Search results for: "Feelings"
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- The Missing Fabrication… The mind feels refreshed. The mind feels steady. Then you can stop the talking. But you don’t simply calm verbal fabrication for the sake of calming it. You use it first to whatever extent it’s needed. Then you can let it go. Even more so in the steps that have to do with insight in the fourth tetrad. The Buddha talks about …
- The Good Heart’s Attachments… Your sense of the body as you feel it from within is totally yours. There’s a sense of happiness that comes while doing this that doesn’t cause any harm. You’re sitting here totally harmless, and you find a way of breathing that feels good, feels nourishing. That nourishment can spread throughout the body, permeate the mind, permeate the heart, and it …
- The Awful Truth… The feeling that the young prince felt at that point, is called pasada: a sense of confidence: “Yes, if there’s a way out this must be it.” And so, the story goes, he left his family and went out into the wilderness. And discovered that through his own efforts, yes, he could discover the deathless. That’s why we have that fifth contemplation …
- Discernment Requires Concentration… You get there by focusing your attention on the breath, the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves, all of which circle around the breath. You’re ardent, alert, mindful. Ardency, of course, is right effort continued. Alert means watching what you’re doing while you’re doing it, because after all, what you’re doing is …
- Ajaan Suwat’s Gift… The pain you feel, nobody else can feel for you. They can see the signs that you have pain and they can sympathize with you, but they can’t really feel your pain. So when the Buddha says to focus on the issue of why you’re suffering, he’s saying to focus on this area of your awareness, the area that you don …
- Treasure Island… If you’re feeling oppressed by the heat, try to gladden your mind. What things would make you glad right now, things in line with the Dhamma? Could you get fascinated by the breath? You could tell yourself, “It doesn’t matter what the temperature is outside. I’ve got something really interesting to play with right here.” You’re alone on your Arctic …
- The Karma of Meditation… Because the person has a lot of wealth, he hardly feels it at all. The other type of person is someone who’s very narrow-minded, narrow-hearted. Doesn’t care about genuine well-being for himself or other people or herself and other people. Has very little compassion, very little empathetic joy. Can’t remain equanimous over things that arise in life. That …
- The Mirror Inside… So, right now as you’re working with the breath, how’s it going? Does it feel comfortable? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what changes would be better? Would it be better to be longer or shorter? Faster, slower? Heavier, lighter? Deeper, more shallow? This is an area where you can experiment. It’s one of the nice things about concentration practice: The …
- Virtue Contains the Practice… If you don’t have any mindfulness—i.e., if you can’t remember what you did—you’re not going to be able to figure out how this feeling of pain or this feeling of pleasure is related to actions you did a while back and have forgotten about. So you try to keep in mind what you’ve been doing. If you …
- Common Sense… simply noticing that thoughts and feelings have an effect on the mind, and that some thoughts and some feelings have a better effect than others. That’s the whole principle of the path. You try to develop thoughts and feelings that lead to an end of suffering. As for the ones that lead to more suffering, you learn to let them go. It’s …
- At Home in Jhana… It’s simply a matter of sticking with it and developing a sensitivity to what kind of breathing really does feel good right now. In other words, you’ve got all the raw materials for happiness right here. You don’t have to go traveling around anywhere else. Just pay attention to what you’ve got. The mind has a habit of fabricating things …
- The Buddha’s Rules of Order… Could it be better? What kind of breathing would feel better right now? That’s the beginning of evaluation. Then you can evaluate further: Explore the sensations of breathing in all the different parts of the body. Try to be systematic about it. You can start at the back of the neck, you can start at the navel, any place where you find it …
- Love is Conditional, Goodwill Is Not… Compassion is basically what goodwill feels when it sees other beings suffering. You’d like to see that suffering end: again, regardless of whether you like the person or not. If you see someone who is enjoying good fortune or is doing things that would lead to good fortune, you want to be happy for them. That’s empathetic joy. Again, that’s the …
- Near to the Buddha… See what long breathing feels like, what short breathing feels like. Deep/shallow, heavy/light. In some cases, this friendship may take time, but you’ve got to learn patience. Often, the biggest mistakes that people make in the world are because they’re impatient. They want something right away, right away, and they don’t think about the long-term consequences. That’s …
- A Message for the Universe… Our problem is that we tend to sit with our unskillful thoughts—they’re “okay.” They’re creating a lot of trouble for ourselves and for the people around us, and yet for some reason we feel that “This is simply the way I am, so this is the way I have to be.” That attitude, the Buddha said, blocks the path, because you …
- Questioning Your Unconscious Actions… Some of it, though, has more to do with how it feels—what kind of breathing feels satisfying right now. But because our attention is diverted elsewhere, we don’t really notice what’s going on. We don’t notice the extent to which we’re shaping this. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha has you focus on this as bodily …
- Thoughts About Thinking… It’s usually around what are called, “the three characteristics,” as in the case where one of the monks said, “Well, given that all feelings are stressful, and all your actions creates feelings, that means all actions create stress and pain.” The Buddha says, “When you’re talking about kamma, you have to talk about the three kinds of feelings: pleasure, pain, neither pleasure …
- Hope… The potentials for feeling come and you turn them into feelings. The same with perceptions, thought-constructs, even consciousness: All of these things have an element of fabrication. There’s an element of doing, an element of intention in all of these things. And we tend to miss that, which is why we miss the point where we can make a difference. So always …
- Empathetic Joy Is Ennobling… Which means you have to develop thoughts of goodwill at times when you’re not feeling happy, too. If the breath is uncomfortable, the body’s uncomfortable, that’s no time to have ill will or thoughts of being put upon. Think of the Buddha’s image of the person being sawn into pieces by a group of bandits. He said that if, when …
- A Mind Without Inertia… We value food because we feel hungry. We value passion because it helps us to overcome our inertia. But when the mind no longer needs to feed on things, it’s totally weightless. It looks at food and feels no inclination, for it doesn’t need it anymore. It looks at passion and sees it as the Buddha did: simply as a fever, from …
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