Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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