Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Circular Practice… So as we practice, remember that we’re depending on one another and we also want to be dependable for one another, to try to be a good example to others so they feel inspired to work on their minds. In this way, everybody benefits from living together. Now, for some of us, there will be the opportunity in the next several months to …
- Growing Up Inside… The sense of ease and well-being that you can create with the breath, the sense of feeling balanced and stable, means that the fact that you’re giving up certain old ways of thinking and acting and speaking, doesn’t make you feel deprived. You’re gaining something better: an opportunity to get the mind really to settle down. And the fact that …
- Sophisticated Dhamma… We’re sitting here meditating, thinking that with right concentration, there’s got to be rapture, there’s got to be pleasure, so where is the rapture and pleasure? Sometimes we feel there has to be a sensation of light, or that you have to have visions. Where is the light? Where are the visions? You decide that you’ve got isn’t good …
- Appreciating Goodness… Try to find a breath that feels comfortable so that the mind will be happy to stay here, because you want to get the mind under your control. We live in a world with lots of dangers, and you don’t want your own mind to be a danger to you. But if your mind is not under your control, what can you depend …
- Happy for People You Don’t Like … It’s going to be very difficult not to feel resentment in cases like that. So you have to analyze why. You come back to the underlying sense of self that you built around the kind of happiness you want, the image you have of yourself in comparison to other people. And it’s very small-minded not to be happy for other people …
- Verbal Fabrication… And then mental fabrication—your perceptions and feelings. As Ajaan Lee would point out, the verbal fabrications are real troublemakers. The way we talk to ourselves can create a lot of problems in the present moment, depending on the kind of commentary we’re making. So an important part of meditation is learning to talk to yourself in a new way. This, of course …
- Close to the Heart… Get to know how it feels in the different parts of the body, how different rhythms of breathing feel. It’s not so much that you want to become a breath mechanic, although that’s one of the side benefits. It’s more that you try to develop your sensitivity to the present moment, your sensitivity to the least little bit of stress, the …
- The Buddha Aimed High… As the king says, “Sometimes I’m lying there in bed in pain, and my courtiers are standing around saying, ‘Maybe he’ll die now, maybe he’ll die now.’” Ratthapala says, “Can you ask them to share out the pain so you don’t have to feel so much of it yourself?” The king says, “No, I’ve got to feel it myself …
- Right View from Right Effort… What feels good right now? You experiment: longer breathing, shorter breathing, deeper/more shallow, heavier/lighter. When you find something that feels good, you stick with it. It may feel good for a while and then not so good. So you’ve got to change. Then once you’ve got the breath going well, what do you do with it? Some people want to …
- Countercultural Conditioning… And then mental fabrication—perceptions, which are the labels you hold in mind, and then feelings: feeling tones of pleasure, pain, or neither pleasure nor pain. These are the things we use to shape our experience. In fact, even before we have sensory experience, we’re already started shaping experience in these ways, so that when something comes in by way of the eyes …
- For a Routine That Isn’t Routine… When you breathe in, where do you feel the breath? Where do you *not *feel the breath? Look at the areas where you don’t feel it, and see if you can detect something. Sometimes there’s a blockage that makes it difficult for there to be any sensation there. So work through the blockage. Other times, you begin to realize that the breath …
- Right Action & Right Livelihood… It’s because the way we earn our livelihood—where we look for happiness—is an area where we tend to be blind to whatever harm we’re doing, because we feel that our life depends on it. We don’t want to hear about ways in which our livelihood is harmful. This is why, when the Buddha was asked about different occupations—a …
- Dispassion… You realize that you’ve been feeding off of form and feelings and perceptions and fabrications and consciousness: all these things that make up your sense of who you are. Now, though, you’ve found something better, which doesn’t require that you need to feed anymore. And you realize that all of this clinging and holding on is suffering. So you feel dispassion …
- Perceptions of Self & Not-Self… On the one hand, there’s the teaching that, as we chanted just now, form, feeling, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness are all not-self. The six senses are not-self. The eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind are not-self. But then, as he pointed out, there’s the phrase another passage that we chant again and again, “I am the owner …
- Look Around as You Follow the Trail… Experiment with different ways of breathing, and you’ll find what feels best right now. If you’re not sure, just tell yourself, “Well, as long as it feels good enough, stick with it.” Then if you find that it starts getting mechanical or uncomfortable, you can change. What’s important is the quality of the mind you develop—a willingness to commit and …
- A Sense of Space Inside… You don’t want it to feel like it’s imprisoned here in the present but you do want it to stay. So if you can find someplace in the body where the breathing feels really comfortable, focus your main attention on that. Then think of that sense of comfort spreading around, so that as you breathe in, the whole body feels comfortable. There …
- The Six Properties… But the Buddha’s talking more about how you feel the body from within. How do you feel the oxygen from within, hydrogen, carbon, or iron? There’s no way that you can sense them directly. What you do sense directly is the fact that the body has a sense of energy, which is the wind; there’s warmth, which is fire; coolness—water …
- The Inner Saboteur… He didn’t feel he was up for it. In fact, back in those days, the monks in the ecclesiastical hierarchy actually taught that nibbana was no longer attainable, that somehow the door had been closed. His fear was that it’d be a waste to put all that energy and effort into the practice with all the deprivations that the practice would involve …
- Asalha Puja – Completeness… How does it feel right now? Does it feel easy? Does it feel refreshing coming in? If not, see what would be more refreshing. The greater the sense of ease and refreshment you get from the breath, the more you become sensitive to the slightest dis-ease of the breathing—something you tend to take for granted, thinking that this is the way the …
- Maintaining Goodwill… That’s the best use for this concentration, because when you stop creating suffering for yourself, you don’t feel inclined to create suffering for anybody else. The reason we make life miserable for other people is because we feel threatened, along with this attitude: “As long as I’m suffering, let everybody else suffer too.” Or: “If I’m suffering, I don’t …
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