Search results for: "Form"

  1. Page 56
  2. Skills to Take Home
     … At the same time, the energy of the breath can form a shield. Because when your awareness fills the body—good breath energy fills the body—it’s very difficult for other people’s energy to penetrate, to invade. All too often we leave huge gaps, huge sections of the body undefended, and other people will invade them. We pick up their moods, we … 
  3. Pain Is a Noble Truth
     … Don’t let the pain form a wall to the breath energy. Remember, the breath energy is prior. Your sense of the body, your sense of what’s going on in the body, is always filtered through the breath. Yet sometimes we get things backwards. We think that if there’s a pain or if there’s a solid feeling of blockage someplace, the … 
  4. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … It’s not a sensual pleasure, it’s a pleasure of form, how you sense the body from within. How do you feel your body from within? Your feet? Your hands? Your arms? Your torso? Your head? Just try to be in touch with that. Try to get on familiar terms with it. When you’re on familiar terms, then you can feel warm … 
  5. Delighting the Mind
     … What’s happening, especially with these last two forms of delight, is that you’re moving from gladdening the mind into concentrating the mind, and then from concentrating the mind into releasing the mind, which completes the four steps that the Buddha lists in his discussion of mind as it develops in breath meditation. So the gladdening does a lot of the work. Remind … 
  6. The Wounded Warrior
     … Concentration is a form of strength. It’s one of five ways the Buddha lists for strengthening the mind. The first strength is to have conviction, first, in the awakening of the Buddha, that it really did happen, he really did awaken through his own efforts. The message there being that he was a human being. He could do it. And even though he … 
  7. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … So, when the Buddha gives his teachings like dependent co-arising, the four noble truths, or the three perceptions, they’re a form of social conditioning, too. This is why the Forest tradition never describes them as ultimate truths. They’re assumptions. They’re conventions. We use the Buddha’s conventions because they serve a purpose that our ordinary conventions can’t. His perceptions … 
  8. Seeing the Stillness
     … What is rupa jhana made out of? It’s based on form, the first khandha, and includes the other four khandhas as well. Learn how to use these things in a way that turns your objects of delusion and suffering into the path. Once the path has done its job, then you let it go. But first you have to learn where to hold … 
  9. Goodwill Without Limits
     … It doesn’t come under the four establishings of mindfulness but it’s an important form of mindfulness to inform the entirety of your practice. You want the entire heart and the entire mind to gain freedom, so both sides of the *citta *have to be trained. Of course, there’s not just goodwill in the brahmaviharas. They also include compassion: You see somebody … 
  10. Not-selfing Your Selves
     … But the fact that we see the identity as a useful strategy, a useful tool, means that we’re going to hold onto it regardless, no matter how many times people point out the fact that form is inconstant, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness, are all inconstant. Still, we feel, “Well, at least they’re constant enough for us to use.” And the effort that … 
  11. The Whole Elephant
     … It really does form a part of the path to the deathless that takes you out of your blindness. Right resolve is right because it works—and so on down all the factors of the path. That’s why the Buddha included it in his handful of leaves—and why he would have distinguished the leaves in his hand from the dirt he left … 
  12. Up for the Challenge
     … First, you should try to comprehend suffering, which means seeing that suffering is in the act of clinging to form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, consciousness. You want to see yourself suffering in the act of clinging itself. Sometimes we’re told that we suffer because we cling to impermanent things. But it’s possible to cling even to permanent things and still suffer. You … 
  13. How to Save the World
     … One, it’s staying with a sense of well-being; and two, when intentions do form in the mind, you’re right here to watch them. You can see them as they arise; you can see what they’re coming from. All too often, intentions seem to just come out of the blue. You want to do this, you want to do that, and … 
  14. Choiceful Awareness
     … how they form at the frontier area where they’re not clearly mental or physical. There’s a kind of stirring, and you can just leave it as a stirring in the breath energy, or the mind could slap a perception or label on it and turn it into a thought and go running with it. But as you’re staying right here, you … 
  15. Like a River Full of Water
     … They want to sell you their lesser forms of happiness, so they teach you to have doubts about the possibility of true happiness can be found. The Buddha didn’t speak in those terms at all. He said it can be found. It can be found through your own efforts. And where do your efforts come from? They come from the mind, so the … 
  16. Cook Your Mind
     … As you’re holding to the precepts, as you’re developing right effort, you’re going to be dealing with these different forms of fabrication: the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, your perceptions and feelings. Those are aggregates. You get hands-on practice in using those aggregates to develop skillful thoughts, to calm the mind down, to create a state … 
  17. Freedom from Beliefs
     … Sometimes they come in more subtle forms. Sometimes they take up the voice of the Dhamma. “You should be doing this. You should be doing that”̦—when it’s actually not what should you be doing at all. You should be staying with your breath right now. So you have to learn how to recognize all these voices as distractions, as things you’ve … 
  18. The Joy of Curiosity
     … We actually continue to find joy in agency, but we find more and more mature forms of joy by figuring out our own mind. This is one of the reasons why meditation can be so frustrating, though, because the mind is very complex. We follow the instructions one day and they seem to work. The mind settles down. Then you do what you think … 
  19. Think Calmly about Death
     … So even though this point may not be confirmed for you, keep reminding yourself, “You are not the body.” Rupam anattā: “Form is not-self.” The same with all the other aggregates. But the question is, “When you leave these things, where are you going to go?” As long as there’s craving, you don’t have to worry about having nowhere to go … 
  20. Suffering Starts Before Life
     … As the Buddha said, it’s around that hunger, around that desire, that becoming forms. Now, clinging is the intermediate stage between the craving and the becoming. As we mentioned the other day, there are four kinds of clinging. Even though you’re clinging to the aggregates, you’re often not aware of the aggregates themselves. You’re more aware of what you’re … 
  21. The Breath Soufflé
     … In creating this and maintaining it, you learn a lot about the mind’s habits of fabrication because you’re engaged in all three forms of fabrication. There’s physical fabrication, which is the effect of the breath on the body; verbal fabrication, what you talk to yourself about; and then mental fabrication, the feelings you create through the breathing, through your attention to … 
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