Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 84
- Inner Poise… It’s nourishing for you, and when you’re feeling nourished inside, you don’t have to go running outside to feed off other people, to get support from this person, to get encouragement from that person—just running around for scraps from other people because inside you’re feeling malnourished. When you nourish the body and mind with the breath, you don’t …
- Dealing with Confusion… If your mind feels scattered, think of everything coming together: a sense of unity right here. What you’re trying to do is to create a place where the mind can settle down and just watch what’s going on in as balanced and impartial a way as possible. This is how you train it, because the untrained mind is generally confused. We live …
- Life Well Lived… For this reason, when the sensation of breathing gets comfortable enough, start thinking of the comfortable sensation going out and filling your whole body, so that the whole body feels easy as you breathe in, feels easy as you breathe out. You can trace the energy flow in your body. Notice where it’s blocked, and if you find pieces of the body are …
- To Stay the Course… And three, there are going to be things that you have to do that you don’t like to do, but you don’t let your emotions, you don’t let your feelings come in and take over and pull you away, because they sap you of your strength. At the same time, when other things outside happen, you don’t let your feelings …
- Practical Wisdom… If you can learn how to breathe through the feelings, the physical manifestations in the body—relaxing your hands, relaxing the feet—you can start occupying the body instead of having that particular feeling occupying the body. Then you’re in a better position to be able to sidestep it, to figure out where its weak point are, so that you can focus on …
- Questioning Your Conviction… May feelings be thus. May they not be thus’?” The same with perceptions, thought-fabrications, consciousness: In each case, the five brethren said No. **So which is it? Can you do things, or can you not do things with these aggregates? Well, you can do some things. And it’s the **some things **that are important. It’s in that area of **some things …
- The World Does Not Endure… You’re wracked with pain, and that’s all they can think of. “Maybe he’ll die this time.” Then the young monk asked the king, “Can you tell your courtiers and relatives to take some of your pain and share it so that you don’t have to feel so much?” “Well, no.” The king admitted that he would have to feel all …
- Oppressed by Old Kamma… When a thought comes up, is it associated with a pattern of tension in your neck, in your back, in your arms, in your hands? What’s the quality, the feeling-tone that goes along with it? Can you change that feeling-tone, at will, using the breath? Sometimes you change the way you breathe, and the thought will go away. And just seeing …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
