Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 55
  2. You’ve Got Friends
     … Suffering here is primarily mental suffering, the mental pain we feel. The word dukkha in Pali, in its everyday meaning, is just pain. Here the Buddha’s talking mainly about the mental pain we feel, which can be connected with physical pain in the present moment or with mental issues purely in the mind, old issues that hang on inside and weigh us down … 
  3. Immersed in the Body
     … If your sense of self is flitting all around — first with a feeling, then with a perception, then back to a feeling again, then to perception and feeling, like those weird amoeba-like shapes that flit across the surface of water — it’s hard to observe, to get a sense of, “What is this self? Why does the mind need a sense of self … 
  4. Ingenuity
     … Suppose the body feels too warm. Where are the cool sensations in the body? Focus there. Give all your attention to that cool sensation, and let everything else go. Then think of the coolness spreading. When you’re feeling dizzy and faint, focus on the solidity of the body. Where do you feel solid sensations? The heavy sensations? Focus there. This is useful not … 
  5. Look after Yourself Happily
     … Buddhism is one of the few religions where they don’t make you feel embarrassed about wanting to be happy. It’s right up front. The question is, How do you do it? How do you find your happiness? Because we also take into consideration that thought, “May all living beings look after themselves with ease.” We don’t want our search for happiness … 
  6. Grief & Regret
     … You start out with a couple of good long deep in-breaths and deep out-breaths, both to establish where you feel the breathing process and to clear things out inside for a little bit. As long as deep breathing feels good, keep it up. When it doesn’t feel so good, you can change. In long, out short; in short, out long; in … 
  7. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … When the mind feels a temptation to go wandering off, you’ve got to settle back into the body again. Reestablish your connection with how the different parts of the body feel as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Where there’s a tension or tightness in one part of the body, you could think of the energy flowing through there. In the … 
  8. Anxiety
     … On the one hand, there’s the feeling of ease. It feels good to stay here. And then there are the perceptions, the images you have in your mind: the image of the breath, the image of the energy flowing. Actually, there are a lot of images running through the mind. If you dig around inside, you’ll find lots of ways in which … 
  9. Stay
     … There’s the visual field; the aural field—in other words, what you hear; then there’s what you might call the verbal field, which is filled with language, what you’re talking to yourself about; and then there’s the bodily field, the body simply as you feel it from within, right here, right now. As you close your eyes, you’re shutting … 
  10. Concentration
     … If you tend to the spot wherever you’re focused—you find it congenial, the breath feels good, the mind feels at home—tend to it and it’ll grow. And as you tend to it, you’re going to learn a lot about the mind. It’s not the case that you drop concentration to go to discernment. You learn about the mind … 
  11. Be Prepared
     … When you’re meditating, it’s good to find a spot in the body that’s your spot, that you can, with some confidence, go to that spot and know that you can manage to breathe in a way that makes that spot feel good. Try to keep it at a place that’s especially sensitive, so that when that spot feels good, then … 
  12. The Little Things
     … How does the breath feel when it comes in? Where do you feel it? Which parts of the body would really feel good if the breath could go there? Well, allow it to go there. Think of it going there. Then pay attention to the next breath. Where would that feel good? Allow it to go there. As for whether you’re going to … 
  13. The Importance of Being Truthful
     … What kind of breathing would feel good now? How about this breath? And then this breath? And keep it up. Sometimes you find that a regular rhythm feels good, and other times you find that one breath will have energized one part of the body but the next breath will have to energize a part that was missed by the last one. For some … 
  14. We’re All Learning the Ropes
     … As long as the mind is starving, feeling irritated and unhappy, all it can think about is immediate results, a desire for an immediate hit. To counteract this tendency, we feed the mind with concentration, we feed the mind with comfortable breath sensations, work those sensations through the body so that we can feel bathed in a sense of ease, realizing that nobody can … 
  15. The Power of Human Effort
     … As for the feelings, you notice they’re feelings of pleasure or feelings of not-pleasure. How can you maximize the pleasure by the way you focus on the breath, by the way you breathe? All of these things are issues of fabrication. As the Buddha said, we suffer because we fabricate our experience—but not out of whole cloth. We fabricate it out … 
  16. The Quest for Inner Happiness
     … It would feel very gratifying just to say, “Breathe in. Breathe out. Allow the breath to nourish every little cell in the body.” So if you’re not feeling nourished by the breath, ask yourself, “What would be more nourishing?” Explore. Experiment. This is how you bring those three qualities of wisdom, compassion, and purity to bear on what you’re doing. You start … 
  17. Beyond Duality
     … Select the parts of the body that feel good. In the beginning, they may feel good only during one part of the breathing cycle, say, just while you’re breathing in, or just while you’re breathing out. Learn how to get them to feel good both with the in-breath and the out-breath, to maintain that sense of ease all the way … 
  18. Respect for the Path
     … And if deep breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Try shorter breathing, or in short out long, in long out short. In short, out long tends to be relaxing; in long out short tends to be more energizing. Fast, slow, heavy light. Deeper, more shallow. Try to notice what kind of breathing feels good for … 
  19. Metta Metacognition
     … When you’re generous, when you freely give something to someone else, it feels good to do it, especially if it was a totally voluntary gift. You could have taken what you had and used it yourself, but you decided, “No, give it to someone else, make them happy.” You develop an expansive feeling of wealth, a sense of having more than enough. The … 
  20. Choices
     … believing that one side of you is dealing with pure feeling—wanting this, wanting that, pure emotion—whereas the other side is dealing with reason: pointing out what’s right and what’s wrong. There’s a constant struggle between the two. But again, the two of them are connected. There are thoughts behind your feelings, and feelings behind your thoughts. A feeling is … 
  21. What Are You Bringing?
     … You consciously go through the people you love, the people you like, the people you’re neutral about, and even the people you dislike, trying to feel an attitude of genuine goodwill for them all. Of course, the people you dislike are the hardest ones. Don’t pretend that you feel goodwill when you don’t, but you’ve got to dig out: Why … 
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