Search results for: "Feeling"
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- The Five Precepts for the Mind… Does it feel tight? Does it feel open? Does it feel soothing? Does it feel constricted? If it feels tight and constricted, think of opening it up a bit. Stop whatever you’re doing and get it back into good shape. It doesn’t have to take long. And then try to maintain that quality of being present with a sense of well-being …
- Focused on the Breath… Or if long breathing feels good, keep it up. You can try in-long, out-short; or in-short, out-long. In-long, out-short tends to be energizing. If you’re feeling tired, you can energize yourself that way. In-short, out-long tends to be relaxing. If you’re tense, try that. Ajaan Lee noted one time that old people tend to …
- Solid Inside… In doing this, you’re expressing goodwill not only for yourself but also for other people, because as I said, when you act and speak, it comes out of your feelings in the present moment. If you can develop a feeling of ease, a feeling of well-being right here, then your actions are bound to be kinder. You’re not acting on irritation …
- Seriously Happy… You feel good about yourself for having goodwill. You feel good about yourself for having compassion. But when it comes to empathetic joy, you realize that there are some people out there who’ve got much better good fortune than you, in worldly ways or in the ways of the Dhamma. And all of a sudden you don’t feel so gracious and compassionate …
- Mindfulness of Death… If you can maintain your focus, then the Buddha has you focus particularly on the issue of feelings in the body, because those are the things that’ll stand out most at that point. If there’s a feeling of pain, he has you reflect on the fact that this feeling of pain is dependent on what? It’s dependent on the body. Is …
- Sensitive to the Breath… And it feels good. It feels like you’ve had a good charge of energy food, and you’re perfectly content to stay right there. As you get deeper into concentration, this sense of rapture or refreshment will grow stronger. In the beginning it may be very light. But in every case there’s a sense that you don’t really feel the need …
- Comfort Dhamma… It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you feel comfortable with what you believe. And you can change your beliefs as you see fit. That’s what they say. The underlying assumption in all these cases is that the universe is one large, wonderful, harmonious totality. And whatever harm is done gets wiped away by the fact that life just keeps …
- Start with Yourself… When you’re working with the breath, you begin to realize that no matter what’s happening outside, you can change the way you breathe so that you feel ease inside, so you feel well-being inside. It may be hot outside or cold outside, there may be a lot of turmoil outside, but you can still create feelings of ease inside by the …
- Judging Mindfulness & Concentration… Where do you experience it? Where do you feel it when it comes in, when it goes out? Stay right there with it. Sometimes we talk about keeping watch over the breath, but it’s more a matter of feeling the breath. The breath is something you wear. You can feel it anywhere in the body. The other activity is putting aside greed and …
- One Thing at a Time… breath, feelings, and the mind. You want to bring them together so that they form a good whole: breath filling the body, a feeling of pleasure filling the body, your awareness filling the body. You don’t have to pay attention to anything else right now. The sound of the plane going overhead: Just let it go right through. It’s really none of …
- Skills for Dying Well… You can create a sense of well-being in the mind and you don’t feel so pushed out by the body. That’s the paradox of doing breath meditation: You’re focusing on the body as you feel it from within, but after a while, the sense of the body begins to get more subtle, and the outlines of the surface of the …
- Steps in Concentration… As you can make that sensation feel good, then think about letting it spread. What would be a good direction for it to spread? Up? Down? Out to either side? Into the front? Out the back? It depends on where you start. Ajaan Lee would have you start at the back of the neck, right about the base of the skull. That’s probably …
- Equanimity & Endurance… You feel this especially when someone around you is sick or dying. They’re going through a process that you can’t feel. You sympathize, but you have to remember, how can you best help them? It’s through developing good qualities in your own mind. And one of those, paradoxically, is equanimity. We usually think that what the other person needs right now …
- Significance… This is why the monks have the rules about when someone comes and asks, “Where should I give this gift?” The monk should say, “Give where you feel it will be well used. Give where you feel inspired, or where you’ll feel it’ll be well taken care of.” That’s it. The monk can’t say, “Give to this group; give to …
- Happiness Comes from Inner Strength… You see that that person benefits, you benefit, and the more they’re happy about it, the happier you feel as well. This creates a really good feeling in the mind. You find that you can feed on that feeling and it gives you strength. Virtue is also a kind of gift. You realize that you can restrain your less skillful impulses. You can …
- Enlarged Awareness… That’s the image of equanimity, a feeling of total ease. All these feelings—pleasure, equanimity—you should try to allow to fill the body as much as you can. In this way, you establish a really good solid foundation for your meditation, a good foundation for your concentration. If your concentration is one-pointed, then as soon as anything disturbs that one point …
- Negativity… This is especially bad when your inner voices are toxic and they do everything they can to make you feel bad, make you feel guilty over things you’ve done in the past that were wrong. They themselves sound like they’re in the right in making you feel miserable. Part of this is due to the fact that we come from a culture …
- Calm in the Storm… verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself—what he calls directed thought and evaluation; and then mental fabrication, your perceptions and feelings—feeling tones, here, of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. As I said, if you do these things in ignorance, they lead to suffering, but if you do them with knowledge, they can actually become part of the path to the …
- Goodwill & Kamma… It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about how the steps of breath meditation develop feelings as a frame of reference, he classifies attention to in-and-out breaths as a kind of feeling. It’s a strange statement, because usually we don’t think of attention as a feeling. But he’s pointing out two things. One is that every feeling we …
- Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life… What you want is a place where you can settle in and feel at ease in the body. If your back is feeling weak, think about the breath energy coming up the back, so that you feel more secure here, more stable and solid. Because this is your space. The way you sense the body from within is something that nobody else can sense …
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