Search results for: "Perception"

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  2. Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts
     … What does it actually feel like? You begin to notice that certain perceptions of the breath have an impact on how you actually feel the breath. Try to choose a perception that opens your awareness to breath coming in from all directions—not just through the nose, but also through the eyes, the ears, in from the back of the head, down from the … 
  3. Forest Bathing
     … feelings and perceptions. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. You identify this as this and that as that. Sometimes your perceptions are accurate; sometimes they’re not. Sometimes even when they’re accurate, they lead to more greed, aversion, and delusion. What we’re trying to find are perceptions that are actually accurate and conducive to getting the mind past suffering, to … 
  4. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … You can just be with the perception of breath filling the body. Be very careful not to let go of that perception. Otherwise, you start wallowing in the sense of ease. You lose your focus, and nothing gets developed. But if you stay with your one object, you begin to see the movements of the mind around that. This is where insight comes in … 
  5. In Alignment
     … So you’ve got to get everything ready, because if you’re staying in the formless states, it’s simply the perception that keeps you there. And until you can maintain a perception so that it’s totally seamless and totally constant, you’re not ready. Now, while you’re working with the breath, you’ve got the breath here. When it comes in … 
  6. Body Contemplation
     … What to do now? He came to see that the issue was with the perception of attractive and the perception of unattractive, and the desires behind those perceptions: the fact that we want to lie to ourselves. Look into that desire, right there, because that’s the key to why we keep on suffering. We cling to the things that make us suffer, and … 
  7. Cutting Roads
     … When you keep that perception in mind—an energy center with energy flowing from that center in a way that feels good, feels nourishing—then you just learn how to maintain that perception. Over time, that perception will gain more and more staying power, because the breath gets infused with that association. You tend to associate that level of energy, that type of energy … 
  8. Mindful & Grateful for Lessons in Freedom
     … Then there’s mental fabrication, your perceptions and your feelings. You have more room for creating feelings in the body and in the mind than you might have thought. The present moment is not just a given. The way you breathe and the way you perceive the breath will have an effect on how you feel it. So what kind of perceptions can you … 
  9. Building a Home for the Mind
     … If there’s a pain in one part of the body and the more you focus on it, the more it seems to get worse, then ask yourself, “What is my perception adding to the pain? Can I think about the pain using other perceptions?” So the evaluation here evaluates both the breath and the other physical aspects of the body, and it evaluates … 
  10. How We Cling
     … They’re actually just activities—perceptions, thought constructs, or feelings—and they’re pretty ephemeral. The purpose of meditation is to get you more directly acquainted with these activities in a hand-on way. As you’re focusing here on the breath, the breath is form. You’re trying to create a feeling of pleasure. You do that by holding certain perceptions in mind … 
  11. Inconstancy
     … You’ve found something that doesn’t have to push against the perceptions of inconstancy, because it’s constant by nature. This is what those three perceptions are for, as a measuring stick. When you arrive at something in the meditation that seems really good, you can ask yourself, “Is this really constant?” You have to watch it carefully because sometimes the higher levels … 
  12. Question Your Actions
     … This relates to the next of the aggregates, which is perception. What are the perceptions you’re carrying around, the images you have in the back of your mind? When someone does something, and you ask them, “Why do you always do that?” actually, they’re not always doing it. It comes and goes and comes and goes, but there’s a perception in … 
  13. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … Then you’ve got feeling and perception. Feeling means feeling tone, like pleasure and pain, or neutral feelings of neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions are the labels you place on things, saying this is this and that is that. Then there’s fabrication – the way the mind puts together ideas out of its perceptions, comments on things, asks questions about things, and gives answers … 
  14. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … The third type of fabrication is mental fabrication, which is composed of feelings of pleasure, pain or neither pleasure nor pain, and then your perceptions. Those things—feelings and perceptions—have an impact on the mind. Perception is different from directed thought and evaluation in that perceptions are not really sentences. They’re more like images or single words—like “breath,” or “big,” or … 
  15. Living Forward, Understanding Backward
     … In other words, when pain arises, you’re aware of the pain, but you don’t have to identify with the pain, or with the perception that says, “my pain.” You can cut right through it and you find that letting it drop makes a huge difference. Or even just the perception of “pain”: You learn how to question that. You learn to see … 
  16. A Cure for the Sluggish Mind
     … That’s where the evaluation comes in: “How can I think about things in a way that will energize me, energize the mind, give it more determination to want to see things through?” So you apply directed thought and evaluation, and then you look at the perceptions. What are the perceptions lying in the back of the mind? Again, if it’s a perception … 
  17. Fixing the Present
     … You want to calm both the feelings and the perceptions. And a first step in that direction is simply to see what perception’s operating there in the background. One of the ways you do that is by consciously trying to change the perception, bringing a new perception into the mind, one that’s less likely to stir up those emotions. Then you can … 
  18. Second Wind
     … What does that perception do? Or you can ask yourself about perceptions of front and back. Sometimes a pain will come up and you locate it in your stomach, say, or in your chest, in the front. But you can ask yourself: What if that’s actually a pain that’s in the back? And how would that relate to your sensations of the … 
  19. Concentration Food
    One of the reasons why we focus on the breath is because it’s so responsive to your thoughts and perceptions. You tell yourself to breathe in long, and it goes long. Tell it to be shorter, it becomes shorter. Deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter: The breath responds. You can tell it to go to different parts of the body. Here, of course, we … 
  20. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … And try to use a perception that helps me stay.” Think of the breath as a whole-body process: Your shoulders are breathing, your arms are breathing, your ears are breathing, your forehead is breathing, every part is breathin. See what that perception does. It makes the breath—and the sense of ease when you breathe comfortably—easy to spread around. So you look … 
  21. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … You breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—in other words, feelings and perceptions. So, what perceptions do you apply to the breath? How do you visualize the breath to yourself, how do you depict it to yourself as you breathe in, as you breathe out, where it’s coming in, where it’s going out, how it comes in, how it goes … 
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