Search results for: "Feelings"
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- The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis… Exactly where in in those parts do you feel lust for someone else, or pride in your own body? Which of those organs is the center of your lust? Well, none of them, when you take them apart like that. Then why is it that, when you put them together, you can feel desire? What is the mind doing to itself? This is why …
- To Know the Noble Truths… The sense of your body as you feel it from within—that’s form. Feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Perceptions, the labels you put on things that give them meaning. As with a stoplight: You see the red and you tell yourself, “That’s red.” Then what’s the meaning of red? It means, “stop.” Then there’s a question of …
- Nurturing Patient Endurance… How are you breathing right now? Where in the body does the breath feel good? Focus your attention there, and be patient with it, because good may not be very good in the beginning. To be protective of that spot in the right way, think of it being wide open. Don’t allow any thoughts to come in that would squeeze it up, tighten …
- Changing Your Mind… And you realize that it really can be your home—the place where you feel stable, the place where you feel secure. That way, when other, more changeable things come up, you can see them for what they do. And when the changes happen in the mind, you can see them as well. The changes that happen out in the world are not nearly …
- Merit & Skill… It’s because she feels that she would be happier dead than having to live with the thought that, if the child had died, she hadn’t done everything to protect the child. So sometimes we’re faced with difficult choices like that. But we end up choosing which one we think is going to make us happier. So everything we do has a …
- Your Inner Mob… The blood starts racing faster, the heart’s racing faster, different feelings of tension and pressure arise in different parts of the body. When you’re angry, there’s a weird feeling in your gut. And because there are the physical symptoms you say, “Gee, this must be what I really feel.” But that’s not the case. It’s just your hormones running …
- What’s Getting in the Way… One way of inducing rapture is to ask yourself, “Which parts of the body right now feel relaxed or even just okay?” When you breathe in, can they maintain that quality of feeling okay, or is there a little squeeze on them? Try noticing your hands. You breathe in, breathe out, and does the flow of energy at any point in the breath cycle …
- Doing Nothing… For instance, analysis of qualities enables you to figure out exactly how much pressure to put on the breath, how to breathe in a way feels just right for all the different parts of the body. You don’t breathe in a way that satisfies one part by making another part uncomfortable. You try to figure out how to make the whole body feel …
- A Becoming Critic… You do it through the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you use—the images you hold in mind or the words by which you label things—along with the feelings you focus on. Notice how you put these things together to make a state of becoming. It’s like learning to be a film critic. You don’t …
- Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity… This counteracts the ill will we sometimes feel when we see someone harming people we love or people we’re concerned about. There’s part of the mind that says, “I’d like to see them suffer a little bit, to get a taste of what they’ve been handing out to other people.” But think about it: Often when people are suffering from …
- Two Hands Washing… If you feel any tension or tightness, realize: that’s not a bone feeling. The bones don’t have any tension or tightness. That’s just the muscles around the bone. So you relax them. You go through the whole body this way. This is a very systematic way of relaxing all the different patterns of tension in the body. So at the same …
- Still… Just tell yourself, “Whatever I feel there, that must be breath. What does that tell me about breath?” Learn from that rather than telling it what it’s supposed to do. When you have that attitude of being receptive to what’s going on, it’s a lot easier to settle in, in a way that both the body and the mind feel like …
- The Power of Intention… You can stick with your intention to be with the breath and figure out, “How can I do this so that it’s actually good for the body—feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out, feels good where I’m focused?” You begin to see why the Buddha said that our intentions have such a huge impact in shaping our lives. That’s …
- The Sublime Attitudes… What are the limits of yours? After spreading goodwill to people you already feel it for — your friends, your family — start spreading it to people for whom you don’t spontaneously feel it. Does your heart object when you try spreading goodwill to people you dislike? Stop and ask it: Why? What would you gain from seeing them suffer? Look at the little voice …
- Helping Yourself by Helping Others… You’ve got to hold that irritation and anger under control, because all too often we feel that when other people are misbehaving, it gives us license to misbehave in return. Or we’re afraid that if we let them “walk all over us,” they’ll get used to treating us like a doormat. So we feel we have to show that we’re …
- Becomings… What causes the craving? Feeling. What causes the feeling? Contact. Try to take the process apart into these impersonal things, without any sense of you or a world around them. You begin to see that these are the raw materials from which that becoming was created, and there’s not much there: just things that arise/pass away, arise/pass away. Nothing of any …
- Attention to Your Potentials… There are also things that we feel we have to hold on to. If we don’t hold on to them, then we’ll feel lost. Sometimes we can cling to pretty negative things out of a sense that we have to do it. But whether you like the things you’re clinging to or not, still there’s a reason for wanting to …
- Balance & Release… tranquility is balanced with insight; the energy feels just right; the levels of desire, persistence, intentness, and analysis are all just right as they converge. It’s when everything feels balanced, and you’re very alert, that you begin to see things you didn’t see before. You’re in a more neutral position. The neutral position is what allows you to see. Try …
- Training Your Minds… What are you afraid of losing? What do you have that you feel threatened about? Think about the world outside. Things could fall apart pretty easily. They are falling apart. Your only safety is developing qualities inside that the world can’t touch. They can take your things, they can harm your body, but they can’t take your virtue. They can’t take …
- Humility & Confidence… In particular, you have to be open to how things feel inside the body. This is an area where we tend to be pretty ignorant. A lot of our knowledge goes outside. We don’t have much of a vocabulary to describe how we feel things inside. That’s why it tends to be unknown territory. So come with the attitude that you’re …
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