Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Questioning & Acceptance… And you go through the feelings and the perceptions and the thought fabrications and the consciousness that’s aware of all these things. You examine each of these things in the same way. Even when there seems to be just a very bright, bright awareness, you still have to question it: Is there any inconstancy in this awareness? And sometimes the concentration can be …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… You’ve got to feed the mind on good concentration, a sense of well-being that comes simply from allowing the mind to be still, with your awareness filling the whole body, with a sense of ease where the breath feels good coming in, going out, and gets more and more refined, more and more refined as the mind grows more and more still …
- Fighting Attitude… With sensual desire, you want to focus on the drawbacks of whatever it is you’re feeling attracted to. Actually, the object itself may not have all those drawbacks but the fact of being hooked on that object: That has a lot of drawbacks. But one of the ways of helping get you unhooked is to look to the negative side of whatever the …
- Shoulds & Ideals… Just focus on the question of how you can stay with the breath in a way that feels really good, that enables you to stay even longer and more easily. That’s an area you want to develop. You want to think about that. It’s not that meditation doesn’t involve thought. It does involve certain kind of thinking, but thinking focused on …
- Skills for Awakening… This is what makes it difficult, because sometimes you feel that you’re getting rid of part of yourself, like cutting off your own arm. You’re passing judgment on part of yourself. But that’s what the analysis of qualities is all about: passing judgment wisely. You’re passing judgment on your past actions and sometimes your present habits. But you have to …
- Training for Dispassion… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness.” Then the next question those people would ask would be, “Why? For what purpose?” The answer is that if you haven’t abandoned desire and passion for those things, then when they change, there’s going to be sorrow and lamentation. But if you have abandoned desire and passion, then when those things change there won’t be any …
- An Auspicious Night… by the way we breathe, the way we talk to ourselves, the perceptions and feelings we focus on. You want to be really clear about, one, the fact that you are doing this; and two, the question of how well you’re doing this. You want to bring more and more awareness to this process, because those fabrications—if they’re done in ignorance …
- Discipline… Some of the things he did, in terms of the effort he put forth, were really strong—stronger than you might feel you’re up to. But at least you know that he wasn’t born ready to be an arahant right away. Reading about how he overcame his weakness, then when you can see unskillful thoughts in your mind, you don’t just …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… How they feel about it is their business, but you have to look at your own mind. Are the thoughts that you dwell on obscuring the mind, making it dark, making it hard to see things clearly? That’s one of the problems with the hindrances: They deceive you. When sensual desire comes in, there’s a part of the mind that wants to …
- Toughen & Tenderize the Mind… The more you have confidence and conviction that there is a way out and there’s a solution, the more you’ll be willing to open up to see—because if part of the mind feels there’s no way out, then you just don’t want to think about it and you start closing things off. It’s in this way that the …
- An Environment for Practice… What’s the problem? Which part of your mind feels constrained by the rule? None of the rules get in the way of nibbana, but a lot them get in the way of your particular defilements. This is one of the best ways to see them. This applies not only for the monks’ rules, but also for the five precepts. They’re not general …
- Audacious & Undaunted… We cling to our feelings. We cling to our perceptions, our thought constructs, our consciousness. And in that clinging is the suffering. Why do we cling? We cling because of craving. If you can comprehend the suffering to the point where you go beyond any passion, aversion, and delusion around it, and if you can abandon the craving, that’s the end of suffering …
- The Inner Monitor… We’ve learned to interpret those feelings as a need to get the anger out of our system. But part of us may also know that if we get it out of our system, it’s going to cause a lot of trouble, so we bottle it up. But that doesn’t help either. So you want to tap into your good breath energy …
- Watching Over Time… How does the breath feel? How is your ability of the mind to stay with the breath? Can it not stay with the breath because the mind is too antsy, or because its energy level isn’t up to staying with the breath? That’s a good measure right there. Then you figure out different ways of breathing, and also different ways of relating …
- Stay Principled… So when a situation comes up that you think might cause you to feel tempted to abandon the path, you’ve got to think it through: “Okay, what exactly am I afraid of here? Which is the greater fear? Which is the greater danger?” In some cases you’ll be able to figure out that there are more skillful alternatives that don’t cause …
- Prepare to Die… So what is that you really want to hold on to? What is there that’s so magical and wonderful about it? This contemplation is not to make you feel bad about your body image. It’s for making you realize there’s really nothing here or in any human body that’s worth getting all worked up about. Nobody in the world has …
- A Wilderness Mind at Home… We feel we get a lot done by anger, but actually the anger is not a help. I mean, seeing wrongs that have to be righted, and doing what you can to right them, is one thing. Getting all tied up in anger over them, though, is something else. It’s no help, because you start miscalculating the effect of your thoughts, words, and …
- Cleaning up Your Personal Environment… The real suffering is the fact that you’re holding on not only to your body, but also to your feelings and your perceptions, your thought constructs, even to your active consciousness. All those are things: If you hold on to them, if you cling to them, you’re going to suffer. Now, the word holding on doesn’t mean your mind has a …
- A Sense of Direction… At the very least you don’t want to feel ill will for them. You don’t think about how much you want them to suffer, because you don’t gain anything from their suffering. In fact, the more they suffer, the more unskillfully they’ll probably behave. So for your own well-being and the well-being of others, it’s good to …
- Ask the Right Questions… dealing with fabrications. The Buddha talks about becoming sensitive to the bodily fabrication, i.e., the in-and-out breath, allowing it to grow calm. And then there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. How do these to grow calm? That’s part of getting the mind to settle down. But this time you go back to the same issue, and the question now …
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