Search results for: "Feeling"
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- Duties in the Present… If you’re feeling too tense, you may want to breathe in a way that’s more relaxing. Check out the state of your body, the state of your mind right now. Experiment to see what kind of breath is good for them. You can focus your attention in any part of the body where it’s easy to see that now the breath …
- Unlimited Mind, Limited Resources… If you see that they’re happy or doing things that lead to happiness, your goodwill leads you to feel empathetic joy. But then the fourth one is something of an outlier. The first three are expressed as wishes: “May all beings be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained.” But the …
- Introduction: Meditation as a Skill… What kind of breathing would feel good now? Notice in which parts of the body you sense the in-breath or the out-breath, and how those feelings feel. Are they pleasant or not? If they’re not pleasant, ask yourself: What would be a different way of breathing that would be pleasant? This is where you start using your ingenuity. And be very …
- Wise Choices… The Buddha has you work on developing a sense of ease, a sense of well-being in the present moment so that you feel at home here, you feel at ease. That way, when pain comes up, you don’t feel threatened by it. So you start working with good stones first, good hunks of marble. My mother was an author, and in one …
- Evaluation… How do you breathe in a way that feels good throughout the body? Think of the breath as a whole-body process. Sometimes you hear it said that you have to focus on the spot right under the nose, where you feel the air coming in and going out. Well, that’s a tactile sensation. The Buddha described the breath as an aspect of …
- Commit Yourself… It feels nice. This is where you have to be careful. Once it starts feeling nice and pleasant, it’s very easy to start drifting, like someone who’s about to fall to sleep. This is where you have to be especially careful to keep yourself interested in the breath, spreading comfortable breath sensations through the body or allowing them to spread, at the …
- Exercising the Mind… Try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. What kind of breathing feels comfortable right now? When you breathe in, what’s the point that lets you know you’ve breathed in enough, you can breathe out? Similarly, as you breathe out, what’s the point, what’s the sensation of the body that says, okay, enough out-breathing, now …
- Cooking the Mind… When you come out of the concentration, you feel refreshed. Okay, that’s a good sign. You have to learn by feeling your way. And the advantage of this is that you’re paying very close attention to what you’re doing right here and you’re not constantly comparing it to some idea you picked up someplace else. That’s how your discernment …
- A Path Under the Trees… What is it like to breathe right now? What kind of breathing would be comfortable? The Buddha does encourage you to breathe in ways that feel good. So you try long breathing, short breathing, faster, slower, heavier, lighter, deeper, more shallow, to see what feels refreshing for the body right now. After all, if you’re going to engage in renunciation, you can’t …
- Attached to the Body… A little urge appears in the mind, there’s a sensation that feels bad, and so you try to create a sensation that feels good: either at the eyes, ears, down through the senses. And the mind is able to build up so much around those little sensations. You have to look at the mind’s ability to create and also its ability to …
- Right Effort… Ask yourself, “How is the breath right now? How does it feel? What would feel better?” Once you’ve got something that feels good, how about spreading it around? And how do you spread comfortable breath around the body? This is also an element of right effort. If you push too hard, you destroy the comfort you started out with. If you don’t …
- Bases of Power… You start feeling a pain here and a pain there, and part of the mind says, “Well, that should be enough for tonight.” You say, “No, I’ve got to sit longer.” Put yourself in a situation where you’ve got to use the concentration to deal with the situation. For example, you tell yourself you’re going to sit for a certain length …
- Determined to Stay with the Breath… When it feels good in your hands, feels good in your feet, feels good in your arms and legs, in all the different parts of your torso, all the different parts of your head, then it’s nicer to stay here. It’s more interesting. There develops a sense of ease. If you allow that ease to have some space, it becomes a sense …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… Feeling feels, perception perceives, fabrications fabricate, and consciousness cognizes. Even form, the Buddha says, is a type of activity: It’s constantly de-forming. All of these things are present right here. The form, of course, is the breath. The feeling is the sense of ease you try to create with the breath—and you learn a lot about creating feelings. Feelings don’t …
- Your Territory… Experiment for a while to see what rhythm feels good. When you’ve found something that seems to feel good, stick with it until it doesn’t feel so good anymore. You can change. But you want to fully inhabit this territory. And for the time being, don’t recognize anything outside of this. The mind plays games with itself, and the main game …
- Challenges… With pain, of course, the issue is how not to feel irritated by it, how not to feel oppressed by it. One way is to remind yourself that not all of the body is in pain. Ajaan Lee compares the body to a mango. There may be a rotten spot in the mango, but you don’t have to eat the rotten spot. You …
- A Mind Like Earth… One is that if you spend a lot of time reacting to things—“This person said this, that person said that, this person thinks this, I had this feeling about that person”—you’re just wearing yourself out and, as result, you can’t think straight. I know a therapist who was once working with some kids in a school for kids who had …
- Refuge… Breathe in a way that feels nourishing. If your heart feels heavy, breathe in a way that lightens it. If your energy level feels down, breathe in a way that gives you energy. If you’re feeling wired, breathe in a way that calms you—something very simple and very immediate. And one of the good things about this is that you can take …
- To Be an Adult… The sad thing is that I’ve been to Dhamma centers where they feel that keeping you like a child is not enough, they want to keep you like an infant. Everything gets watered down so that you don’t feel too challenged, you don’t feel that you’re being judged, you don’t feel like anybody’s going to say anything negative …
- Long-Term Welfare… You do that in the course of learning how to use the concentration, so that it really feels good for whatever ails you. For example, if you’re feeling tired, there are certain ways of concentrating that give you more energy. If you’re feeling stressed out, there are other ways of focusing on the breath, adjusting the breath, so that it’s more …
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