Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Give It Your All… When you’re feeling lazy, when you’re feeling discouraged, think of all the help you’ve gotten along the way. And one of the ways of repaying that help is to practice. The second thing to reflect on is that if you don’t give yourself to the practice, you’re not going to get anywhere. If you don’t give your time …
- The Power of Intention… As the Buddha said, our past karma gives us the potential for different experiences of form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, and consciousness. Then with our present fabrications—our present intentions—we turn these potentials into something actual for the sake of having an actual experience, and then, of course, for the sake of whatever activities we want to do with those forms and feelings …
- Attahi Attano Natho… It feels good inside. You carry this sense of well-being around so that you’re not out there constantly trying to suck in whenever is out there, hoping that you can feed on it. At the same time, you’re developing good qualities of mind: mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind continually; alertness, the ability to watch what’s actually going …
- Encourage Yourself… How to think when you’re feeling lust to get past the lust. How to think when you’re feeling discouraged so that you can get past the discouragement or depression or whatever. Before we can give up thinking, we have to learn how to think well. We have this wonderful faculty: this ability to think. And yet, for so many of us, it …
- Guardian Meditations… You can think about your past generosity, especially when you’re feeling discouraged in your practice, when you feel that “I don’t have any good in me,” tell yourself, “What do I have in me? What do I have in the past that’s good?” Think of the times you’ve been generous when you didn’t have to be. Think of the …
- The Big Picture… And there’s mental fabrication, perceptions—the labels you put on things—and then feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Pay careful attention to that. These are the things you use to take the raw material provided by your past karma and turn it into your experience of the present moment. And they’re all right here. The breath is …
- The Lessons of Good Kamma… And one of the things that the Buddha advises is that if someone asks you, “Where should I give?” you say, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel it will be well used and well taken care of.” That’s it. You don’t go out fundraising. You don’t go out making hints that you’d like this thing or that. You …
- The Wisdom of Incongruity… Think about evaluating how comfortable it is, where you feel it, where it feels good, where it doesn’t feel good. Give the mind some work to do. As long as it wants to work, wants to think, give it something good to think about that’s related to the breath. That way, it can gradually zero in, zero in on the breath. That …
- In the Context of the Deathless… Aggregates like the form of your body as you feel it from within, as you’re sitting here right now, working with the breath. Feelings: You hope to create feelings of pleasure. There are perceptions, the labels you apply to things that identify them, give them meaning. Here you’re identifying the breath as the topic you want to stick with. There’s fabrication …
- Overcoming Complacency… From the potential for feeling, we create feelings. And so on with perception and consciousness as well. An act of creating that’s going on all the time. And then, on top of that, once we have those aggregates, once they’re present to our awareness, we can create our sense of self out of them: “I’m this. I’m that.” And our …
- Recollection of the Buddha… You don’t feel up to it. You get discouraged, you’re lazy, or other moods invade your mind. It’s at times like that when you need other meditation themes to help you convince yourself that, yes, you do want to be with the breath after all. There’s the set of four meditations called guardian meditations. The first one is recollection of …
- True Protection for the World… If the mind’s food source is outside, there can always come a point where when you feel that your food source is threatened, and you’ll want to fight back. When your happiness depends on things outside, it’s not just the case that your happiness can be threatened from outside, but your goodness—your determination not to harm anyone, not to engage …
- Renunciation… The body begins to feel just like a mist of little dots. If you focus in on the space between the dots, that goes into another level of becoming, or another level of well-being, called the formless level. There’s no shape to it at all. And as you get solidly settled in with that sense of space, you can turn around and …
- Single-minded… We want to pay careful attention outside, so we feel instinctively that we’ve got to squeeze off all the input from inside the body. What you’ve got to learn is how to be aware outside and inside at the same time. You’ve got to maintain that spot. Keep it wide open. Allow it to have a sense of fullness, that it …
- From Inconstancy to Dispassion… So it’s not the case that you just let it go, let it go, let it go for a while, until you feel more inclined to deal with it. You’ve got to stop it as quickly as possible and say, “This is where I draw the line.” And see what part of the mind objects. What is it missing? What is it …
- Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind… We try to settle the mind with one object, like the breath, and bring the mind to the object in a way that it feels at ease and has a sense of fullness, refreshment. So we work with the breath to see what kind of breathing would feel good, and then we learn to live with that sense of well-being. This is why …
- A Willingness to Learn… See how the breathing feels in different parts and do what you can to deal with any sense of tightness or tension or pain in the body, working your way up to being aware of the whole body as your breath comes in, the whole body as the breath goes out. Or choosing a particular point of focus: You may find focusing on the …
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think… One is feelings and the other is perceptions. Perceptions, here, are the images you hold in mind, be it a word or a mental picture—the words here being just basic concepts before they even turn into sentences. These are the things that shape our state of mind. Sometimes you find yourself in a good mood and you can trace it back to a …
- Renunciate Grief… Renunciate joy is the joy you feel on reaching the goal, and renunciate equanimity is the equanimity that you feel when you have tasted that joy. The Buddha makes an interesting comment. He says that when you’re suffering from householder sorrow or householder grief, you don’t want to try to replace it with householder joy, because those two just keep going back …
- Cooking Food for the Mind… When you’re feeling feverish or coming down a cold, there are certain kinds of food they’ll have you eat. As a meditator, you want take the same approach: See what the mind’s illnesses are right now and figure out what kind of food would help counteract those illnesses. So there are two things you’ve got to think about. One is …
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