Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Refuge… There’s a feeling of pleasure and the more neutral feelings that come as you stay with the breath. There are the perceptions that keep you with the breath through the way you picture the breath to yourself. You can work with those to see what way of picturing the breath leads to a feeling of breathing that feels really good inside. There’s …
- Nostalgia for Suffering… There’s a part of the mind that wants to have somebody else there acknowledge, yes, that really was suffering, that really is something to feel sorry for, so that people should pity you, feel compassion, feel empathy, sympathy. That’s nostalgic. We’re nostalgic for our suffering. And yet one of the qualities of the third noble truth is analayo, which means letting …
- Moving Between Thought Worlds… Just because a strong feeling or thought arises in the mind doesn’t mean that you have to go with it, or that the feeling is genuinely you. Remember that “who you are” has to be put into quotation marks. You can make a sense of “who you are” around anything, and there are many potentials available in any given moment. So just because …
- The Buddha’s Currency… You’ve given something where you feel inspired to give. It wasn’t under any compulsion, any force, any pressure to do. It was simply out of the pure goodness of your own heart and mind that you wanted to give. Now the gift has been given, and as the Buddha said, when you give wisely, you’re happy beforehand at the idea of …
- The Intelligent Heart… If you haven’t been meditating before, you’ll probably find that there’s a pain here, a little ache there, this is not comfortable, that feels tense, that feels tight. But instead of running away from those things, you decide to let your awareness settle down around them. Let the breath gently work on them, and you find that you can dissolve a …
- Strength of Conviction: 1… Once you’ve found someone you feel you can trust, then the next factor is that you listen to the true Dhamma. Here again, you test it—and here again, the testing requires that you have some qualities that make you a fair judge. You look for the Dhamma that can be put into practice and then try it out. Think it through first …
- Warm Your Heart… He says, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel it would do the most good.” There’s a wide range of gifts that would be appropriate, people it would be appropriate to give with. He basically says, “If you feel inspired to give to anybody, don’t let anybody get in the way.” But then again, you have to think about it: You …
- Accepting the Way Out… If the breath doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Then there’s verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself about the issue at hand. That’s tied in with mental fabrication, your feelings and your perceptions of what’s going on. And one of the big perceptions that keeps you in a bad mood is, “Why me? Why am I the …
- Purity of Heart… We feel we need these things in order to survive; that’s how we keep going as beings. When our food source seems to be threatened, we react. In that way, we’re no different from dogs or other animals. You threaten their food and they’re going to snarl and bite. When we feel that our food is threatened, we snarl and bite …
- Switch the Context… How can you settle down? What’s the best way to get the breath so that it feels good enough to settle down? It doesn’t have to be perfect. We’re not running a breath competition here. There’d be no way to judge the results or judge the contestants, anyway. We’re here to get the breath so that it’s okay …
- Doing… That’s why we’re focusing on the breath, trying to figure out what way of breathing feels best right now: long or short, fast or slow, heavy or light, deep or shallow; which parts of the body feel best doing the breathing, which parts should be relaxed and not have to do any work in the breathing. There are lots of things you …
- Tenacity… how to breathe in such way that feels good coming in, it feels good going out, it feels good being in your body. In the different passages in the texts where the Buddha gives analogies for the factors of the path, concentration is often compared to food. It’s the nourishment that keeps you going: a sense of ease, a sense of rapture or …
- High-Level Dhamma… Ajaan Maha Boowa tells a story when he was out in the forest one time and feeling very frustrated about his meditation. It so happened it was a holiday. The people in the village nearby were playing music and doing whatever else they did on a holiday, making a lot of noise. He could hear the noise way off in the distance. At first …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… If you’re feeling sleepy, you can ask yourself, “How do the manifestations of sleepiness play out in the body? Where do you feel them?” In other words, give yourself a question to pursue, to pique your interest. In this way, you’re taking the route that Ajaan Maha Boowa describes as discernment fostering concentration, where your inquisitive mind takes the lead. As the …
- The Dhamma Eye… If you want to be happy, this is what you’ve got to do, whether you feel like it or not. This is the way true happiness is found. So we can’t take our feelings as our guides, because our feelings have led us to all kinds of suffering in the past. Once you realize that, that’s when you begin to say …
- Not-self for the Sake of Happiness… It very much identifies with the feelings of pleasure or pain, and will tend to fabricate a lot of thoughts and perceptions around feelings, the pleasures and pains that have come from your actions. This is where we may tend to exaggerate how wonderful something was, as a way of motivating the producer to produce more. And of course, the consuming self identifies with …
- To Know the Buddha… As they say in Pali, rūpa ruppati, which means form deforms; feelings feel; perceptions perceive; fabrications fabricate; consciousness cognizes. They’re not things. When we talk about them as aggregates, it sounds as if they’re piles of gravel, but they’re actually activities. And the activity itself is suffering, stress. We do these things for the sake of happiness—we cling to them …
- Appropriate Attention Always… Once you can exercise your persistence, get rid of those unskillful qualities of the mind, the mind is going to feel rapture, to feel calm, to get concentrated. Within the concentration, as it develops, the feelings get more refined, your perceptions get more refined. Then you can get to a state of really solid equanimity, where you can see things as they’re happening …
- The Easy Way Out… We feel the pain but we think that it’s coming from something else. We grow up when we really realize that, okay, the arrow is here, and that we’re the ones shooting ourselves. There’s another discourse where the Buddha says that whenever physical pain comes, it’s like one arrow being stuck in us—and then we shoot ourselves with another …
- The Practice of Right View… How does the breathing feel? Where do you feel it? How many layers of breath energy are there in the body? When you breathe in, what’s happening in the different parts of the body? When you breathe out, what’s happening? Do you know the places where you tend to hold on or to force the breath or to squeeze the breath in …
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