Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. How to Straighten Out the World
     … Does shorter breathing feel good? Does longer breathing feel good? Just think longer and the breath will grow longer. Then you can notice if it feels right. If it does, maintain that rhythm. If not, you can change. You can think deep, shallow, heavy, light, or heavier, lighter, until you find a rhythm that feels right, until you find a texture of breathing that … 
  3. Best Friends
     … Does it feel good? Does it feel not good? Try to sensitize yourself as much as possible to the breathing energy in the body. Focus on any areas of the body where you can feel the breath coming in, the breath going out. Watch the breath there for a while, to see how it feels, to evaluate whether it feels pleasant or not. If … 
  4. Equanimity as a Factor of Awakening
     … The thought comes in with a feeling and it gets into your bloodstream. You feel patterns of tension in the body. You think, “If I don’t go along with that thought, or don’t follow through with that desire, I’ll just feel so tense I won’t be able to stand it.” This is why we have the breath as our basic … 
  5. Name & Form
    Name & Form January 24, 2020 When you close your eyes and focus on the breath as you feel it, you’re moving from the level of sensuality to the level of form. It’s a step up. The pleasures that can come from the level of form are much more refined and much less likely to lead to unskillful behavior than the pleasures of … 
  6. Fabrication
     … How does the breath feel? Does it feel good? If it does, stay with it. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change it. This is about the most basic level of conversation you can have with yourself. “Does this feel good or not? Comfortable or not? Yes. No.” And then you work with that. What are you working with? You’re working … 
  7. Think of the Consequences
     … One of the uses of concentration is to provide that foundation of well-being so that the mind isn’t so quick to jump at whatever it wants to do or feels like doing. It’s feeling well nourished, feeling strong inside, so then when the idea of doing or saying or thinking something comes up, you can ask yourself, “What would the long … 
  8. Meditate Because You Have To
     … If you have a breath that doesn’t feel all that satisfactory, ask yourself, “What kind of breath would feel more satisfactory?” and see how the body responds. One at a time, one at a time. Then there’s mental fabrication: feelings and perceptions. The perceptions here are the perceptions you hold in mind to stay with the breath, your images of what the … 
  9. Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
     … This comes down to a fairly abstract principle that the Buddha mentions in another passage—that when you experience a feeling of any sort, pleasant or painful, part of it is just a potential for the feeling coming from your past karma; the rest is the way you actualize that potential with your present intentions, your present karma. You fabricate the potential into an … 
  10. Pleasure & Pain
     … Then when you’ve got a spot here that feels good — the breath comes in, it feels good; the breath goes out, it feels good — you can let the sense of boundary around your little spot dissolve away. Think of the sense of ease spreading out from that spot, flowing along whatever channels there are in the body that pleasure can flow, permeating in … 
  11. Construction Techniques
     … perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things that tell you what they are and what they mean. Feelings are feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. These are things we do all the time. It’s through these activities that we shape our experience, not only right now, but also on into the future. The Buddha also talks … 
  12. Victory
     … your feelings of pain; your feelings of pleasure. People can sympathize with those feelings, but they can’t directly feel them—just as I can’t get into your visual perception and see what green looks like to you, to see if your green looks like my green, or to see if sour tastes the same to you as it tastes to me. In … 
  13. Your Inner Teacher
     … You’ve got these different potentials here for solid feelings or liquid feelings or energy feelings or warm feelings. Sometimes all you need to do is make a mental note that it’s possible for these feelings to be in any part of the body wherever they’re needed. That helps to dissolve a lot of the tension that tends to build up in … 
  14. Potentials for Rapture
     … Then notice—when you’re thinking about those uplifting themes, the things that make you feel inspired—how does the body feel? If it feels good, can you return to the body as it’s feeling that way and maintain that feeling? In other words, there are times when your perception of the breath gets in the way, and no matter how much you … 
  15. Behind the Scenes
     … Where do you feel it—the breathing process? And does it feel comfortable? Does it feel open and spacious, or does it feel tight and constricted? You can experiment with different kinds of breathing, but try to experiment in a way that doesn’t add more constriction. Just pose the question in the mind: What would feel good right now, longer breathing or shorter … 
  16. Wandering Aimlessly
     … There’s a feeling and then there’s a craving associated with the feeling, either to maintain it or to destroy it. Then you create the sense of yourself as both the consumer of the feeling—the person who’s experiencing the feeling—and person who has to do something about the feeling, either to maintain it or to get rid of it. In … 
  17. Giving Ballast to the Mind
     … And it feels refreshing, nourishing. When you get tired of a particular rhythm of breathing, you can change. Keep this up: What does the body want right now? What feels good right now? Of course, the body doesn’t really want anything, it’s the mind. What would feel good right now to the mind? Which part of the body would you like to … 
  18. Self-Hatred
     … Somehow we feel that feelings of guilt are who we really are. It’s where we sense ourselves most intently. There’s a rightness about feeling guilty, about feeling miserable. When we feel well, it doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t feel real. That’s an attitude you’ve got to unlearn. In the beginning, it doesn’t mean that you wipe the … 
  19. Standards for Thinking
     … We in the West tend to dismiss them as primitive chemistry, but they’re actually a very good vocabulary for noticing how you feel the body from within, and they give you some handles on what to do with what you feel. If you’re breathing in a way that makes you feel light-headed or dizzy, it’s a sign there’s too … 
  20. Thinking & Not Thinking
     … You try to bring the body and the feeling of pleasure and the mind together here in the present moment so that they stay together. With the body, it’s the breath. Try to think of the breath, be aware of the breath as it’s coming in going out. Watch it to see what kind of breathing feels good. Experiment to see what … 
  21. A Home of Your Own
    When we focus on the in-and-out breath, we’re focusing not so much on the air coming in and out through the nose as on the feeling of breathing as we feel it from inside. When you breathe in, which parts of the body move? Do they feel coordinated or do they feel like they’re working at cross purposes? Do they … 
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