Search results for: "Feelings"
- Page 94
- Free Like a Wild Deer… In the beginning we may feel vulnerable because we’re not protecting ourselves in the old ways, and it takes a certain amount of trust. Think of the ajaans going into the forest. Before, when they were lay people, they would take their weapons with them. But then as monks they were going totally unarmed, and their protection was taking refuge in the Buddha …
- The Need for Evaluation… And when you get that feeling of pleasure, are they the same thing or they are something separate? Then there’s the perception, the different labels you apply to the breath, to your sense of the body, your mental image of the body. Learn how to use these things deliberately. The fabrication here is the directed thought and evaluation. That’s a very necessary …
- Dhamma Opportunism… How much do we really need to survive? How much food, clothing, shelter do we need just to stay healthy enough to practice? Anything beyond that is a waste, and we may feel the pinch further down the line. So, think about the future a little bit. This doesn’t mean that you have to starve yourself to the point where you’re weak …
- Pride, Good & Bad… It’s very easy to see that there are people out in the world who are afraid to say the truth, are afraid to express their feelings, and so there’s a certain amount of pride that comes with the idea, “Well, I’m not afraid. I’ll say whatever I see is true, or whatever I have come through my mind.” There’s …
- Immediate Knowledge… This is why it’s such a big shift in our values, a big shift in our whole approach to knowledge, to come here and practice the Buddha’s teachings, because we have to look very carefully at things we’ve taught ourselves to overlook, out of the feeling that there’s something more important out there, something more interesting out there. Now we …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… If you’re not sure if one breathing method feels better than another, stick with it for a while and see what it does to the body, see what it does to the mind. Then change and try another way for a while. You could spend the whole hour doing this. As you do this, you’re getting more sensitive to what you’re …
- Investing in Noble Wealth… Do you really want to put an end to suffering or are you just shilly-shallying around? Practicing when it feels convenient, practicing when it feels easy and then running away from the practice when you run into a problem: That’s not going to get you anywhere. So this is the underlying attitude that feeds all the other forms of noble wealth: the …
- Honesty… We say, “Well, maybe it’s not so bad after all.” Or we deny that we actually feel it. Of course, that makes it difficult to understand why it’s there to begin with. This is why the Buddha said that when you look at things arising and passing away, it’s not enough simply to gain insight into the fact that they arise …
- Warrior Knowledge… There may be feelings of pain in the body, but there’s no suffering in the mind. So the practice is a matter of developing skill. Ancient cultures made a distinction between two types of knowledge: scribe knowledge and warrior knowledge. Scribe knowledge is the knowledge that can be defined in words. Warrior knowledge is the knowledge that comes from acting, from developing a …
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… bodily fabrication, the breath; verbal fabrication, how you talk to yourself with directed thoughts and acts of evaluation; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These can lead to bodily actions, verbal actions, mental actions that can have affect for a long, long time. But you want to look at them just as events right here and now. So, look at your breath just as …
- Don’t Clap Hands with Pain… As he said, once you learn not to cling, then even painful feelings don’t need to have an impact on the mind. The mind experiences them as something separate, he says. That’s the way it naturally is for an arahant. But we can work in that direction by training our minds to step back a little bit from the pain and comprehend …
- Patience… If the mind is going to get into any dialogue, engage in a dialogue about how the breath feels right now, reminding yourself to stay with breath, catching the mind when it’s going to slip off. There’s a lot of work to do, even when you try to keep it simple, just keeping the mind with the breath. As for whether the …
- Start the Year Right Here… It feels good to be persistent, mindful, concentrated, discerning, and all the other good qualities he has us develop—compassion, sympathetic joy, goodwill for all beings. These are good qualities. They feel good in the mind and lead to a happiness that’s really solid and sure. So this is the path. It’s a good path to be on whether or not you …
- The Best of a Bad Situation… I remember walking through that section of the palace and feeling really oppressed—I had to get out. Even though the situation is comfortable material-wise, you have to recognize that it’s a bad situation. And do your best—if you can’t get out, then you do your best within that situation. There was the monk who was out in a wilderness …
- The Buddha’s Filters… your experience of form, your experience of feelings, experience of perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness. When you look at your ideas of reality in those terms, you realize that these things change all the time. They’re strongly conditioned, both in the sense of being socially conditioned and in the sense of simply being subject to conditions that arise and fall away. They’re all …
- Conviction & Persistence… That requires firmness of mind, the ability not to feel threatened by it, not to be in a great hurry to get through the problem but to watch it patiently so that you can understand: “Oh, this is what I’m doing. This is where I’m adding unnecessary stress to the situation.” Or, “Here’s a choice I didn’t see.” Or, “Here …
- The Buddha’s Revolution… It’s a feeling of great openness, freedom, that you’ve been released from petty concerns, things that limit the mind. It’s an unexpected place to look for freedom, but there it is: true freedom. The same principle applies to the principles that are related to qualities you have to develop in order to get there. The qualities that lead to freedom do …
- Focused on Your Duties… Then you ask yourself, when you breathe in, how far does the energy go? When you breathe out, how far does it go? Ideally, you should be able to breathe in and out feeling it everywhere in the body. Then notice if there are any patterns of tension anyplace that are getting in the way of the free flow of the energy. Allow those …
- The Dhamma Wheel… Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, fabrications fabricate, consciousness cognizes. And we cling to these activities—in other words, we feed off of them. That’s where the suffering is, so that’s what we’ve got to focus on. Knowing the suffering or knowing that first noble truth is one level, then there’s knowing the duty with regard to it, which is to comprehend …
- Mastering Causality… You begin to get more sensitive to what the mind is doing, particularly in terms of its perceptions and thought-fabrications, and how these relate to your feelings. Perceptions are the labels you put on things. For example, you may experience the body as something solid breathing in and breathing out. Well, you can change that perception. See everything you sense in the body …
- Load next page...
