Search results for: "Feeling"

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  2. Other People
     … Where does it feel soothing? Where does it feel good when you breathe in, breathe out? If you can’t really decide whether it feels good or not, hold your breath for a while. Then when you finally do breathe, it’s going to feel good. Well, notice the spot where it feels best, and make that the focal point of your awareness. Be … 
  3. Respect for Concentration
     … Try to get sensitive to how the breath feels. What does a long breath feel like? What does a short breath feel like? Which feels better? Experiment. You can try experimenting with deep or shallow breathing, fast or slow breathing, heavy or light. There are lots of different breaths to experiment with. Try to sensitize yourself to this part of your awareness. It’s … 
  4. Focus on Your Intention
     … Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes—the point being that these are activities. The word “aggregate” has an unfortunate connotation. It sounds like gravel, little bits and pieces of rock. The aggregates probably got that name in English from a convention in early modern European philosophy which said that groups of things were either systems or aggregates. Systems were … 
  5. True, Beneficial, Timely
     … I asked him, “Can you feel your body? As you’re sitting here, can you feel it from the inside?” He said, “Oh yeah, no problem.” Well, that’s breath. Hold that perception in mind, that what you feel the body right now starts with breath energy. Then ask yourself, if this were breath energy, would it qualify as good or bad? Sometimes there … 
  6. No Happiness Other than Peace
     … So if you want to head them off before they become big, you have to be able to settle down here and feel well-established. You’re not going to be pushed off in any direction by anything. This requires an enlarged state of mind, so once the breath starts feeling comfortable, start thinking of spreading your awareness around the body and allowing that … 
  7. The Forerunner of All Things
     … Now, you don’t do that just by sitting around and asking yourself, “What do I really feel? What do I really think?” because the mind can lie to itself. You can say, “Yes, I really do feel this, I really do think this,” but are those feelings and thoughts something you want to go with? After all, if the mind is capable of … 
  8. Heart & Mind
     … Feelings here are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. Here again, learning how to breathe skillfully in the midst of difficult situations can give you a foundation of well-being inside, so that you don’t feel so oppressed, so hemmed in by events. You realize that regardless of what’s happening outside, you can still inhabit the full space … 
  9. Friends
     … But when you learn to use them as a path, then if there’s a pleasant feeling, what’s the best use for that pleasant feeling? If there’s a painful feeling, what’s the best use for that painful feeling. It’s a way most of us don’t tend to think. All we can think of is: “If there’s a pleasant … 
  10. The Veils of Delusion
     … What we’re doing is uncoding it, getting back to the pure physicality of what it means, what it feels like, to be in a body. When you breathe in, what’s actually happening? We have all kinds of preconceived notions about what the breath is doing. But stop to take stock: What do you really feel as you breathe in? What do you … 
  11. Truth
     … It’s one of the reasons why he said that people who feel no shame in telling a lie are capable of any kind of evil. This doesn’t mean that everybody who lies is capable of all kinds of evil. There are people who will feel ashamed about the lies they tell, which shows that they know some boundaries, that they have a … 
  12. Broaden Your Range of Choices
     … The energies feel threatening, and you feel you have to get them out of your system, especially if the energy is associated with anger. You don’t like having the feeling of that energy in the body, so you let it out. Like water under pressure, it’s got to escape for the pressure to go down. That’s how most people deal with … 
  13. All Three Functions of Mindfulness
     … Similarly with feelings: The sutta talks about feelings of the flesh, which are the feelings that arise willy-nilly at the senses. But then it also mentions feelings not-of-the-flesh, which are things you have to consciously give rise to. Pain not-of-the-flesh is the realization that there’s work to be done and you haven’t reached the goal … 
  14. Putting Aside the World
     … If it doesn’t feel comfortable, think of its getting longer or shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter—anything that would give a sense of greater satisfaction to the body, in terms of what the body needs in terms of breath energy right now. If you’re feeling tired, try to breathe in a way that’s more energizing. If you’re feeling tense … 
  15. Your Secret Foundation
     … There’s a passage where the Buddha says that even your experience of feeling takes a potential for feeling and fabricates it into an actual feeling. And the same goes for the other aggregates. The potential for perception, your potential for fabrication, your potential for consciousness: These are all things coming from past actions and shaped by present intentions into what you actually experience … 
  16. The Swinging Balance
     … If you’ve exhausted all the teacher’s ideas, try to think up some approaches of your own so you can feel at ease here in the present moment.” Because if the mind doesn’t feel at ease here, it’s going to wander around all over the place and never find any rest. You wander out into the world and all you see … 
  17. Strength to Be Good
    Try to be as fully aware of your body sitting right here as you can, how it feels in all the different parts. The ideal awareness of the breath has one spot as its main center, but its range should go all the way down through the body, all the way down the arms to the tips of the fingers, all the way down … 
  18. Speech for the Sake of Stillness
     … Where do you feel the breath right now? Do you know when it’s coming in? Do you know when it’s going out? Does it feel comfortable? If it’s not comfortable, this is where you start talking to yourself. What can you do to make it more comfortable? Is the breathing too long? Is it too short? Too heavy? Too light? Too … 
  19. Basic Meditation Instructions
     … how it feels coming it, how it feels going out. Use your ingenuity to see what ways of breathing would feel more comfortable, more satisfying. After all, the breath is the energy that keeps you alive. This is the breath of life. It only stands to reason that if the breath of life feels good, it’s going to good for the body, good … 
  20. Basics
     … Beings friends means, first, trying to sense as precisely as possible what it really feels like, as opposed to your preconceived notions of what it should feel like or where you should feel it. In other words, listen to the breath. And then, second, allow the breath to get more comfortable. These are basic principles in establishing any kind of friendship: Listen to the … 
  21. Reflecting on Karma
     … The Buddha said, “When you’re asked about action, you don’t say all actions result in pain.” There was a monk nearby who interjected, “Maybe he was thinking about the fact that action results in feeling, and all feelings are stressful, right?” And the Buddha said, “When you’re talking about actions, you talk about the three kinds of feelings: pleasant, painful, neither … 
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