Search results for: "Feelings"
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- In the Mood to Meditate… Just sit down and tell yourself, “The body has total freedom to breathe in any way that’s going to feel good,” and it will respond. And the mind is willing to go along with it. There are other times, though, when it’s not. Either there are some physical difficulties or some spots of tension or whole globs of tension in your body …
- Centered on Concentration… And two, there’s that sense of ease and well-being, so that the insights don’t hit you when you feel weak, when you feel hungry. Concentration is a strength. Concentration is meant to be a food so that the mind feels strong and well nourished, ready to admit where it’s made its mistakes in the past. If you simply read the …
- Respect… What does that do to the way the breathing feels? What does that do to the way the body feels as a whole? There’s a lot to experiment with. And it’s through experimentation that we learn about the principle of cause and effect. Meditation is not simply a process of doing as you’re told. It’s learning about cause and effect …
- Luminous… There are other things that he doesn’t explain, but he wants you to find out for yourself, like how to breathe in a way that feels good. You observe what’s actually happening; how to take advantage of that good feeling; how you can learn about the mind’s relationship to feelings as you do this. Those are questions he does want you …
- Barriers in the HeartA lot of our suffering and stress come from the limitations we feel in our lives. We’ve got this body that needs constant care, and even though we care for it, what does it do? It starts getting old, it gets ill, it finally dies, no matter how well we care for it. And it doesn’t ask permission before it does any …
- Goodwill… When you’re receiving food every day from people like this, it’s hard not to feel gratitude, feel goodwill. You realize that the practice here is a group effort and that your meditation is not just your own private affair. It’s dependent on the generosity, the goodwill of other people. You look around the monastery here, everything here is a gift, or …
- The Brightness of Life… Try to be mindful, as the texts say, of the body in and of itself, or feelings, or the mind, or mental qualities in and of themselves. As we’re focusing on the breath, it’s body. But as you’re focusing right here on the body, you can’t help but be aware of feelings, because they’re right there. So try to …
- Don’t Objectify… Feeling feels, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes: That’s how he defines these things. So they are activities too. And yet we turn them into things, latch onto them, turn these things into our self, and then they turn on us, entangling us in conflict. The same with the world. He says that our basic ideas about the world come from our six …
- Guardian Meditations… There’s a skillful way to perceive; there’s even a skillful way to feel. Feeling comes not only from raw data, streaming in from the outside, but also from an element of fabrication and mental impulse. A physical impulse comes up your nerves, and your mind processes it before you’re really conscious of it. What we’re trying to do as we …
- Free from Animosity… our sense of the form of the body as we feel it from within, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental constructs—mental constructs are the stories we tell ourselves, the analyses, the comments, we make on things—and then finally consciousness at the senses. These are the things with which we ordinarily assemble our sense of who we are and what’s ours. Yet …
- One Person… Try to breathe in a way that feels really good there. You can think of the breath energy coming in from the front; you can think of it coming in from behind, from the left, from the right. See what feels best. Then try to maintain that sense of feeling really good. If the breath gets too long, it’ll drain you. If it …
- Developing Discernment… Then there’s mental fabrication—the pictures or labels you have in the mind, together with the feelings you’re trying to create here, feelings of well-being. So, picture the breath in the body in a way that helps you stay here, with a sense of the breath filling the whole body, well-being filling the whole body, and your awareness filling the …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… There’s a case in the Canon where someone reasons that all actions result in feeling, all feelings are stressful, so all actions result in stress. As the Buddha points out, that’s going to lead people to say, “It doesn’t matter what I do.” The three characteristics or the three perceptions are teachings where we have to know the right time and …
- Sensuality… Chocolate wisdom tends to be, “Take another one, indulge yourself, be nice to yourself, give yourself more cholesterol problems.” Even without the advertising industry, though, you have that way of thinking when you’re feeling really miserable and you tell yourself, “Give yourself an ice cream cone, give yourself some food, give yourself something sensual to make yourself feel better.” This is one of …
- Scramble the Image… Once you feel really established here, then you’re going to notice any movement of the mind that goes out in any direction. If you’re not yet well established, you’ll probably go with it. But as you get more and more used to being here—centered in this feeling of relaxation, this feeling of openness—there’ll come a point when you …
- Speaking Truth to Defilement… At another point, he said that if you feel no shame at telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil you will not do. So he takes lying that seriously. Because as we’re meditating, we have to learn more and more to tell the truth to ourselves. We get practice telling the truth on a daily basis. “Not even in a joke,” as …
- Resistance… For example, when you develop thoughts of goodwill there may be a little voice in the back of the mind saying, “Well, I don’t really feel goodwill for these people.” Or, “I don’t give a damn about where my thoughts are leading, I want to think about this.” Don’t assume that the purpose of these exercises in directed thinking is to …
- Imperturbable… You want to develop this skill of getting the mind really centered, gathering in, gathering in right here in a way that allows the body to feel at ease and the mind to feel unperturbed. If you allow it to get perturbed by things coming in through the senses, the Buddha said, it’s like a cow with flayed skin being attacked by flies …
- Full-Body Breath… realizing exactly how much thought your outside responsibilities really require, and how much is unnecessary, just a spinning of wheels, the type of thinking you go through because you’re used to it, and it feels good because you’re feeling responsible, but is not really all that necessary. The Buddha mentioned that the point where he first got on the right track on …
- Do, Maintain, Use… When you’ve got your awareness filling the body, you’ve got the breath filling the body, and it feels good, then you can stop evaluating the breath and just be with the sensation of breath coming in and going out. There’ll be a sense of ease, a sense of fullness. It feels just right being here. Try to maintain that. The maintaining …
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