Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Strong Through Admirable Friendship… You can’t say No to them; they’re your true feelings about things. These voices make you not want to change. So, your desires have their reasons. Sometimes they’re pretty devious, which is why they want to pretend that they’re not doing anything at all. It’s like the people who claim there’s no global warming, but they go up …
- Strength in Humor… If you feel nourished inside, it’s a lot easier to deal with the craziness in the world. You don’t get sucked into it out of weakness or out of the sense that “things aren’t going the way I want, so I’m just going to lash out and give up.” That kind of attitude accomplishes nothing. But if you don’t …
- Strength Training… You create feelings of ease of the breath, you perceive the breath energy as filling the body, you direct your thoughts and evaluate the breath —that’s fabrication—and you’re aware of all this. You’re taking these five aggregates and turning them into the path. That’s what you learn when you start reading the Buddha’s teachings. It opens your awareness …
- Mastery… As long as you find that you can control things like form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness—the five aggregates—you do exert control over them. You do develop a sense of self around them on the path: the self as its own mainstay, the self as its governing principle. But you try to develop it, not in the sense of trying to …
- Getting Yourself… They can do it, so why can’t I?” That reflection is useful when you’re feeling inadequate, nothing seems to work, and you start getting down on yourself. Reflect on the fact that there are other human beings out there a lot worse off than you are. There have been people in the past who were a lot worse off than you are …
- Maybe the Buddha Knew Something… Human society was all about taming wilderness, with a feeling that wilderness could take over at any time. So the general value was very much against wilderness and this extended from the cities out into the villages. Still, Ajaan Lee said to himself, the Buddha said it’s good for the practice. So he was willing to put his preconceived notions aside and give …
- The Unity of the Path… As the Buddha says, you keep the body in and of itself in mind, or feelings in and of themselves, mind states, or mental qualities in and of themselves. You keep those things in mind. Then you bring the qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Mindfulness is the act of keeping in mind. Alertness is actually watching what you’re doing. Ardency is the …
- Remembering Ajaan Fuang… How about when he was alive, anything amazing then?” I said, “What I thought was amazing was that even though he was Thai and I was a Westerner, during my time with him I never had the feeling that that was a barrier between us. The communication was heart to heart. Even though I had to learn Thai ways of doing things, still I …
- The Triple Training… There has to be a certain amount of insight into how you’re fabricating your mind-states—the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you use, the feelings you focus on—if you want the mind to settle down. If you don’t see these things happening in the present moment, it’s going to be really hard for the mind to settle …
- The Economy of Goodness… So breathe in a way that feels good, deep down inside. Think of the breath as a whole-body process. It goes through all the nerves in the nervous system, all the vessels in the circulatory system—out to the tips of the fingers, out to the tips of the toes. You have to think of yourself not sitting here looking at the breath …
- Recollection of the Buddha… And he had to feel his way. We have the advantage of having his example, so we should think about how fortunate we are to have that example, and what it says about us, that this is a potential that we have: We can be that true. We can be that dedicated. And happy. You say, “I look at myself, and the Buddha’s …
- Worldly Narratives… People with wealth who suddenly feel their wealth is slipping out of their grasp, and the question is: What did they do to get the wealth to begin with? And, what are they going to do in order to maintain it? Sometimes you can start stooping to some pretty low things. The same goes with power and all the other delusions that we put …
- The Graduated Discourse… So it’s not that he’s denying the fact of the pleasures, but as he says, it’s because of the pleasures of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrication, and consciousness that we’re stuck on them—that’s the problem. But still, he wants people to have a sense that, yes, he does appreciate that there are pleasures in life. Then, when he gets …
- Rivers of Craving… If you feel really desperate at that point, you can just grab anything. The third kind of craving is basically craving to be snuffed out. You’ve been through a lot of pain; you look back on your life and it’s been pretty miserable. I have a student who gained a memory of ten past lives one time, and at the end of …
- Unskillful Thinking… Can you feel it? So when you’re sitting around doing nothing, you don’t have to do nothing, you can watch your breath, you can play with the breath, you can learn about the breath. At the same time, you can play with sidestepping your thoughts. In this way, you can enjoy the present moment and develop important skills at the same time …
- Forgiveness… Many of us in the West have a feeling that we’ve picked up from the culture, that there’s a plan for everything: The universe had a beginning point, it’s going to have an end point, there’s a story, and it’s going to come to closure. Now there are different ideas about what exactly that story is and where it …
- Clearing a Space… When I was staying in Thailand with Ajaan Fuang, I’d feel frustrated when he’d say, “Use your pañña.” That’s the Pali and Thai word for discernment. That was back in the days when the only translation I knew for pañña was wisdom, and I kept thinking, “How am I going to use my wisdom when I don’t have any?” But …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… On the one hand, if you’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, other people will feel a good energy coming from you. And then, two, you’ll learn how to trust yourself more. If you do genuinely have goodwill for other people, even difficult people, then you’re less likely to act in unskillful ways around them. This means that you can trust yourself more …
- Nuclear Thinking… The way she spoke to him gave my brother the feeling that she was on his side. She knew he wanted to have some fun and she was showing him how to do it in a harmless way. Mindfulness and alertness are like teachers of the mind, and you’ve got to train them to be sharp and wise. When alert mindfulness fills the …
- Hindrances to the Heightened Mind… Just because something comes up in the mind, they make us feel that we’re committed, that we have to think the thought through. There’s also the problem where one part of the mind says, “Well, as long as I’m trying to get the mind into concentration, I can’t let there be any thoughts at all in the mind,” and so …
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