Search results for: "Perception"
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- Head & Heart… your feelings and your perceptions. When you practice breath meditation, you’re learning ways of dealing with perceptions, ways of dealing with feelings, to breathe in a way that gives rise to ease, fullness, rapture. Learn to perceive the breath as a whole-body process. How do you perceive the breath energy in the body in such a way that you can calm down …
- Body Contemplation Is Compassionate… Where is the lust located? Where is the craving located? Is it in a particular perception of the other person? Is it in a perception about yourself, the fact that you’re attractive, and that you can seduce others? Try to be frank with yourself. Be honest with yourself—because in this particular issue, there’s so little honesty. Even between people who love …
- Off the Continuum… Here again, you watch the process of how these perceptions and feelings shape the mind and how they can be calmed down. What kind of perception allows the mind to calm down and settle into the body and feel really good? So here you’ve got concentration and insight, or tranquility and insight working together. You’re using your insight to bring tranquility to …
- The Skill of Letting Go… The appeal may have to do with your perceptions around these things, your perceptions of yourself as related to these things. Sometimes you just simply crave craving. So look into it—what is the allure? Then, in the next step, you compare the allure to the drawbacks: “When I cling to this, what happens? What are the negative results?” This is where the Buddha …
- Guardian Meditations… Mental fabrication consists of perceptions and feelings: If you fabricate these things out of ignorance, they’re going to lead to suffering as well. This is why a large part of the practice is focused on the issue of perception: the way you label things, how they fit into the larger picture of your thoughts. And this is why the Buddha didn’t just …
- Staying on Track… Then there are the perceptions. These are brain messages where you identify, “This must be that, that must be this, this must mean that, that doesn’t must mean this.” People can drive themselves crazy primarily with a verbal and mental fabrication. But even bodily fabrication: Some people when they meditate get strong feelings of energy suddenly surging through the body. Usually these are …
- For the Survival of True Happiness… Some brief perception strikes their fancy. I have a friend from childhood who encountered some wealthy people when he was young. He was always attracted to that wealthy lifestyle. Even though he never earned enough money to live that way, he tried living that way and ended up in a lot of debt, just because of this perception that took hold of his mind …
- Take the Buddha Seriously… After all, as you’re meditating here, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself talking to yourself about the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that you have around the breath. What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions. You …
- Solo Practice… One of the terms for this process is called de-perception: questioning your perception of what’s going on in the body and then trying other perceptions to see how they affect the breath. Sometimes you find one perception that seems really comfortable and there’s the tendency to tell yourself, “Ah, this must be it! This is the way to breathe.” But then …
- The Battle of Your Selves… Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Maha Boowa talk about the ways in which distractions get started in the mind, and it’s interesting that they switch roles in terms of the perception and the fabrication. Ajaan Maha Boowa would start with the fabrication, a stirring of energy in the mind, and then he says you slap a perception on top of that. In Ajaan Lee …
- The Safety of Dualities… So, your perceptions can change your range of what you can do, which means that some perceptions are skillful and some are not. This is why we have to develop right view, to get a sense of which perceptions will be skillful, which ways of perceiving ourselves, which ways of perceiving the problem of suffering will actually be conducive to putting an end to …
- A Post-goodness World?… So why lay claim to it as what you want as your happiness? So you’ve got the foundation for the three perceptions right there in that question. If something is inconstant, stressful, it’s not worth holding onto as you or yours, so it’s not worth pursuing. That’s something that’s often forgotten when we think about the three perceptions: the …
- Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom… For example, you can try holding in mind the perception that your body is like a big sponge, and the breath is coming in and out every pore of the skin. Think of the breath as an energy field that fills the body, and see what that does to the way you actually breathe. This way you begin to see how your perceptions shape …
- Surprise Yourself… What does that do? In other words, you play with your perceptions. That’s how ingenuity works. First, you’ve got to alert yourself to what your perceptions are, then you challenge them and think of alternatives. One of the easiest ways to think of alternatives, of course, is to ask yourself the opposite. If the in-breath seems to be going in one …
- The Four Noble Truths from Within… Then we have perceptions and feelings. Those are the factors that fabricate the mind. What kind of perceptions are we going to bring to this process of being right here so that we can create feelings of well-being that can sustain us? These are all things you can experience right here from within. It’s simply a matter of wanting to sensitize yourself …
- A Mental Fortress… And then your perceptions: What perceptions are helpful in keeping the mind calm, and which perceptions stir it up? Remember in the Buddha’s lessons about dealing with pain, there are ways of looking at the pain that get you get you all worked up. Other ways of looking at the pain can help you see the pain as something separate from your awareness …
- Breathe Easy… A lot of this skill has to do with perception. We perceive certain parts of the body as being unresponsive to the breath, parts that the breath can’t penetrate. Actually, the breath can penetrate everything. It’s an energy, a very refined energy. So that’s the first perception to hold in mind, that the breath is an energy that can penetrate anything …
- Large Perspective, Small Focus… physical fabrication, i.e., the breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation; mental fabrication, which are perceptions and feelings—perceptions are the labels or images you apply to things, and feelings are feelings of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. You realize, when you’re getting the mind into concentration, that you’re working directly with these forms of fabrication, getting hands-on …
- An End to Suffering… How are your perceptions shaping the way you do things? How do your perceptions of the results turn around and shape the way you do things the next time around? Look into that. This combination of perception and intention is what you’ve really got to learn to understand. And there’s the element of attention: what you pay attention to, what you decide …
- Pleasure & Pain… There are also perceptions, and there’s your awareness. The perceptions are the labels you put on things. Then there’s your basic consciousness. You’re learning how to untangle these things: the actual physical sensation of the pain, the labels you place on it, and the awareness that’s in the midst of these things. All these things tend to get glued together …
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