Search results for: "Feelings"
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- When You’ve Played Enough With the Breath… The theme all the way through these steps is the interaction among breath, feelings, and mind. In some of the steps, the emphasis is on how the mind can have an impact on the breath and how it can shape feelings; in others, it’s how feelings and the breath can have an impact on the mind. The last two steps in the second …
- Beyond Inter-eating… And if you don’t get the food source you want, you start scrambling around trying to find another food source, and at the same time you feel threatened, fearful. And we know what the mind does when it feels threatened and fearful: its stupidest things, most heartless things, thoughtless things, mindless things. Someone did a study of prisoners, people who tend to live …
- A Meditator is a Good Friend to Have… Then allow the breath to find a rhythm that feels really comfortable. You can experiment for a while, to see what kind of breathing feels most refreshing. Sometimes shorter breathing is what the body needs, sometimes longer, sometimes deeper, more shallow, heavier or lighter, faster or slower. Try to keep on top of whatever the body needs. As for any other thoughts that may …
- The Wrong Uses of Right… And since actions lead to feelings, then all actions lead to stress.” And the Buddha says, “Another fool! When you’re asked about action, you respond in terms of the three feelings. There are pleasurable feelings, there are painful feelings, and there are feelings that are neither pleasurable nor painful. If you want to talk about the fact that ultimately, even the pleasure has …
- Healing Breath… If you find the way of breathing feels harsh or disruptive to the body, abandon it. Breathe in a way that feel soothing, nourishing. Ajaan Lee recommends that you do it the other way around. In other words, you get the breath so that it feels soothing, and then you spread your awareness to fill the body, at the same time allowing that sense …
- A Rite of Passage… Your relationship to the breath will develop as you stay right here, as will your relationship to the feelings that come with the breath: feelings of ease, feelings of fullness, rapture, or refreshment. As long as they feel refreshing, stay with them. When they begin to seem a little bit too much, then you think of a more subtle level of energy in the …
- Learning How to Talk to Yourself… Then finally, there are mental fabrications, which are perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things, like labels on a bottle. Some of these labels are just words, and sometimes they’re images. They give meaning to things: This is this, and that’s that. You identify what this is, what that is, what its meaning is. And then feelings—feeling …
- A Refuge from Karma… If you just sit here wallowing in how good it feels, it’s not going to feel good very long, because the cause for that good feeling comes from the fact that you’re alert, paying careful attention to the breath. If you lose that foundation, either you go into delusion concentration, which is pleasant but it’s like falling asleep, or else the …
- Inquisitive… Sometimes it feels like it’s coming in from outside, and other times it feels like it’s flowing from certain spots inside the body. It starts, say, at the tip of the sternum or the point just above the navel, and the breath energy radiates from those spots. Other times, it feels like there’s a column of energy running down the middle …
- Many I’s, Many Eyes… As you breathe in, the whole body feels at ease breathing in; as you breathe out, the whole body feels at ease breathing out. Try not to squeeze the breath energy out as you breathe out. Allow things to feel full as you’re breathing in, and even to maintain that sense of fullness as you breathe out, so that the breath energy and …
- Noble Right Concentration… form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness. Where are you going to see those aggregates? You see them in the concentration. The breath is part of form. The feeling of pleasure that arises as you stay focused: That’s feeling. The mental image you have of the breath: That’s perception. Directed thought and evaluation as you try to adjust the breath, play with the breath …
- Wearing the Breath… Just be with how the breath feels, and notice where you feel it. Be right there at the sensation. Don’t be up in your head looking down at the sensation. Be in the sensation. Then try to maintain that. Whatever issues come up, they’re not important right now. The real issue is about getting to be right here, directly with the sensation …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… It’s through learning to apply it to all kinds of different situations so that you get a really good feel for it. As you gain that feel for it, then the various elements of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness begin to separate out. You can watch them for what they are. Then when you let them go, it’s not that …
- Concentration Food… We’re trying to use the breath to make the body a good place to be here in the present moment, which means you want to think about the breath in ways that are more soothing when the mind is feeling frazzled, more energizing when you’re feeling tired, more relaxing when you’re feeling tense. So, first make a survey of how things …
- The Regularity of the Dhamma… For example, you’re sitting here right now with the form of the body, your sense of the body, how it feels from within. That sense of form is made up of solidity, warmth, liquid sensations, and energy: the four elements or four properties. As for name, it includes feeling, perception, attention, intention, and contact. Consciousness, he says, lands on these factors of name …
- The Primacy of the Mind (2)… We’re working here not with feelings willy-nilly. We’re working with what the Buddha calls feelings not-of-the-flesh: niramisa vedana. Those are feelings that are consciously, deliberately created. So again, we’re working from the mind into the breath. Then you’re sensitive to how that sense of pleasure has an impact on the mind: You breathe in and out …
- Deconstructing Anger… You suddenly feel free to do what you want to do, and your sense of shame and compunction goes by the board. Your concerns about the results, the long term results, of what you’re doing goes by the board. You feel free not to care. So you want to see why you’re willing to throw those things away. The same happens if …
- Knowing & Acting… If the breath doesn’t feel comfortable at that spot, very gently adjust it until it does. When you finally get a feeling tone that feels good right there, notice what other spots in the body have the same feeling tone. Think of them connecting. It’s as if you’re starting a fire in a wind. At the very beginning, you have to …
- Feeding Off of Others… Can anybody else feel the breath the way you feel it? The person sitting next to you may hear you breathing, but that’s about it. Of course, if it’s really loud, you should tone it down. But your sense of the breath is yours. Your sense of the body as you feel it from within is yours. Your sense of how you …
- Appreciating Merit… It’s not just the feeling you get from them that’s happiness, it’s the actual action that’s a kind of happiness. We don’t think of happiness as an action. We think of it more as a feeling we get from doing things. But here you exercise an activity that feels good, that feels right. And in that—in the action …
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