Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. A Mental Fortress
     … Shame, not in the unhealthy sense of feeling bad about yourself, but shame in the healthier sense of realizing that certain things are beneath you and you don’t want to stoop to do them, no matter what. Compunction is the sense that you really do care about your actions and their results. You’re not apathetic. You don’t say, “I don’t … 
  3. Laying the Infrastructure
     … You know the feeling of energy and rapture is there, but you don’t have to get involved with it. You can’t take that as your object. You have to stay with the breath as your object all the time. Some people say that once the mind begins to settle down, you drop the breath and stay with the feeling of mental pleasure … 
  4. Not Resolved on Self
     … After all, often the skillful thing to do is to get the mind still, settled down, on familiar terms with your breath, on familiar terms with your body as you feel it from within. That’s a good place to be. Then you try to maintain that sense of center regardless of what’s going on around you. So you move the resolve from … 
  5. Practicing Meditation to Perform at Death
     … It feels no obligation to you, no matter how well you take care of it. When I first came back to the States, I got a phone call once from a guy who’d been a master of martial arts. He’d been able to control his body, until it was able to do all kinds of things, smash through all kinds of stuff … 
  6. Motivation
     … One of the first exercises of your discernment when you meditate is how to get yourself to meditate when you don’t feel like it—or how to get yourself to meditate when a lot of other things are pulling you in their direction. As the Buddha said, this is one of the measures of your discernment and wisdom. One of the reasons we … 
  7. Train Your Hunger (The Sea Squirt)
     … But once you’ve managed to stay away from it for a while, then you begin to realize that if you go back to eating sugar, it doesn’t feel right anymore. It smells funny, tastes funny. It doesn’t feel right inside you. In other words, you have to learn how to abstain for a while. And you abstain largely out of confidence … 
  8. Training in Right Resolve
     … Notice where you feel the breathing most clearly in the body. Focus your attention there, then ask yourself if the breath is comfortable. If you’re not sure, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. See what the body needs right now, see what the mind needs right now, and see if you can bring their needs together. Sometimes the body likes very … 
  9. With Reference to the World
    The body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves: Notice the “in and of itself” or “in and of themselves” here. That’s the important point of what we’re trying to focus on. Take the body, for instance. Just try to be with the sensation of the body you … 
  10. Comfortable as an Outsider
     … Otherwise, you feel that you’re the only person making yourself miserable this way, cutting yourself off from others. There’s a great passage in the Canon where a monk is meditating in the forest, and his meditation isn’t going well. He hears the villagers off in the distance having a nighttime festival and he’s thinking about how miserable he is and … 
  11. Opening Your World
     … If you feel weak in the face of your old habits and there’s just one “you” in there, then you feel there’s no way out except to get some help from outside. But if you realize there are the weak members of the mind and there are the stronger members, skillful members and unskillful members, you see that you just have to … 
  12. The Creator of Worlds
     … In the beginning, it’s going to be a fight because you’ve been living in these other worlds for a long time and you feel comfortable in them. They’re like an old shoe: It may not necessarily be good for your foot but it’s the shoe you’re used to. These other, new shoes don’t feel quite right yet. But … 
  13. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … When the body feels weak, you can remind yourself that there’s an awareness that’s larger than the body, one whose energy doesn’t need to depend on the body. When things in your life seem to be crowding in, you can remember that there’s an awareness that’s larger than all of those things. Keeping that perception in mind, you can … 
  14. Right Speech
     … Harsh speech is what you say with the intention of hurting someone’s feelings. Divisive speech is done with the intention of breaking up or preventing friendships. And idle chatter is basically speech without any real clear intention at all, just chattering away for the sake of having something to say. You want to learn how to avoid these forms of speech, and also … 
  15. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … As you’re sensitive to it, use your powers of evaluation and observation to see what feels best, what kind of breathing feels gratifying throughout the body. This is a good path to follow because it doesn’t save all of its pleasures to the end. There is pleasure in the meditation. There is also the pleasure of knowing that the path doesn’t … 
  16. The Teacher Inside
     … Notice when it feels good, notice when it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, you can change. You can experiment. The same holds true with the mind. Notice: Where are you focusing? Is this a good place to focus? If not, you can move. Be very deliberate in these steps, because when things go well in the meditation, you want to be able … 
  17. Basic Wisdom
     … He gets you sensitive to feelings of pleasure, the energy of rapture, and the perceptions that go around rapture. Sometimes rapture can be perceived as something really pleasant and positive, and sometimes the same sensation can freak people out. You’ll notice the effect that the perceptions and feelings have on your mind, and then you try to calm that effect down, just as … 
  18. Cornered
     … how he breathed, how he talked to himself, the images he held in mind, the feelings he could develop through the breath. It was because of these things that he was able to pull himself together and strengthen his heart to the point where, at the end of the three months when the rains retreat was over, he could walk out. It took three … 
  19. The Radiant Mind
     … And then mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings: the images we hold in mind and the feeling tones we focus on and encourage. Those are shaped by our intentions, too. Usually, we’re awfully ignorant of how we encourage these things. Yet, as the Buddha said, we shape both the present moment and our future lifetimes through these types of fabrication. If we’re ignorant … 
  20. Make Yourself Small
     … Even when you have negative things to say, you try to couch them in terms that the other person will be able to receive and not feel insulted, not feel belittled, not feel that you have contempt. Psychologists have done studies to show that the worst thing for any kind of relationship is contempt. There’s that story of the videotapes they make of … 
  21. The Middleness of the Path
     … The map we have is just a sketch, and we have to feel our way. Your willingness to feel your way, to learn from your mistakes, is what develops your wisdom, develops your discernment. Sometimes it’s a little chastening to see how little wisdom and discernment you have, but what are you going to do? You make use of what you’ve got … 
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