Search results for: "Feeling"
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- 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 …
- The First Noble Truth… Are you clinging to a form or a feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness? He puts these in terms that allow you to step outside of the suffering. Because the big problem of the suffering is that you’re often in it, in what the Buddha calls becoming. You’ve taken on an identity in a particular world and it’s causing you suffering. As long …
- To Free You from Clinging… Later on, when the Buddha was teaching Dighanakha, a wanderer, he talked about the issue of feelings and how they’re dependently co-arisen—and again, there was no mention of self or not-self. Ven. Sariputta—by that time a monk—was fanning the Buddha. He followed along with the talk, looked directly into his own mind, looked at his relationship to feelings …
- An Island in the Flood… Or you take feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, dhammas—mental qualities—in and of themselves, as your frame of reference. But the important thing is you don’t just stop with the frame of reference. You also engage in those other activities: being ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. This …
- Keep Things Simple… And even though you may not feel all that settled or secure, it’s better than getting upset and saying, ”Well, gee, this isn’t amounting to anything; this is horrible,” and then spinning out of control. Take things one step at a time, whatever the step that’s required. If it requires you to step up high, okay, you step up high. If …
- Karma & Gratitude… So they in particular deserve a feeling of gratitude. Now, the Buddha said the best way to repay that debt is that, if they are stingy, you try to teach them how to be generous. If they’re not virtuous, you try to teach them to be virtuous. In other words, whatever goodness they are lacking, you try to influence them in that direction …
- The Stakes Are High… The feeling of pleasure seems to be one with the breath. Let it be that way for a while. As these things come together, they then gradually separate out. Ajaan Lee’s image is of different metals in a hunk of rock. You can’t take a pick axe and separate the metals out, but you can apply heat to the rock. As the …
- Hypocrisy… This is one of the reasons why we get the mind into a good state of concentration, so that it feels secure enough to look into its issues without sweeping them under the rug. When there’s the sense of stability, the sense of well-being that comes from concentration, you can start looking at the issues of your life without feeling threatened by …
- In the Eyes of the Wise… to have the strength to stick with our convictions, to have a sense of well-being inside, because all too often the reason we go after other people’s opinions is that there’s a kind of well-being that comes from other people’s approval, or what we feel is other people’s understanding, and that our happiness really depends on them. But …
- Honoring the Noble Ones… You learn how to breathe in a way that feels really comfortable. Breathe aware of the whole body, so that the whole body feels nourished by the breath, refreshed by the breath. The mindfulness then turns into concentration. Now, there are people who are afraid of concentration. I don’t know how many books on meditation start their discussion of concentration with a warning …
- Eight Principles… It has an impact on feelings and, of course, feelings have an impact on the mind. And as you think about the breath and evaluate the breath, you learn about perceptions. All these fabrications—bodily, verbal, and mental—are intimately connected. And when you’re doing concentration, they’re all right here. You can see ways of dealing with the breath that have to …
- Training the Committee… You’re sitting down and you say, “Okay, exactly why? What would you gain from that person’s suffering?” As we all know, most people do evil because they’re feeling threatened, they’re feeling miserable. They say, “As long as I’m miserable, let everybody else be miserable, too.” That’s what they think. So what would be gained by that person’s …
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