Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. Licking Yourself Clean
     … It feels good to be thinking good thoughts. It helps put you in the right mood to meditate. Physically, you work first with your posture. You want to sit straight. You don’t want to lean over or sit hunched over. Keep your back straight — comfortably straight. Then you work with the breath. Does the breath feel good? Notice where exactly you feel the … 
  3. Whole-body Consciousness
     … With it, you observe feelings. From contact comes feeling: a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling, a neither pleasant nor painful feeling. You see the contact, you see the feeling, and there’s a sense of being separate from them. There’s the awareness, there’s the feeling, and they’re two separate things. This, the Buddha points out, leaves you with a strong sense … 
  4. The Karma of Pleasure
     … And as you look for sukha , what is it? It’s a feeling. Feelings are fabricated. In other words, even in the experiencing of a feeling, there’s already a certain amount of intention. We have potentials that come in from our past actions and then our present intentions shape those potentials into a feeling. That’s what the mind spends a lot of … 
  5. Not Pained by Pain
    When the Buddha teaches how to focus on feelings as you meditate, there are four steps: Focused on the breath, you learn how to breathe in a way that gives rise to a sense of rapture and refreshment; that’s the first step. The second step, you breathe in and out giving rise to a sense of pleasure. The third is that you breathe … 
  6. Choices in the Present
     … The breath feels good coming in, feels good going out. You can make it feel better and better and better coming in, better going out, and you take that sense of well-being and allow it to suffuse the body. The Buddha talks of kneading it through the body the same way that you would knead moisture through a ball of dough, to the … 
  7. A Mind like Wind
     … Learn how to be sensitive to how it feels when it’s long, how it feels when it’s short, and decide which kind of breathing feels best for you right now. You can choose, you know. The breath, after all, is a bodily fabrication that has an element of intention in it. So take advantage of that. As the breath gets more comfortable … 
  8. Appreciating Merit
     … You start thinking about the long term, not just what you feel like right now. You think about the long term of how you would feel the next morning and on to longer periods of time. The same principle applies to all the practices that count as merit. Remind yourself of how good it feels that you can be generous, how good it feels … 
  9. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … See what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now. If you’re feeling tense, try to breathe in a way that’s relaxing. If you’re feeling tired, try to breathe in a way that gives you energy. If you’re feeling frazzled, try to breathe in a way that feels soothing inside. An important principle in concentration practice is that … 
  10. Issues of Control
     … You sensitize yourself to it—the fact that feelings and perceptions are shaping your mind—and then you try to calm their impact. Which feelings you can focus on are most calming? In the beginning, there might be some intense feelings of pleasure that you just want to drink up, drink up, drink up. Well, drink them up. As the Buddha said, when you … 
  11. The Time & Place to Let Go
     … If it doesn’t feel satisfying, try breathing deeper. If it feels too strung out, let the breath grow shorter, more shallow. Allow it to find a rhythm and texture that feels just right for the body right now, so that no tension builds up as you breathe in, and you don’t hold on to any tension as you breathe out—so that … 
  12. Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising
     … Why does the mind feed on these things? Because it feels empty without them. Sometimes it feels lost without them, deprived of its bearings. We create our bearings for ourselves through our views, through our ways of doing things. What it comes down to is that we think we need these things for our happiness. Without them, we feel lost. These are our means … 
  13. Discernment in Concentration
     … This is the warmth, this is the coolness, this is the energy, this is the solidity.” This is the feeling: The feeling may go with the type of breath energy you’ve got going, but after a while you begin to realize, okay, the feeling is one thing, the breath is something else. Then there are the perceptions: The images you hold in mind … 
  14. Four Bases of Success
    Breathe deeply for a bit to notice where you feel the sensation of breathing and try to stay with that sensation wherever it may be in the body. Then notice how long breathing feels, how deep breathing feels. If it feels comfortable, stick with it; if not, you can change the way you breathe: Make it longer, shorter, faster, slower, heavier, lighter. Experiment for … 
  15. At Home with the Breath
     … So ask yourself, what kind of breathing feels good in the stomach? What kind of breathing feels good down in the intestines? How about the shoulders, the arms, down to the fingers, the spaces between the fingers? How about the sense of breath energy surrounding the body like a cocoon? Can you sense that? If you don’t sense it, you can ask yourself … 
  16. A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness
     … It’s not infrequent when people come to meditate that they gain a sense of pleasure from the meditation and they don’t feel that they’re worthy of it. They feel they don’t deserve it. To get past that feeling, they should look back on their own attitude toward not only their own happiness but also toward other people’s happiness. If … 
  17. Full Attention
     … We try to work on what the Buddha said is our ancestral ground” the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves. In other words, stay with just what you’ve got here right now on its own terms—not the body in the world, or the feelings in the world … 
  18. Don’t Stop with Acceptance
     … Recognizing that a feeling is painful is perfectly normal. The question is, what are you going to do with that painful feeling? The Buddha teaches endurance. We hear so much about how we’re supposed to accept things, but there are only three things that the Buddha talks about accepting, aside from invitations: One is the fact of pain. The second is the fact … 
  19. A Complete Training
     … Then you realize that to keep this attitude going, it helps to breathe in a comfortable way, to talk to yourself in a comfortable way, and to have perceptions and feelings that will help induce those pleasant feelings of goodwill. This means you’re beginning to see the process of fabrication. Then as you get more into developing the meditation—working with the breath … 
  20. Gather ’Round the Breath
     … What you want to do is bring all of you here, all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, perceptions. Concentrate right around here. Ajaan Lee talks about two types of aggregates. There are those that basically head outside, interested in forms outside, feelings and perceptions of those forms, thoughts about those forms, and your awareness of those forms. Then there are those that … 
  21. The Heightened Mind
     … The main factors are the sense of pleasure and rapture or refreshment that you get when you lift the mind above its ordinary concerns, when you get the mind away from sensuality, and you’re just here with the body as you feel it from within, and you breathe in a way that feels good. You’re trying to develop this feeling tone, because … 
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