Search results for: "Feelings"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- The Demands of Goodwill… And remember, goodwill is not just a soft, pink cloud kind of feeling. It’s a very demanding wish. A very demanding attitude. This is why it’s called a “Brahma” attitude. It’s not your normal, human attitude. Our goodwill usually is partial. There are certain people we feel goodwill for and others we don’t feel any goodwill for at all. And …
- Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad… What are the things that fabricate your state of mind? Feelings and perceptions. Where do feelings come from? You get some feelings from the way you breathe and pay attention to the breath. So if you find that the mind is feeling sluggish, depressed, or discouraged, what can you do to gladden it by the way you breathe to create good feelings and by …
- Events as Events… Does it feel good? Does it not feel good? If it doesn’t feel good, you can change it. As the Buddha said, the breath is the factor that has the most influence on your sense of the body as you feel it from within. So take some time to look at it on its own terms and don’t drag other issues in …
- Nourishing & Interesting… the way you talk to yourself about the breath, the images you hold in mind, the feelings you focus on, how you relate to those feelings. There’s a lot to explore here, because you learn that when you hold a certain image of the breath in mind, it can either be very nourishing—it can lead to breathing that feels really good—or …
- Training Your Intentions… With fabrication, we fabricate form for the sake of form-ness; we fabricate feeling for the sake of feeling-ness; perceptions for the sake of perception-hood, I guess you’d say; consciousness for the sake of consciousness-ness. It’s a weird grammatical construction in Pali, which is why it sounds strange in English, too. But the basic message is that we have …
- Lessons from the Breath… If the breath feels good, the rest of the body can start feeling good, too. You can hook up to the breath energy in all the different parts of the body, and when you’re coming from a position of comfort, you’re coming from a position of strength. In dealing with the breath, you’re learning all the lessons you need for developing …
- Gratitude & Trust… If you’re like me, you have some blood relatives for whom you feel no trust at all. The sense of relatedness there is pretty weak. But the people for whom you feel trust: That’s a relatedness that’s very strong—the kind of relatedness that keeps the world going and gives us a sense that human society is a worthwhile thing. Which …
- The Path is Fabricated… You still have mental fabrication, feeling and perception—the perception is the perception of breath that holds everything together—until you reach the fourth jhana, where there’s just mental fabrication, the feeling and perception. The in-and-out breathing has stopped, leaving just a feeling of equanimity, what the Buddha calls “purity of equanimity and mindfulness.” This, too, is something you do. There …
- Calming Mental Fabrication… Work out any kinks you might feel in there, any patterns of tension, from the back of the neck, down the shoulders, down the arms—or anywhere you feel that it feels good to have the sense of pleasure flowing. As a general rule of thumb, you want to remember that you don’t push the breath around. You simply open the channels and …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… The mind actually gets concentrated and they feel somehow that they don’t deserve it, or that it couldn’t really be the kind of concentration the Buddha’s talking about. A lot of people, especially in our society, go around feeling unworthy. So here’s an antidote to that: We’re on a worthy path and we’re worthy of the path. This …
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