Search results for: "Feelings"
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- The Airplane Mechanic… When you’re working with the breath, you’re ery patient to observe the breath; to see what really does feel comfortable. And then when you have a sense of comfort, allowing that sense of ease to spread through the body without pushing it; without forcing it, because if you force it too much, it’s not going to be ease anymore. It’s …
- Why We Practice the Way We Do… Then while you’re here, ardency means that you try to get as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels right now, how your body feels right now. Does the body feel at ease? Can you create a sense of ease by the way you breathe? What rhythm of breathing would do that? What texture? Heavy or light? Deep, shallow, fast, slow? Experiment …
- Trustworthy Judgment… You try to make the breath as comfortable as possible, so that when the mind comes back, it feels good, feels right. In this way the mind becomes more and more your own mainstay, so that when you have to make big decisions about your life, you have a mind state that’s capable of making the decisions. And you can trust your ability …
- Wisdom Through Doing… You can experiment to see what you like, what feels good for the body right now. If you’ve been feeling tense, you want something more relaxing. If you’ve been feeling tired, you want to breathe in a way that’s energizing. Try to find the balance of just right. The third quality is intent. You pay a lot of attention to what …
- An Auspicious Birth… Painful feelings can come up. Pleasurable feelings can come up. Painful emotions, desires: These are like waves coming over you in the sea. If you try holding on to them, you get washed away. You’ve got to hold on to your plank. Now, it’s to be expected that you’ll lose your grip every now and then. But what’s special about …
- Me, Me, Me… form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. That gives you five. In each of those cases, you can either identify directly with the aggregate or you can think of yourself as someone who has that aggregate, or somehow you’re in the aggregate, or the aggregate is in you. That’s four times five: twenty. Twenty possible ways of thinking about your self. On top …
- Insight from Developing Concentration… You’re going to make it consistent so that you can observe how to breathe in a way that gives rise to a feeling of pleasure. Ajaan Lee recommends that you use, not the perception of air coming in and out of the lungs, but the perception of the energy in the body as your main focus. Think of the breath as going throughout …
- Gladdening… You feel good. Sometimes there’s special satisfaction in helping one another secretly—in other words, doing something for someone else that’s kind, thoughtful, without their necessarily having to know that you’ve done it. There’s a special joy in that. And that’s the goodness of the heart. Once you have the goodness of the heart, it’s a lot easier …
- Looking for Trouble… When it goes out, know how it feels when it’s going out. Where do you sense the breath? What sensations tell you that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out? Which of those sensations are comfortable? Focus on the comfortable ones. Get to know them. This takes a lot of attention not only because the breath is subtle …
- Mindfulness 2.0… And once you’re here, what do you do with the breath? Ardency in this case means being especially sensitive to the breath and to what kind of breathing would feel really good right now. After all, the purpose of right mindfulness is to lead into right concentration. So if you can get absorbed in the breath, gain an interest in the breath, feel …
- Approaching Painful Memories as a Meditator… They say that you’ve got to enter into the emotion, feel it fully, before you can get past it. What you’re often doing when you do that, though, is simply reinforcing old habits. You want to have the mindfulness and alertness to realize: That’s not me anymore. This is why we develop the observer: the one who watches the meditation. That …
- Victory… You focus primarily right now on the body in and of itself, but the feelings are going to be right there, too. Your mind should be right there—and if it’s not right there, then the mind is the problem. Or maybe the breath is the problem. Or maybe the feelings are the problem. These are the three areas where you can check …
- Resources for Endurance… Sometimes an emotion comes flaring up and you think that’s your real feeling at that particular time. Well, it’s one of the potential feelings, and this one that happened to get the water and the sunlight. You can think of it as a seed and you’ve got to decide: Is this a good emotion to go with, or is it going …
- Make Yourself Reliable… So the way you feel your body from within often has nothing to do with any wisdom at all. It has more to do with the fact that you have certain habits. When anger comes, you tense up the body in one way. Greed, comes, lust comes, fear comes, laziness comes… when you’re feeling lazy, you can create all kinds of sensations in …
- The Psychology of Virtue… As he said, if you feel no shame in telling a deliberate lie, the idea of something you shouldn’t do just is not there anymore. You can do all kinds of things. So restraint has to start with the mouth. That’s because the mouth is closest to the mind, and it really reflects what’s going on in the mind. So you …
- Metta… Compassion is what goodwill feels on seeing people who are suffering, or who are doing actions that would cause suffering. Notice one of those phrases in the chant just now: “May no beings despise anybody. May no beings harm anybody.” In other words, we don’t want anybody to act in ways that will cause harm, harming others by their actions right now or …
- The Art of Right Speech… You notice when you’re feeling irritated, your breath changes. What happens? Sometimes your breath will change before you’re even conscious of the irritation. There’s a little catch in your heart or catch in your stomach, and your breathing gets labored. That’s a sign that something’s got to be done. Well, you can do something about it, not working directly …
- There Is This… The illustration there is of an illness where even a king can’t say, “Now that I’m ill, can someone among my courtiers take some of this pain away from me so I can feel less pain?” Even kings can’t be in charge of their pain. This is a teaching on suffering, stress. And both of those teaching are also teachings on …
- The Gatekeeper Doesn’t Just Note… As Ajaan Lee teaches it, you evaluate the breath to see what kind of breath feels good. See what way of conceiving the breath helps the breath feel even better. Spread that good breath energy around, so that you have a sense of well-being throughout the body, along with a strong sense of nourishment. When the mind feels nourished like this, then it …
- More than Just Letting Go… Mental fabrications are feelings and perceptions. Feelings are feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain. Perceptions are the images you have in your mind, either individual words or visual images, that the mind uses to communicate to itself with. These are the processes that usually get shaped in ignorance, but now we’re bringing some knowledge to them. We’re trying to …
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