking to yourself, or a combination of the perceptions and feelings you have. You may notice that when the mind tends to go for lust, there’s a certain feeling in the body. Even before there are any blatant signs of lust affecting the body, there’s an itchiness in …
- Breathing Easy… It’s like that old Peanuts cartoon where Linus comes up to Lucy and says, “Feel how cold my hands feel.” She says, “Oh yeah, they are cold. But how do you know how cold they are when you’re inside them?” It’s one thing to touch your hands from the outside. It’s another thing to feel the hand from the inside …
- Take Time to Evaluate Your Life… There are other suttas where the Buddha talks about what it means to be mindful about pleasant feelings, what it means to be alert about pleasant feelings, painful feelings, different kinds of pleasant and painful feelings, feelings of the flesh, feelings not of the flesh. He says that there are some that should be encouraged and some that shouldn’t be encouraged: both the …
- Guardian Meditations… And then three, by the perceptions you hold in mind and the feelings you focus on. Perceptions are the mind’s labels for things: what they are, what they mean, what their value is. Feelings here are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. That’s mental fabrication. You’re doing this all the time, whether you’re sitting here meditating …
- Getting Connected Inside… This is one of the reasons why you go through the body section by section to see what feels good in the different parts of the body. What kind of breathing feels good in your abdomen? What kind of breathing feels good in your chest? How about your feet and your legs? It’s more subtle there. The further you get away from the …
- Freedom… Notice how it feels when it comes in, notice how it feels when it goes out. Notice which parts the body are involved in the breathing process, and which ones aren’t. See if it feels comfortable. If it doesn’t feel comfortable, you’re free to change it. You can make the breath longer, shorter, deep, more shallow, heavier, lighter. If you’re …
- Damming & Diverting… What kind of breathing would feel good? Once it feels good, how do you spread that goodness around? How do you maintain that sense of goodness when you’re spreading it? And then in the background, there are the feelings and perceptions: the feeling of ease that comes when the breath feels good and also the perceptions that hold you in place—perceptions of …
- After-work Meditation… Focus on that wherever you feel it. Again, make the emphasis on the spots that feel okay. They may not feel overwhelmingly rapturous or blissful, but the bliss and the rapture come from the areas that are simply okay to begin with. Give them some space. When you give them some space, they can develop in intensity. The body does begin to feel blissful …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… So notice where you feel the breathing in the body, and ask yourself if it feels good. Learn to be a connoisseur of the breath energy in the body, so that you can recognize immediately what feels good, what doesn’t feel good. And you can adjust the breath so it’s just right: not too long, not too short. Just like the porridge …
- Everything Comes Together Right Here… There will also be a perception you hold in mind, an image you hold in mind about the breath, and then the feeling. How does the breath feel right now? Does it feel comfortable? The Buddha talks about perception and feeling as being mental fabrications because of the impact they have on the mind. But they also have an impact on the breath. The …
- Making a Difference… Some people feel embarrassed about this, but it’s based on an important principle. You can’t feel goodwill for other people if you can’t feel goodwill for yourself. This is where it has to start. Once you remind yourself of your desire for happiness—and that desire underlies all your actions—that puts the meditation in perspective. Because the question is asked …
- Allies… You find a spot in the body where you feel comfortable, where it feels easy to stay focused, where it feels natural to stay focused. Then try to find a sense of well-being, a physical sense of ease and pleasure there, using the breath. Sometimes this means allowing the breath to be very subtle, sometimes stronger, but try to find a rhythm and …
- The Fetter of Perceptions… So we have to question our perceptions, even about our own bodies, about our own feelings. There’s an of-course-ness to them: This is the way we’ve interpreted them all along and it’s worked perfectly fine. But for the purpose of gaining some detachment from the body and detachment from our physical feelings, maybe we need other perceptions. Maybe we …
- Breath Meditation: Four Sets of Tools… Maybe it’s with the feelings in the body. Maybe there are pains that are distracting you. In that case, the Buddha says to focus on the feelings you can create with the breath, particularly comfortable feelings: feelings of ease and pleasure, feelings of rapture or refreshment. What way of breathing would feel pleasant right now? Focus on the aspect of the breathing that …
- Issues of Control… Ask the body, “What would feel good right now? Where would it feel good for the breath to come in?” This is where it’s good to expand your imagination. We have certain cartoon ideas of what we should feel as the breath comes in and where it comes in, which muscles in the body will be doing the work. When we sit here …
- Doing Aggregates… There’s usually a feeling. When you’re here with the concentration, you’re adding the form of the body as an anchor. But still, there’s also feeling and perception, fabrication, and consciousness. So everything you need to understand is right here. You’re getting practice in watching it in action, and that’s how we begin to comprehend the problem of suffering …
- A Path of Aggregates… Then there’s feeling: the feeling of hunger that drives us to look for food, and the feeling of satisfaction and pleasure that comes when we’ve had enough to eat. Of course, that will change to hunger again, so you have to find more food. But it’s these feelings that drive us: feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Then there …
- Samatha, Vipassanā, Jhāna… Where is the form, i.e., the breath? Where is the feeling? The feeling of ease. Where is the perception? The mental image you use to hold the mind with the breath. Where is the fabrication? The intention to hold things here. And the consciousness, the awareness of what’s going on. As you get better and better at concentration, you can sort these …
- Discernment Is in the Details… Does the breath feel comfortable? Where does it feel comfortable? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what can you do to change? Do you change the rhythm of the breathing, the depth, the heaviness of the breath? Do you change your concept or perception of the breath? If you feel that you have to pull the breath in through some tiny nasal passages that …
- Imagine… The body feels very still, but around the edges there’s a kind of effortless vapor that you feel with the in-and-out breathing. Then after a while even that stops and everything is perfectly still. All of this comes from creating that spot in the body where it feels good to stay focused. Then learning how to maintain it. Then inspecting it …
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