Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. Noble Treasures
    The mind has a very deep habit, a little question inside that keeps getting asked over and over again: “What are we doing next? What are we doing next?” If you come up with a lot of different answers, the mind gets scattered and feels fearful. So, for the next hour, try to convince yourself that there’s only one thing you really have … 
  3. Beyond Nature
     … Then there’s purely mental fabrication, which is feeling and perception, “perception” here meaning the labels you apply to things, while “feeling” means the different feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. Normally, the way we put these things together causes stress and suffering. If you do this with ignorance, you suffer. If you can learn how to do it with … 
  4. A Clear Agenda
     … Feelings come up and you relate them to the breath. “How does this feeling of pleasure or pain relate to the breath? Is it caused by the way I’m breathing? Or is it completely irrelevant?” Say that there’s a pain someplace in the body: How does that relate to the breath? Experiment a little bit to find out. Change the way you … 
  5. Angry
     … Wherever you see that you’ve built up feelings of tension or tightness in the body through the way you’ve been breathing, breathe through them. That gives you the alternative to getting it out by expressing the anger or bottling it up. Here’s a third way of dealing with it. You dissolve it. You dissolve those feelings in the body. Then you … 
  6. Tuning-in to the Breath
     … It feels full, it feels refreshing all the way through the body because you’ve opened up all the little cells in the body and allowed the breath to enter. When you get that sense of fullness, it’s easier to relax. This may not be a pretty image, but the mind at this point is like a mosquito when it’s finally hit … 
  7. Evaluating Your Practice
     … Because all too often, when there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the mind, there’s going to be an uncomfortable feeling in the body to go along with it. If you identify with both, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. So you have to remember that there are places you can step out. You can still be in the body in the present moment … 
  8. Skillful Thinking
     … Does it feel good? If it feels good, if it provides an area where you can settle down and feel at home, then you’ve done it skillfully. If not, try it in other ways. The basic evaluation here is based on the four noble truths. This is the Buddha’s guideline for discernment. Actually his guidelines go back even more simply than that … 
  9. Painful Thinking
     … Again, you find this by playing around until you come across some breathing that feels really good. Stick with it for a while. See what happens. You want to give the mind a sense of feeling really at home here in the present moment. So many of us don’t feel at home at all. As soon as we stay in the present moment … 
  10. Compunction
     … This is why we practice meditation, because there are some forms of putting yourself out where you feel depleted and other forms of putting in energy where you get more energy back, and meditation is one of the latter. So when you’re beginning to feel apathetic or don’t care, it’s a time to meditate. Here again, it’s a principle of … 
  11. The Dhamma Wheel
     … They’re activities. “Form,” as the Buddha said, “deforms.” Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, thought-constructs put things together, consciousness cognizes. These are activities we engage in. We keep repeating them over and over again. It’s with these activities that we feed. You have the form of the body; you have the form of the food. The body needs the food. It feels pain … 
  12. Spread Goodness Around
     … So when King Pasenadi asked him, “Where should a gift be given?” he replied, “Give where you feel inspired or you feel it would be well-used.” Then the king went on to ask him, “When a gift is given, where does it give great fruit?” And the Buddha said, “That’s another question entirely. You want to give to people who are free … 
  13. Protection for the Holidays
     … Remember that our feelings are not handed to us ready-made. As the Buddha said, there’s an element of fabrication in terms of which feelings you’re going to focus on, and which ones you’re going to ignore. When you focus on certain potentials, you actually turn them into full-fledged feelings. So how are you going to fabricate something skillful out … 
  14. Study to Practice
     … perceptions and feelings. What are the perceptions that aggravate the anger? What perceptions might help put the anger aside? The same with the feelings: What kind of feelings are you focusing on? The Buddha gives lots of recommendations for how to deal with these three kinds of fabrication. He tells you even how to breathe: Breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture … 
  15. The Web of Pain
     … Let the breath come in, go out, in a way that feels good for the body. And focus on the comfortable sensations related to the breath. These can be anywhere in the body at all. When you emphasize the comfort like this, you find it easier to stay in the present moment. This is to combat a tendency the mind has, which is to … 
  16. The Missing Truth
     … That connects with the feeling, the feeling of ease that you’re trying to create here. That gives you three of the establishings of mindfulness right there: body, feelings, mind. When you can bring those together, they gain strength from one another. In other words, your intentions are focused on the breath. Your awareness fills the body. The breath fills the body. The sense … 
  17. All-around Alertness
     … finding ways of breathing that feel really good right now—and what feels good right now is not necessarily what’s going to feel good tomorrow. So look at this with fresh eyes. Where do you not ordinarily focus on breath sensations in the body? Have you ever spent much time with your right flank, or your left flank, or your tailbone? Give them … 
  18. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … And you can feel the in-and-out breath anywhere you want, wherever you notice that it’s clear to watch the breath, where you find that it’s in a part of the body that’s especially sensitive to how it feels when you breathe in, how it feels when you breathe out. It might be down in the chest, in the throat … 
  19. Off the Continuum
     … What can you do to calm the effect of the breath on the body until there is a sense of ease, well-being, where it feels like the breath currents in your body are all flowing together, and they’re not working at cross-purposes? The next step in the breath meditation is to breathe in a way that induces feelings of rapture, feelings … 
  20. Gratitude to Things
     … You feel underappreciated; you feel that nobody cares. And you wonder, “Why should I be doing good things for other people when they don’t appreciate it, when they don’t feel gratitude?” This is how a lack of gratitude causes society to unravel. Real civilization doesn’t lie in having good things. It lies in having good intentions for one another. Ajaan Fuang … 
  21. Fabricating with Awareness
     … your feelings and perceptions. Again, the breath is helpful here. You can create feelings of ease and well-being throughout the body, which will have a really healthy effect on the mind. You look at greed, aversion, and delusion, and you begin to realize that they’re not worth the effort they require because there’s already a sense of well-being. The reason … 
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