Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 77
- A Slave to Craving… It feels good to breathe in, feels good to breathe out. The more intense the pleasure that comes from this, the more the mind is willing to settle down and focus totally on the process of breathing in the body. Then you think of all the other pleasures you could be indulging in now, and you realize that this is much better. It’s …
- Beneficial Thinking… They feel they have a bad enough body image as it is, they don’t need to make it worse by thinking about what’s inside the body. But there’s a difference between a healthy negative image of the body and an unhealthy negative image. Most of us have an unhealthy one. We see somebody else as having a really nice body, but …
- Jhana: Responsible Happiness… It’s as if you ask: “What do you need, stomach? What kind of breath energy would feel good right here?” Give it what it wants. Then you move to the chest. “What do you need, chest? What breath energy would feel good right here?” Just pose those questions and try to maintain that steady awareness to watch, to respond. As you learn how …
- The Not-Self Discourse… There’s dis-ease in the body, dis-ease in your feelings, in your perceptions, in your thought fabrications, even in your consciousness. If these aggregates really were you or yours, you could totally control them. Now, this doesn’t mean you have no control at all. As the Buddha admitted in other places, the aggregates do offer some pleasure. If they didn’t …
- Sense Pleasures & Sensuality… the pleasure of form, even though it feels very embodied. I know a lot of people say, “What’s the difference? This feels very sensual.” It’s different: The sensuality of the body relates to your tactile sensations, the things you touch. This is something totally inward that has none of the drawbacks of sensuality. It’s not intoxicating and it doesn’t require …
- Contentment vs. Initiative… It’s hard to feel empathetic joy for others when you’re not feeling any happiness at all. But you do make sure that you don’t get yourself into debt, because it just eats away at you, knowing that you’ve got something you’ve got to pay back. If there’s interest, every day becomes an enemy, taking a little bit more …
- Buddhist Engineering… the body in and of itself, feelings, mind, mental qualities in and of themselves. For the time being, the Buddha said, “Start with the breath,” because when you focus your mind on the breath, you’ve got all four of those frames of reference in one spot. The breath, of course, is an aspect of the body. When you’re breathing comfortably, there’s …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… And you want to remind yourself of those values, especially in this land of wrong view, because otherwise you start feeling lonely. You start feeling that you’re the only person practicing and your values aren’t in line with those of other people. And those people don’t just sit by and watch neutrally. Most people try to push you in their direction …
- The Science of Meditation… Is there something wrong with the feeling that you’re creating with the breath? Can you change that feeling? The Buddha recommends breathing in a way that gives rise to rapture or pleasure. Do you know how to do that? That’s one aspect of staying with the breath, but it’s connected with feelings, too. Or you may look at the mind state …
- Forest Bathing… Craving builds on feeling. Feeling comes from contact, contact from having the six senses. The six senses come from name and form. The list chases things down through the processes of fabrication –* sankhara.* There basically are three types. There’s bodily fabrication, which is your in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, directed thought and evaluation, the way you focus your mind on a topic …
- Everything You Need… Especially if you feel that the present moment is determined, the idea of what you should do right now and should not do right now doesn’t have any theoretical basis, doesn’t even really make sense. If everything were predetermined, there’d be no choice. Things would just have to happen. But if you realize that they don’t have to happen in …
- Passion for Nostalgia… When you were back at that spot, in that time, there were uncertainties, there were fears, disappointments, but the feeling of what it was like to actually live in that space at that time gets scrubbed—so that only the nice details remain. So you have to realize: Your mind is lying to you, and you don’t want your life to be directed …
- The Most Important Thing to Be Doing… If you have a sense of the blood flow through the body, allow that to feel easeful as well. In other words, you’re trying to create a sensation here that the mind can settle into, where it feels secure, feels soothed on all sides. This way, you can begin to comprehend what the mind is doing that creates unnecessary suffering for itself. We …
- In Times of Danger and Fear… Now that you’re paying attention, though, try to breathe in a way that feels good. You don’t just sit there watching whatever comes up. As the Buddha said, the task of mindfulness, when you put mindfulness in charge, is to give rise to skillful states, get rid of unskillful states, and if skillful states are there, you try to maintain them. Let …
- Peace vs. Clinging… But the really important ones are the ones that relate to peace, that really bring the mind to a sense of well-being where it can stay and feel full of contentment. So that’s what we’re working on as we meditate, because we realize that the happiness offered by the world outside is not all that lasting, not all that dependable. Now …
- Frame Your Questions Well… As the Buddha says, we fabricate feelings for the sake of feeling-ness and perceptions for the sake of perception-hood. It’s very strange Pali, turning all these things into abstract nouns, but the important part is the “for the sake of.” There’s an intentional element going on here. We take a potential and turn it into something we think we can …
- To Keep You Going… When you think about doing things that you know are below the level of the craft, you should feel a sense of shame about it, that you’d be ashamed to do that. This doesn’t mean you say, “I’m a horrible person, I’m a miserable slob,” but simply that you’re above that kind of behavior. That’s actually a sign …
- The Path of Adventure… People feel entitled to be at the goal already. They want really quick happiness. There are so many ways of getting quick happiness nowadays that we feel that anything that doesn’t promise immediate gratification is lacking, inferior. But look at what happens to mice when they’re offered instant happiness. Scientists have found the little pleasure center in the brains of mice. They …
- Framing the Body… At the end of each lifetime, he had a strong feeling of, “What suffering! What suffering!” Yet, in spite of the suffering, we keep coming back. Think of King Koravya in conversation with the monk Ven. Ratthapala. Ratthapala’s pointing out to him the truths of aging, illness and death. When he was young, he was strong. But now he’s old. He means …
- Encouragement… One of the main problems of suffering is that we feel ours very intently, but no one else can feel ours. Sometimes we feel like we’re alone in the world. We can tell other people about our suffering and they can sympathize with it, but they don’t experience our suffering. So there is a loneliness that comes with suffering. But when you …
- Load next page...
