Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. The Origination of Suffering
     … It puts you in a good place, where you’re not compelled to feel that you go off after those other becomings. So sometimes as you’re meditating you may feel it frustrating that, as you’re trying to stay with the breath, this comes up, that comes up, this thought about this, this thought about that. You have to fend these things off … 
  3. Imagine Your Breath
     … what an in-breath should feel like, what an out-breath should feel like. You begin to realize that what Ajaan Lee had to say about evaluation, the adjusting of the breath, is really true: It’s the discernment faculty in your concentration. You begin to see fabrication. You begin to see how it can be used to energize the body, to calm the … 
  4. Things as They Function
     … There’s the body, feelings, mind, mental qualities. He says you can watch all four of them by staying with the breath. The breath itself, of course, is an aspect of the body. There will be feelings of pleasure or discomfort associated with the breath: That’s feelings. There’s mindfulness and alertness: That’s your mind state. And then there are mental qualities … 
  5. Right Effort
     … That requires that you understand the process of breathing, you understand how you relate to feelings, what can actually done with a feeling of pleasure, how it can be allowed to spread, what ways of trying to make it spread don’t work, what ways do work. This requires effort. But when you have the right attitude toward the effort, you enjoy it, and … 
  6. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … Where do you feel that? The person was saying all she could feel was the air coming in from the outside, along with the need to pull that air in. I said, “Well, what is it that pulls it in?” The air doesn’t come in on its own. It’s the energy in the body. That’s the breath the Buddha’s talking … 
  7. Meditation Prep
     … Empathetic joy is the antidote for any feelings of resentment you may feel for somebody else’s good fortune. You realize that resentment doesn’t do you any good at all. People who are enjoying good fortune must’ve done something sometime that leads to happiness, so why resent it? Do you want people to resent good fortune when it comes your way? Of … 
  8. Staying Grounded
     … not too hot, not too cold, not too heavy, not too light—a place where it feels really good to stay, where it feels natural to stay, where you feel like you’ve really come back home. When you’re grounded like this, you get a better sense of when is an appropriate time to think, and when is an appropriate time not to … 
  9. There’s Work to Be Done
     … The first thing you direct your attention to is to see what rhythm of breathing feels good. He recommends long breathing to start with, to energize the body, and as long as long breathing feels refreshing and energizing, keep it up. When it starts feeling tiring, then you can let it calm down, get it shorter, more shallow. And take an interest in the … 
  10. Elemental Normalcy
    Traditionally, when you’re practicing metta meditation, you start with people who are easy to feel metta or goodwill for: people close to your heart, people you love. And then once you feel a sense of well-being with that goodwill, you start spreading the same thoughts to others who are more and more difficult until you find that you can sincerely wish that … 
  11. Delight in Striving
     … And then there’s mental fabrication, which is perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you’ve put on things—that identify what they are, what they mean, how important they are. Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. These are things that we *do *fabricate. We may think that our feelings just come at us ready-made, but they … 
  12. Dissolving Narratives
     … Sometimes when the body feels heavy, you want to develop a sense of lightness with the energy that’s coming in and going out. Other times, when the mind feels scattered or wired, you need to give it some grounding. So learn how to bring things into balance so that it feels right being here. It feels just right being right here. When the … 
  13. Putting out the Flame
     … The same with feelings: The Buddha says to see feelings as like bubbles on the water when the rain falls, say, on a river, and little bubbles form on the surface of the water. They disappear almost as soon as they’re formed. The same goes for all the other aggregates. They’re basically without essence, without substance. And you’re going to create … 
  14. The Uses of Pleasure
    When the Buddha called his path of practice a middle way between the extremes of indulgence in sensual pleasure and indulgence in self-torment, he didn’t mean that it was going to adopt a neutral feeling-tone. He was offering a different kind of pleasure and a different way of relating to it. The different kind of pleasure is the pleasure of concentration … 
  15. Signs Along the Road
     … The same with feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves. For example, when you focus on the breath, this is an aspect of the body in and of itself. Then you follow the instructions for breathing mindfulness. Basically, the descriptions of right mindfulness in the Canon are descriptions of what you* *do in order … 
  16. Succeeding at Happiness
     … If you’re not feeling nourished by your concentration, something’s wrong. So give full attention to what you’re doing, in terms of the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself about the breath, the images you hold in your mind about the breath, the feelings that develop in the body as a result, and then what you do with those … 
  17. Complexities of the Mind
     … What did you do? How did you focus on the breath? Where were you focused? What feelings surrounded the mind as it began to settle down? To what extent can you recreate that? The next time around, you want to try that. See if you can recreate it. Ask yourself, what did it feel like? What were the steps going in? You want to … 
  18. The Challenge of Right View
     … If you really are serious about developing goodwill for all beings, you have to remember that you’re sure to run into people for whom it’s hard to feel goodwill. The whole purpose of the practice is to dig through your entrenched dislikes and to ask yourself: “How can I feel goodwill for that person? They’ve done this. How can I feel … 
  19. Meaning & Becoming
     … Even though he’s king, when he’s sick, he can’t order his courtiers to take some of the pain that he’s feeling and share it among them to allow him to feel less pain. He has to feel the pain all alone. And even though he has great wealth, he can’t take the great wealth with him when he dies … 
  20. Patience
     … As the Buddha says, we engage in different activities that he classes under the aggregates, and each of those aggregates — whether it’s form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, or consciousness — is something we fabricate for the sake of something else. In other words, we have means and we have goals. The goals are either directly or indirectly aimed at happiness. This is how we … 
  21. What to Keep in Mind
     … Where does it feel good, where does it not feel good? When it doesn’t feel good, what can you do to change it? If you don’t have any idea how to change it, just watch things for a while and pose that question in the mind: If the breath were allowed to do its own healing work, where would it flow? Learn … 
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