Search results for: "Feeling"
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- Reflections… You’re sitting here and you’re feeling drowsy and lazy, and you’re drifting off to sleep. You’re certainly not going to see your mind clearly. That, he says, is like looking at your reflection in a bowl of water that’s got a lot of sludge and algae in it. The fourth hindrance, restlessness and anxiety, is like looking at your …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… What kind of breathing really feels good for the body right now? You can focus on the body in any one spot: the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, at the abdomen. Those are the three main spots, but there are a lot of other spots in the body where you might be able to notice that now the breath is …
- Strength Training… Wherever you feel the breath, hang on right there. As you breathe in, as you breathe out, be sensitive to that sensation wherever you feel it in the body. The important thing is that you stick with the breath. You know that there’s no future breath you can watch, no past breath you can watch. So when you’re with the breath, you …
- Cut the Currents… You feel that everything you’ve identified with is falling away, you feel exposed, and you feel like you’re being deprived. Then there’s an opportunity to take on another identity in another world. Again, if you’re not strong, you go flowing after that current. That’s how you take rebirth. So, you’ve got to remind yourself that every state of …
- Free Sources of Energy… And of course, when you’re focusing on the breath, you have to have certain perceptions in mind and you’re developing certain feelings. That’s mental fabrication. In this case, what kind of breathing would feel energizing? What kind of perception of your abilities right now would be helpful? Your freedom to search for potentials that may not be obvious is something you …
- Complaining Rights… So you focus on the breath, try to make breath as smooth as silk, so that it feels good coming in, feels good going out, and there are not a lot of bumps or distractions, so that the mind can get used to being with something smooth and continuous—and so that it can get used to being smooth and continuous itself. It’s …
- Stepping Out of Truth Games… We’re each trying to make a world of concentration in which you’re fully aware of your body as you feel it from within. You’re trying to make that the center of your attention, and that’s the center of your desire right now: to get the mind stay here. The problem is that the mind has lots of other worlds at …
- Working Ourselves Free… Breathing in it feels good; breathing out it feels good. Then work on the subtler breath sensations in the body, patterns of tension, say, in the chest, in the shoulders, the back, the legs, the hips, because that’s a form of breath energy as well. Think of everything relaxing all the way out to the pores. Every pore. Think of the body as …
- 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 …
- Renunciation… When you let go, it’s easier not to feel ill will for people because you don’t have to fight them over things. You don’t have to jealous of them when they take what you wanted, so you’re not harming yourself. Then, on the transcendent level, right resolve is, essentially, the thinking and evaluating that bring the mind to jhāna: good …
- 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 …
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