Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Put the Other Person’s Heart in Yours… It goes together with empathy, sympathy, having a sense of how other people feel, putting yourself in their place—or as the Thais say in one their nice idioms: Take the other person’s heart and put it in your heart and see how it feels. Take their feelings into account. In these days of intersectionalism, we’re told that people of different genders …
- The Pain of Conviction… You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it …
- Respect Your Center… the place in the body where the breath feels good, and the mind feels at home when it’s focused there. You want to know that spot and learn how to work with it, learn how to come back to it as quickly as you can if you’ve lost it. This will take some exploration, experimenting with different spots and noticing where your …
- Calming the Breath… But the Buddha here is talking about elementary feelings: how your body feels to you from the inside. Again, this can be willed. You focus on solid sensations, and the earth element or the sense of solidity gets stronger. You can focus on the warmth in the body, and you can actually make the body feel warmer if you intend to make it warmer …
- The Skill of Renunciation… What kind of breathing would feel best right here? Longer? Shorter? Heavier? Lighter? Faster? Slower? Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels good now. As for any other thoughts that come into the mind, no matter how important they may seem, no matter how potentially entertaining they might be, tell yourself, No. You’re trying to learn a skill, the …
- Befriending the Breath… How does the breath feel good? How does the breath not feel good? What parts of the breath are you not acquainted with? Start out with the areas where it’s easy to notice the sensation of breathing coming in, going out—the areas where you’re familiar with the breath. But always keep in mind that you may have a strange way of …
- Choiceful Awareness… If it feels good for a while, that’s okay. Choose to stick with it. If after a while it doesn’t feel good anymore, you can choose to change. It’s through exercising your powers of choice that you become more sensitive to how they function and to the impact that they have. That enables you to get better and better at making …
- Factions in the Mind… It feels good to breathe in, feels good to breathe out. You don’t have to force the breath, you don’t have to hold it in, you don’t have to count. Let the breath come in and out at whatever rhythm feels good for the body. If the rhythm keeps changing, fine — as long as it feels good. Be on top of …
- Like a River Full of Water… It’s not just that you can feel goodwill, sometimes, or compassion, sometimes, for some people. You want to train the mind so that you can feel these attitudes for everybody—people, animals—always and everywhere. You start with yourself, but you don’t end with yourself. You think of how the suffering of others doesn’t benefit you in any way, so why …
- Starting from Within… And be on friendly terms with it, allow it to come in and out in whatever way feels really good. To find what way feels really good, you can experiment. Longer breathing, shorter breathing, faster, slower: There are ots of ways you can play with the breath, until you get a good idea of what the range of possibilities is right now, exactly how …
- Over the Pass… So when a feeling comes, it’s just a feeling. Any narrative around, “What kind of person am I, having feelings like this?” or “Is this a feeling I would really like to get into?”—those kinds of narratives, you’ve got to drop. Because as soon as you get into the narratives, you get ignorant about what you’re doing. And wherever there …
- Free from Buddha Nature… Evaluation is checking to see: “How does this feel? Does this feel good? Does this feel right? Is this a comfortable place to stay? Is it an uncomfortable place to stay? How about my mind? Is it ready to settle down right now, or does it need a few other reflections before it’ll be willing to settle down in the breath in the …
- Discernment… Which ones are just physical sensations and which ones are feeling? In other words, which ones are rupa , or form, and which ones are feeling? Any sense of heat is form, any sense of movement is form; coolness, solidity: these things are all form. But then there’s the feeling of pain that sort of flickers among them. It’s something different. It’s …
- Injustice… This means looking at the areas where you feel aversion, where you feel upset over the injustices of the world, and you have to learn how to bring your mind to equanimity in areas where you can’t be of help. Even where you can be of help, you have to be coming from equanimity. This doesn’t mean that you don’t care …
- All Your Old Baggage… It’s possible to take the potential for pleasant feeling and actually make it painful. And vice versa: the potential for painful feeling is something you can sometimes make more pleasant by the way you look at the feeling, by the way you relate to the feeling, how you perceive which side of the feeling you’re on. So the crucial element is what …
- The No Common Sense Zone… What kind of breathing feels good right now? Could it feel better? As you work with this, don’t let yourself get discouraged. Use your powers of observation, use your ingenuity, on little things like this: the same way that you work with hammers and saws when you’re building a hut, needle and thread when you’re making flower arrangements, flour and butter …
- Equanimity & Exertion… Then there are also mental fabrications, which are perceptions—the labels you have for things, which can be either individual words or mental pictures—and then feelings: feelings of either pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain. You can work with all of these things to deal with that second kind of cause. For instance, there are times when working with feelings of pleasure …
- The Uses of the Breath… So when you’re feeling tired, the breath is a good place to focus and to think about the different parts of the body that need breath energy that have been starved. And give it to them. The breath is also a good place for the mind to grow calm. When you think of the breath coming in and out throughout the entire body …
- The Brahmaviharas Are Not a Complete Practice … What kind of breathing would be comfortable? What kind of breathing would not be comfortable? How can you breathe in ways that feel satisfying? And what would be satisfying right now? What does the body need right now? When the breath feels satisfying, how do you keep it satisfying? How do you spread it around? As the Buddha says in his instructions for getting …
- Because the Mind Is Purposeful… Try to breathe in a way that feels good: relaxing when you’re feeling tense, energizing when you’re feeling tired. Think of the breath as a whole-body process. It’s not just the air coming in and out through the nose. That’s just the result of the breathing. The breathing is the energy that goes through the movement of the muscles …
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