Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 53
  2. Persistence
     … If you have trouble with your legs going asleep during the meditation, start right now paying careful attention to how the back of your neck feels as you breathe in. Does it feel good? What could you change? Is there any tightness there? See if you can loosen it up. Now work down the spine. You find that by improving the circulation down through … 
  3. Self-Reliance
     … Does this breath feel good? Well, it feels okay. How about changing it here? What will that do? Watch it for a while. You may be not too sure yet, but follow it for a while and see. Be willing to observe. Be willing to experiment. Stick with it for a while and see what happens. If the results start getting unpleasant, then you … 
  4. Cross-questioning
     … Well, you’ll feel better, but it’s not going to take you anywhere. It’s like that old analogy of trying to get milk out of a cow by twisting its horn. You twist it and twist it and twist it and nothing comes. Then you finally realize that when you no longer twist the horn, you feel better, the cow feels better … 
  5. Desire
     … Some people feel threatened by this. Again, here’s another area where concentration is helpful. It’s a lot easier to let go of things when you’re feeling good—when you’re feeling settled, when you’re feeling whole as you’re doing the concentration—than it is when you’re feeling hungry and desperate. Up to this point, it’s simply a … 
  6. Standing Where the Buddha Stood
     … What you’ve got left at that point are feelings and perceptions. These are the big issues, because as the Buddha pointed out, feelings are the basis for craving. When the mind is there in the fourth jhana, you can see this very clearly. The perceptions are what shape your awareness of what you’re experiencing. You can see this fact clearly as well … 
  7. The Role of Attachment
     … You stay simply with the good feeling of the breath. Even though it may not be accompanied by bright lights or whistles or confetti, still, it’s a nice state, a pleasant state. It may feel like a vanilla state to begin with, but as you stay with it, it starts taking on more flavor. So hold on to that. This requires, to some … 
  8. For the Cessation of Dukkha
     … Breathe in ways it feels good so that it feels good simply inhabiting the body. This is called the pleasure of form. It’s different from the pleasure of sensuality. The pleasure of sensuality depends on things outside being a certain way, but they almost never really correspond to our desires. As the Buddha said, it would have to rain gold coins and it … 
  9. Strong-hearted
    When you focus your attention on the breath, you’re focusing on something that only you can know—how you feel the breathing from inside, how you feel your awareness from inside—because this is where the problem is, and this is where the solution will be found. The problem is that we act in unskillful ways. We let greed, aversion, and delusion take … 
  10. When it’s Hard to Settle Down
     … Does it feel really good when you breathe in right down in that area or does it just feel kind of bland? If it feels bland, ask yourself what would be really satisfying there, what would feel really, really good there, and see how the body responds. Sometimes it’ll involve thinking of the breath coming in from another direction than you normally think … 
  11. A Good Foundation
     … We’re here to explore how the body feels from within and how we can make it a pleasant place to stay, a good foundation, so that we feel secure in the present moment. Because, as I said, the insights we’re going to gain can sometimes be pretty painful. Especially if you don’t like seeing your own stupidity. Ajaan Suwat once said … 
  12. Ugly Body, Happy Mind
     … When the ajaans talk about contemplating feelings, especially feelings of pain, the issue comes down to: What’s creating a bridge between the physical pain and the pain that you’re suffering from in the mind? It’s a perception. What kind of perception? Why do you think in those terms? The same with the contemplation of the parts of the body: The Buddha … 
  13. Fabricating against Defilement
     … And because that’s such an unpleasant physical feeling, or series of physical feelings, you’re overwhelmed with the desire to get it out of your system. You think that by expressing the anger, saying something harsh or clever, whatever, will keep the feeling from staying bottled up in the body. But that doesn’t work at all. It just creates new habits: that … 
  14. Making an Effort
     … The kind of happiness that comes through ordinary effort in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, ideas, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness: There’s effort in all of these things. The basic building blocks of our experience, the five aggregates, require fabrication. Even before we sense things, there’s an element of fabrication going on in the mind. If the mind weren … 
  15. Breath Energies
     … There are certain issues in life where we feel that we’ve been unjustly treated, and it’s good to remember that karma has been going on for a long, long time. And the back and forth that we’ve had with one another has been so, so long and so complex that there’s really nobody to keep tally. And it wouldn’t … 
  16. The Armored Car
     … You don’t constantly let your feelings be hurt. You have to keep reminding yourself, “If something’s being thrown at me, I threw it at somebody in the past.” That helps to deal with the sense of righteousness that comes when you feel like you’ve been wronged. Actually, you’ve been wrong in the past, too. And whatever the back and forth … 
  17. Transparent Becoming
     … Or if you’re feeling discouraged in the practice, think about other people who have had problems in the practice and yet were able to get through them and come out on the other side. If you’re feeling lazy, you can think about death. It could come at any time. Are you ready to go? If not, get to work. If you find … 
  18. The Purpose of Empathetic Joy
     … Isn’t it a higher thing to feel compassion for those who are suffering than to be happy for those who are happy? Well, it’s more than just being happy for those who are happy. You think about the fact that they did something in order to gain that happiness. In fact, you’re also happy for those who are creating the causes … 
  19. Persistence
     … But if you’re with the body—your sense of your hands, your feet, your legs, your arms, your torso, your head, all the parts of the body— those parts can be very quiet and yet you can still feel them nevertheless. So move your focus there. Ask yourself what kind of breathing would feel good in those parts of the body. You can … 
  20. Parsing Out Suffering
     … There’s another place where he says that everything converges in feeling, particularly our desire for feelings for pleasure. But then you look at people in the world and you look at yourself: There are a lot of things you do that cause suffering and yet you find pleasure in them. That’s what you’ve got to understand. That’s why the Buddha … 
  21. The Noble Pursuit of Happiness
     … After all, if you resent other people’s happiness, you’re not going to feel right about your own. And if you can’t feel right about your own happiness, it’s going to be hard to see other people happy. The two go together, which is why they’re part of a set. The Buddha taught four brahmaviharas, he didn’t teach just … 
  22. Load next page...