Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 53
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. A Noble Choice
     … You’ve got your awareness of the present moment; you’ve got the body as you feel it from within, the breath as you feel it. But being content doesn’t mean you just sit there with whatever you’ve got. You learn the skills to make the most of what you’ve got here. How do you make the most out of the … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...