Search results for: "Feelings"

  1. Page 75
  2. Admirable Intentions
     … Alert means being alert to how the breath feels in the different parts of the body. Ardent means trying to do this well. If you find the mind wandering off into thoughts of greed and distress, you just bring it right back. Actually, you don’t have to bring it back. Just drop those thoughts, and you find that the mind tends to gravitate … 
  3. Control
     … He has a disease and he can’t order other people to share out the pain of the disease so that he can feel less pain. He has to feel all the pain of the disease himself. It would be easy to talk about the disappointments and lack of control of life when you’re talking about people who are poor and powerless, but … 
  4. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … The skills are primarily in the three kinds of fabrication—bodily, the way you breathe; verbal, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental, the perceptions and the feelings you focus on. They’re all important. For instance, with the breath: When a strong emotion comes on, you can’t just talk yourself out of the emotion. You have to realize that the … 
  5. The Dhamma Wheel in the Heart
     … So as not to feel threatened, you go back to the concentration. Try to get in touch with your breath. Try to smooth things out inside so that you have a place where you feel comfortable before you deal with the thought. In the course of developing the concentration, you also find that you’re actually getting quicker about seeing little signals in the … 
  6. The Power of Choice
     … Notice which kind of breathing feels good, which kind of breathing doesn’t feel good. And keep nudging it toward the more comfortable kind, and then nudging it toward greater and greater, more and more subtle levels of pleasure. The one thing you have to watch out for here is that when it starts getting really comfortable you can tend to drift off. Because … 
  7. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … If you hold on to yourself and say, “I’m this kind of person and I wouldn’t feel comfortable being anything else,” reflect on the fact that you’ve been many, many identities. Think of Ajaan Mun recollecting his previous lifetimes. He came across a period when for 500 lifetimes he was a dog. It’s hard to think of Ajaan Mun as … 
  8. Stick to Your Duties
     … The problem is, as the Buddha says, the desire and passion you feel for them. So you want to figure out: Why is there the desire? Why is there the passion? What is the allure? Then you take the desire and passion and you separate them from the form, or the feeling, or the perception, the thought construct, the act of consciousness that you … 
  9. Into Position
     … It’s good to start with a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the process of the breathing in the body most clearly. Focus your attention there. Then try to decide how you know when a breath is comfortable or not at that spot. You try different ways of breathing, and you’ll find that some … 
  10. Nurturing Your Inner Adult
     … There’s the breath, which is bodily fabrication; directed thought and evaluation—in other words, the way you talk to yourself about an issue—are verbal fabrications; and then there are perceptions and feelings, which are mental fabrications. Feelings here are not so much emotions. They’re more feeling tones: pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images that underlie the thoughts … 
  11. The Best Use of Your Time
     … So wherever you notice the feeling of the breathing, you can focus right there. Try to set the intention that you’re going to stay right there as well. Of course, what will happen is that, after a couple breaths, other intentions will come up. You want to think about this, you want to remember that plan for this, whatever. You have to remind … 
  12. Equanimity in Heart & Mind
     … Where do you feel that it flows in? Here, we’re not talking about the air. We’re talking about the energy. Where does it come in? Or does it feel more like it’s originating from inside the body itself, and welling up to fill the whole body? Which perception do you find more nourishing? So explore. Try to get a sense of … 
  13. Dispassion & Delight
     … As the Buddha himself put it, if we say simply that all action leads to stress—because all actions lead to feelings, and feelings are stressful and not-self—what motivation would people have to do what’s skillful? How could they follow the path? There was a psychological study done years back of people in Sri Lanka who were said to be very … 
  14. Endurance Through Discernment
     … Through the way you breathe you can create feelings that enable you to sit with the pain for a longer period of time and feel less threatened by it. Of course, there will be things that will come up in life that you can’t breathe through, or when you breathe through them you can’t make them go away. This applies to things … 
  15. The Evening News
     … The same with feelings: You get sensitive to when there’s rapture and pleasure coming from getting the mind concentrated. Then you see how those things together with the perceptions that go with them—the perception of the breath, the perception of the feelings, the perception of the body—have an impact on the mind. They fabricate the mind. Then you allow that impact … 
  16. What’s Not on the Map
     … This means that although you can get a general sense of this skill beforehand by reading and listening to people talk, the actual practice is something you’ve got to learn to feel your way through. Getting that right feel for the practice is the essence of mastery. The basic principles may apply to everybody, but no one else has ever trained your particular … 
  17. The Patience of a Hunter
     … Try to see what way of breathing feels good right now, just right for the body, just right for the mind. “Just right for the body” means that you’re not adding any unnecessary tension. And if the body feels tired, you breathe in a way that’s energizing. If it feels tense, you breathe in a way that’s relaxing. “Just right for … 
  18. Unentangled Compassion
     … Take a couple of experimental in-and-out breaths—deep, long—and see how it feels. If long, deep breathing feels good—keep it up. If not, you can change. Notice where you sense the breath or the process of breathing most clearly, and focus your attention there. Then allow the breath to find a rhythm and texture that feels good. That’s it … 
  19. Close to What You Know
     … You’re sitting here focusing on your breath, so notice how the breath feels. If it doesn’t feel comfortable, see what you can to do to make it more comfortable. In other words, notice what you’re doing and notice the results. That’s a very direct kind of knowledge. The sensation of ease or stress or whatever you’re feeling with the … 
  20. Worthy of Trust
     … They suddenly find themselves in a world where, say, the principle of karma doesn’t apply, so they feel they can do anything, think anything, and say anything they want. Then they find themselves in another frame of reference, and wonder: How could I have said that? How could I have done that? This is why we sometimes sense that the mind is out … 
  21. Training in Commitment & Reflection
    Try to breathe in a way that feels nourishing to the body. Ajaan Lee recommends starting out with some good, long, deep in-and-out breaths as a way of energizing yourself and emphasizing the process of breathing, so that you can see clearly: Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out. Wherever it feels most prominent, focus your attention … 
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