Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 151
  2. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … The awakening itself isn’t equanimity—it’s the highest happiness—but when you reflect on your mind afterward, seeing that it is now freed of greed, aversion, and delusion, you can either feel joy, rapture, or equanimity. That kind of equanimity, you don’t create. It just happens. The other two kinds of equanimity you have to fabricate. Notice that the first one … 
  3. Using Your Many Minds
     … form feeling, perception, mental fabrications, consciousness. They’re all there in the concentration. When you learn how to let go of the most subtle levels, then you’re totally free. But you can do this only if you’ve mastered them. It’s not the case where you say, “Well I’ve had a taste of concentration, so now I’m beyond that, I … 
  4. Honest & Observant
     … While you’re with the breath, try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels, because that sensitivity is what’s going to develop into discernment. After all, discernment isn’t just a matter of imposing the Buddha’s concepts on your mind. You have to be sensitive to what you’re actually doing and the results you’re actually getting … 
  5. Antidotes for Clinging
     … We feed on the form of the body, we feed on feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and sensory consciousness. When these things are pleasant, they’re not too heavy. But they can turn around and turn unpleasant very quickly. They gobble us up, for we’ve opened the way for them to get to us. Once you start clinging to the good ones, you start … 
  6. To Escape the Prison of Time
     … After all, where’s the body you had twenty years ago, ten years ago? Where are your feelings? You may have memories of the past, but they’re very much subject to change, and can often be unreliable. You look within time and you can find very little solidity, very little opportunity to settle in and say, “Okay, this is a good safe place … 
  7. Staying Power
     … This is why it’s important to have this third alternative, which is first to breathe through any tension that’s built up in the body around the anger, because that’s the part that makes the anger unbearable—that physical, visceral sense of tension, tightness, blockage in the body that feels wrong. That’s what makes the anger unbearable. Thoughts on their own … 
  8. Abandoning & Developing
     … It’s a state of mind where you can actually look more clearly at what needs to be done, what can be done, without a neurotic need to change things the way you think they should be just for the sake of changing, or for the sake of feeling good about yourself. You’ve already got a sense of well-being inside, which allows … 
  9. In Line with the Truth
     … Each time you come back, reward yourself with a good, comfortable breath, something that feels really good deep down inside. If there’s any part of the body that seems to be deprived of breath energy, think of opening it up and the breath penetrating in, so that you can touch the Dhamma with the body. That’s an expression the Buddha uses to … 
  10. Habits of Perception
     … See things within the frame of body, feelings, mind states, or mental qualities, in and of themselves. Make those your frames of reference — as when you’re dealing with the breath right now: just the breath coming in, going out. In this context, thoughts have meaning only to the extent that they pull you away from the breath or don’t pull you away … 
  11. A Well-Thatched Roof
     … Once you learn how to feel dispassion for those things, that’s when you’ve really comprehended stress. The pleasure of concentration is what allows you to look at pain to the point of comprehending it. So the important point with regard to all these dhammas of the world is learning how to use them. They do have their uses, as long as you … 
  12. Protection Through Mindfulness Practice
     … What was the first sensation in the body? What was the first little thought in the mind?—the little whisper of thought that suggested that lust might be a good antidote for whatever sense of irritation you’re feeling, or that anger would be an appropriate response for what someone’s done. And how does that work its way through your inner bureaucracy?—influencing … 
  13. Where Perceptions Can Take You
     … When something comes up in the mind—perception, feeling, thought construct—ask yourself, “What is this for? Where does this lead?” Have a clear idea that it can lead in these different directions: Either it can pull you down, or it can stabilize the mind, or it can lead the mind to even more distinctive levels of being stable, or it can take you … 
  14. Avoidance
     … Throughout Asia there’s a feeling that skills are have a certain dignity, and that the teacher’s the one who gets to choose who gets to study the skill. The teacher has to be impressed by the student’s dedication. That’s part of the reason for that tradition of sitting outside overnight. At the same time, going through that experience the student … 
  15. Stake Out
     … intention, attention, perception, feeling, directed thought, evaluation, and even the way you breathe. If you take these things simply as events in and of themselves, you begin to see there’s not much there. That’s the level that the Buddha wants you to operate on, before these things have a chance to become a state of becoming, because as you get a sense … 
  16. Life in the Context of the Practice
     … That enables you to step back from your problems so that you can settle down and meditate properly, realizing that whatever your issues are, the suffering that you feel from them comes from your own craving, comes from your own clinging. And whatever issues will come up in the course of the day, you don’t know what they’ll be, but you do … 
  17. Doing the Right Thing
     … When you can breathe in a way that feels good and you have a sense of well-being at the different breath centers in the body, that gives you a lot more nourishment so that you’re not hungry all the time. A lot of the reason we do stupid things is because we want a quick fix right now. We can’t wait … 
  18. Alighting on the Dhamma
     … What’s the perception here? What’s the thought construct? What’s the feeling here? And then seeing these activities as things worthy of dispassion. Now, you don’t want to jump to dispassion too quickly. If you do it too quickly, you lose the foundation in concentration you need in order help pry away your attachments to other things. In fact, while you … 
  19. Dhamma Warrior
     … It’s getting a feel for skills by putting them into practice in difficult situations, situations that challenge you and require a sense of balance, a sense of circumspection. What are some of the other things you need to pick up in these situations? Well, for one, a sense of yourself. What are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are you capable of … 
  20. How to Be Alone
     … We sometimes feel embarrassed to congratulate ourselves on how things are going, but that embarrassment doesn’t help at all. Recognizing when the meditation is going well and learning how to appreciate when it’s going well will give you a reference point. When you start getting discouraged about the whole process, you can remember that there were times when it went well. And … 
  21. Question Your Defilements
     … Anybody would be attracted by that.” Or there’s somebody you’re really angry at: “Of course, that person has done something that anybody in his or her right mind would be angry about.” When you feel sleepy, “Oh, it’s a sign the body really needs to rest.” When you’re anxious, the things you’re worried about really are worrisome. The things … 
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