Search results for: "Feeling"

  1. Page 90
  2. The Kamma of Meditation
     … And perceptions and feelings—mental fabrication. Those are your choices in the present moment. You can choose to breathe in different ways. You can choose to talk to yourself in different ways. You can choose your perceptions. You can choose the feelings you nurture. It’s because we have this range of choices that meditation makes sense, is possible, gives results. You do have … 
  3. Death Is All Around
     … Focus on the breath, develop feelings of ease, spread them throughout the body. You use your perception of the breath to focus your concentration. You use your directed thought and evaluation, which are thought constructs, to keep your mind on the breath and to evaluate the breath. Then you’re aware of all these things. That’s taking these five aggregates and turning them … 
  4. Bless Yourself
     … When you feel tempted to lie, remind yourself that your speech is a valuable property, a valuable treasure. Ajaan Lee’s expression is, “Bow down to your mouth every day. You’ve worked hard to become a human being, to have a human mouth that can express truths.” Think about that Far Side cartoon where a guy has invented a machine that interprets what … 
  5. Strength of Persistence
     … Have you ever looked for it? Have you ever allowed it into your imagination? You can ask yourself: “If the breath energy around the body were smooth, what would it feel like? If it were agitated around the body, what would it feel like?” Think of it smoothing out. Then think of that smooth energy penetrating the body. Or if there’s a pain … 
  6. Disenchantment
     … He says, “Wow, I was really fooled by that guy.” In the same way, the Buddha says that once you attain the first taste of Awakening, you look back on your old pleasures and realize how you’ve been fooled by the mind — that in finding your pleasure, what you’ve been feeding on is just forms and feelings and perceptions and thought constructs … 
  7. Four Bases of Success
     … Mental fabrication has to do with perceptions and feelings. Perceptions are the images by which the mind communicates with itself, either with pictures or with single words, assigning meanings to things so that you can recognize what they are. And feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. These things all respond to your intentions, and they have an impact … 
  8. A Passion for the Path
     … They may be old things that you feel nostalgia for, old things that you feel that you can’t imagine how you can live without. But if they’re weighing you down, they’re unnecessary, because the mind doesn’t need to be weighed down. That’s something that’s hard for us to think about. We may have a sense that our minds … 
  9. Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!
     … The leper sits there and takes a stick, heats it in the fire and then, when the stick is nice and hot, cauterizes his wounds with the stick because it feels good. Why does it feel good? Because as the Buddha said, his perceptions are skewed. If he were actually cured of leprosy, would he take a stick, put it in the fire, and … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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