Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Friendship Leading to Seclusion… Because you need friends to encourage you, “Yes, you can do this.” If you find yourself feeling lonely, they can talk you into realizing that you’ve got a good opportunity here to really get to know yourself. If you’re feeling discouraged, they give you encouragement. When you’re getting careless, your loyal friends protect you from your own heedlessness. In other words …
- Why We Train the Mind… feelings and perceptions. “Feeling” here doesn’t mean emotion. It means the feeling tone that you focus on with regard to that issue—pleasant, painful, or neither. Perceptions are the mental labels or images that surround an issue—for example, the way you perceive the breath and how it relates to a particular unskillful emotion. If anger comes up, ask yourself: “How am I …
- Feeding on the Breath… And as long as the fullness feels good, keep it up. When it begins to feel oppressive, you can think of ways of dissipating it. One is to focus in on the fact that right there where that sense of fullness is, there’s also a subtler level of energy. If you focus on that subtler level, it’s as if the sense of …
- Talking Among Your Selves… How does it feel right now? I noticed that when Ajaan Fuang was teaching his students, he would have them describe how they were feeling the breath. Then he would use their vocabulary to talk to them. There was one guy who had had trouble getting the mind to settle down with the breath, but then one day he was meditating while sitting on …
- Endurance… What kind of breathing would feel good right now—really good? Down through the torso, down through the legs, down through the arms, all over the body: Which spot in the body seems to be most sensitive to the breath coming in going out? Focus your attention there. And see what kind of breathing feels really good there. If the mind wanders off, bring …
- Analyzing Anger… Third is mental fabrication – perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are labels: the images you hold in mind, the names you give to things, the meanings you give to things. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. It’s all very simple. But he wants you to see these things because, as he points out elsewhere, when we engage in these activities …
- Introduction to the Breath… Now, if you notice the mind slipping off, then when you bring it back to the breath, try to make the breath more comfortable, because often the reason we slip away is because the breath doesn’t feel right. It feels tight or constricted or forced. So be very careful to notice: Is the breath getting too long? Are you squeezing it out too …
- Guarded… Find a spot where you feel at home inside, let your attention settle there and learn how to protect it. One of the ways in which we feel invaded or threatened by other people is when we feel their energy moving into our energy field. And one way to prevent that is, once you’ve got some good energy going in your selected spot …
- A Strong Sense of Self… Notice how it feels. You can try long breathing for a while, to see how that feels, and if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If not, you can change. You can try shorter breathing, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Wherever you feel the breath most prominently in the body, focus your attention there and watch it steadily so that you …
- Strength of Mind… Once the breath gets comfortable, one of the exercises you can try is to go through the different parts of the body and ask yourself, how does that part of the body feel when you breathe in? How does it feel when you breathe out? Does it feel good? Try adjusting for that part. You can start down around the navel, work up the …
- Concentration as Wilderness… Try to find a rhythm of breathing that feels really soothing, energizing, and refreshing for the body. In the beginning, this may mean deep, long breathing to energize parts of the body that ordinarily aren’t energized by the breath. Then, when that gets tiresome, you can let the breath get shorter, more shallow. Find a rhythm that feels really good, so that when …
- To Comprehend Suffering… Now, on top of that, there may be feelings of pleasure or pain or neutral feelings. And even though these may be associated with the body, they themselves are not “body.” It’s important to make that distinction, because we often confuse them. Say there’s a pain in your leg, a pain in your back, or a pain in your shoulder. The pain …
- The Committee of the Mind… You want to find a perception that allows the breath energy to flow smoothly throughout the body so that the body feels nourished, the nerves feel nourished, the blood vessels feel nourished—everything. So try different perceptions to see what helps. One that I’ve found useful is thinking of the body as like a big sponge. As you breathe in, the air can …
- The Path of Happiness… Breathe in a way that feels free and easy. You can experiment to see what rhythm of breathing feels best. Try long, deep breathing for a while to see if that feels good. If it does, maintain that rhythm. If not, you can change. Try long in and short out, or short in and long out, or short in and short out, deep or …
- Look after Your Mind with Ease… How is the breath going? Is it comfortable? Where do you feel the breath right now? When you breathe in, does it feel like you’re fully nourishing your torso all the way down? Is it nourishing the nerves? Is it nourishing your eyes, your ears? Think of the breath as the flow of energy in the body, and ask yourself where it would …
- Solidly Established… Choose a spot where you feel comfortable, and let the breath be comfortable as well. Try not to force it too much. Let it come in and go out at a rhythm that feels good. You might want to start out with a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Then let the breath find a rhythm that feels right. Then do …
- Coming into the Present… Fire, of course, corresponds to the feelings of warmth. Earth is feelings of solidity. And water is feelings of cohesion, feelings of coolness. Every point of sensation in your body has all four of these to a greater and lesser extent. They may seem like a foreign way of thinking about the body, but this way of thinking has its uses, particularly when you …
- Respect… Then, when things have been cleared out, choose any one spot in the body where it feels natural to stay focused. It might be in the middle of the head, the chest, the abdomen. Focus your attention there and let it stay there for a while. See what kind of breathing feels good there. It could be long breathing, short breathing, fast or slow …
- Layers of Selves… In other words, finding the spot in the body that feels good. And then breathing in and out sensitive to mental fabrication, i.e., your perceptions and your feelings. How are the perceptions having an effect on you? How are the feelings having an effect on you? How do they get mixed together to have an effect on the mind? Then you find a …
- Right but Wrong… Udayin steps in and says, “Maybe he’s thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful, and all actions result in feelings.” And basically, the Buddha says No, that’s not the time for that teaching. When you’re asked about kamma, the proper response is: There are three kinds of feelings—pleasant feelings, painful feelings, neither pleasant nor painful. After all, the …
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