Search results for: "Feelings"

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  2. Negotiating with Death
     … body, feelings, mind, mental qualities. Feeling there is one of the difficult ones, because the word “feeling” in English has lots of meanings. You feel your body. And you also feel pleasure and pain. And also you feel sadness or joy, whatever. So you’ve got three kinds of feeling, just feeling the presence of the body, feelings of pleasure and pain, and then … 
  3. The Good Side of Kamma
     … If you’re a windup toy, you wouldn’t have to feel gratitude for anyone. But we’re not windup toys. We’re not totally determined. We do have choices in the present moment. Each present moment. So the feeling you have when you really feel gratitude or when someone shows gratitude to you: Learn to relate that feeling to the teaching on kamma … 
  4. Chew Your Food Well
     … You may notice that at the end of a breath it tends to feel squeezed or strained. That’s a sign that the breath is too long. If you’ve been breathing in and don’t quite feel full, allow the breath to get longer. Learn to experiment. What feels good right now? What feels right for the body right now? What feels right … 
  5. Goodwill in Heart & Mind
     … I’ve heard many people complain that they can think thoughts of goodwill, but they don’t get any warm feeling out of it. Well, it’s not necessary to have the warm feeling, as long as you think about other people’s well-being and take that into consideration as you plan your actions. That’s an awful lot right there. After all … 
  6. Comprehending Suffering
     … There are feelings. You’ve got feelings in the body right now, and you’re trying to generate feelings of ease, feelings of well-being. It’s by trying to generate them that you understand them. You don’t simply watch them come and go. You’re trying to develop what the Buddha calls feelings not of the flesh. There’s the pain not … 
  7. Food for Consciousness
    As we’re sitting here meditating, we’re focusing on something that nobody else can know—how our bodies feel from the inside, how our awareness feels from the inside. It’s an area that we ourselves don’t pay that much attention to, because our attention is too often diverted outside. And for that reason, we don’t have much of a vocabulary … 
  8. A Private Matter
     … Often it’s hard to talk about how the breath feels, because the breath feels like the breath feels. It doesn’t quite feel like anything else. So we talk about it indirectly, in terms of metaphors and similes, realizing that our descriptions are approximate. When you hear something in the instructions, learn to translate it in such a way that it relates to … 
  9. Equanimity Isn’t Everything
     … But then, the Buddha doesn’t just have you sit there with the feelings or with whatever else comes up. In the course of the breath meditation, he tells you to try to breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of rapture, breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of pleasure. The instructions on feelings in the Maha Satipatthana Sutta … 
  10. The Buddha’s Standards or Yours?
     … Mental fabrication consists of perceptions and feelings—feelings here not so much as emotions, but rather as feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Now, the way these things are defined, you can see that they don’t happen only when you’re meditating. It’s not that you’re going to do jhana and suddenly say, “Well, I’m going to … 
  11. Blessings
     … Focus your attention on whatever spot in the body the breath is most obvious and pay particular attention to how the breathing feels in that spot. Choose a spot that’s very sensitive, one that tells you, “This kind of breathing feels good. That kind of breathing doesn’t feel so good.” Those voices are the wise voices in your mind right now: the … 
  12. Settling In
     … Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths to see how deep and long breathing feels. If it feels good, keep it up. Try to maintain that sense of well-being. If it gets so that it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Make it shorter, or have long in- and short out-breaths, or short in- and long out … 
  13. The Gatekeeper’s Duties
     … What does it feel like to be breathing right now? Where do you feel the breathing? You can feel it anywhere in the body. It’s not the air coming in and out of the nose. After all, that air doesn’t come in and go out without the energy in the body allowing it in, allowing it out. So where do you feel … 
  14. Healing & Protection
    Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths, to see how it feels. Notice where you feel the sensation of the breathing process. It can be anywhere in the body. Wherever it seems most prominent or easiest to follow, focus your attention there. Then notice if it’s comfortable. At what point does the breath get too long? Or when does … 
  15. Friends with The Breath
     … The pain feels hot or pain feels solid. But actually the quality of the pain itself is something different. It may be in the same place as the knee, but it’s not the same thing as the knee. Or maybe it’s not really in that place. Sometimes you have a pain that you feel is in one place in the body, but … 
  16. The Four Jhanas
    The Four Jhanas January 30, 2009 As you sit here with your eyes closed, where do you feel the breathing? You may feel it in lots of places in the body, because the breath isn’t just the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s an energy flow. It’s part of the breath element that fills the entire body. Your … 
  17. Monotasking
     … These different facets of the practice—the body and feelings—are not totally separate. They connect. Then you begin to notice that how you perceive the body is what allows these feelings to happen. When the Buddha talks about mental fabrication, this is what he’s talking about: He’s talking about the feelings and the perceptions, those images or the labels you have … 
  18. Dhamma Medicine
     … See if it feels good. If it doesn’t feel good, you can adjust it a little bit more and then sit with it for a while and see if that feels good. Keep this up until you find a way of breathing that you can settle into—where you feel at ease, feel comfortable, feel strong. It’s the ability of the mind … 
  19. Genuine Satisfaction
    Dostoevsky, writing in the nineteenth century, had one of his characters say, “I feel like a person standing on an open field with my skin stripped off, and the wind is blowing sand into my exposed flesh.” It’s supposed to be a very deep statement of existential angst. Fast-forward to 1950s: Carson McCullers, in The Member of the Wedding, has a young … 
  20. Sowing Good Seeds
     … What kind of in-breath feels good right now? What kind of out-breath feels good? How do you conceive of the breathing, and what effect does that have on the sensation of the breathing? If you feel the breath as something in your nose that you’ve got to pull down into the body, it’s going to have one kind of effect … 
  21. Comfortable with Yourself
     … See how that feels. A little shorter: See how that feels. Faster, slower; deeper, more shallow; heavier, lighter: See what really feels good for the body right now—and feels really good for the mind as well. Some types of breathing maybe relaxing for the body but just they’re a little bit too slow and blurred for the mind to focus on. So … 
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