Search results for: "Feelings"
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- Alone with Your Mind… learning how to evaluate what feels good in the short term, what feels good in the long term. Then there are other times when you just want to stay with one really nice comfortable sensation, find your quiet spot and let everything settle in right there. Any questions that come up, you say, “Nope, not now.” You don’t even have to think that …
- Occupy Your Body… If there’s a chronic pain in some part of the body, how do you breathe around it? How do you breathe through it? How do you get your awareness around it? Get so that you feel that you inhabit the body, you feel that this is your space, in the sense that you’re not going to let the pain push you out …
- Awe… You realize how small your body is, and how vulnerable, and you feel a sense of awe. That awe is a useful emotion. It’s very close to samvega. In fact, one of the meanings of samvega is fear, awe, or terror. It’s one of the primary emotions in the practice: realizing how vulnerable the body is, and as a result, how vulnerable …
- On Not Twisting the Cow’s Horn… If you start feeling a sense of pleasure in the middle of the chest, allow it to expand so that it fills the whole chest; then from the whole chest down through the whole torso, up into the head, down through the arms, down through the legs. If it starts in the head, think of it going down through the neck, both the front …
- Surveying the World… So the lesson we can learn from this is that when we look at the world and we feel sorrow over the way the world is going, we have to ask ourselves, “What can we do for the world?” The best thing we can do for the world is to find that solid center inside that the Buddha found, so that we, too, can …
- More Buddhist Engineering… Do they fit together well? What way of breathing would provide a good place to stay? When you’re trying to develop a state of concentration, you want something pleasant to stay with, something all-around good, so that you feel really stable, solid here. What way of breathing would do that? Think of the breath not as the air coming in and out …
- The Skill of Restraint… There’s restraint in what you do, and restraint in how you look and listen and smell and taste and feel and think about things — in other words, restraint in what goes out, and restraint in what comes in. And both kinds of restraint require a good amount of skill. Take restraint of the senses: There’s a skill to looking, a skill to …
- Varieties of Mindfulness… If you’re feeling discouraged about yourself, focus on two of the recollections, silanussati, caganussati, thinking about the times when you did hold to your principles, when you were generous. Call those to mind as a way of giving yourself energy on the path. This doesn’t mean that you have to reflect on examples of perfect virtue or perfect generosity. Reflect on what …
- Effective Self-Discipline… As when you were in school, they were the ones who made you want to learn or feel inspired by the subject, the ones who could reason with you to get you on their side. As a meditator you need these same skills. The Buddha’s teaching comes in a lot of lists. And it’s interesting to notice the role that persistence has …
- Talking to Yourself… Do you want to have it go up or down? Sometimes if you’re feeling drowsy, you want to have it go up a bit. If you’re feeling like too much up-flowing energy is giving you a headache or what one Zen master called “Zen sickness”—it’s a dullness in the head—that’s when you want the energy to go …
- The Power of Intention… How’s it going right now? Does it feel comfortable? Do you have a sense of the breath in different parts of the body and how those breaths can all be connected? When there’s a sense of comfort, how do you maintain it? How do you let it spread? And once it’s spread, how do you keep it enlarged? You find, as …
- Brahmaviharas on the Path… It’s easy to feel goodwill for some people but not for others, and so on down the line. It takes some work to try to make our attitudes limitless. As the Buddha pointed out, in his previous lifetimes prior to becoming the Buddha, he actually developed these brahmaviharas. They would take him to the brahma realms but then the karma of that practice …
- The Right Touch… If we squeeze the breath in pushing it around, it’s not going to feel full. Or, if you squeeze the breath between the in-breath and the out-breath to mark, “Well, now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out,” that doesn’t allow a sense of fullness to develop, either. The Buddha left it as kind of a …
- Skills to Make You Free… Sometimes this analysis will actually make the pain go away; other times it won’t, but because there’s a sense that things are separate, you don’t have to feel oppressed by the pain. This is one of the skills with which you can deal with the results of past bad actions and not feel overcome by them because you’re not overcome …
- Noble Wealth… Then he goes on to talking about breathing in a way to give rise to rapture, breathing in a way that gives rise to pleasure, breathing in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—and then calming them. There again, you’re working with potentials you have, and you’re learning how to put them together in the right way so that …
- Meticulous… He told them he was feeling a lot healthier, both mentally and physically, as a result. So of course, the journalist writes an article about how, yes, perhaps the news cycles are invading our minds a little bit too much, but if you don’t keep up on world affairs, you’re a narrow person, she said. So she ended up justifying the fact …
- Totally Secure… If the breathing doesn’t feel comfortable, you can adjust it. Make it longer or shorter, deeper or more shallow—whatever feels really good for the body right now. As for everything else, you can let it pass. Basically it’s not your issue, unless you make it your issue. It’s not your karma, unless you make it your karma. You have the …
- Restlessness & Anxiety… This is where you can use the breath to calm things down, to soothe things in the body, so that you don’t feel like you’re sitting on ants. Anxiety, however, involves more than just having too much energy. It can go in two directions: anxiety about the future, worry about what’s going to happen to you or to your loved ones …
- Responsibilities… So, what does it mean to have your daily life fit into your practice? The image I think of is that you have a visual field—the world outside—and you also have the field of your sense of your body as you feel it from within. You want to maintain that sense of your body as you feel it from within regardless of …
- To Sustain Your Practice… Viscerally, it feels good. You may be in difficult situations, but you can learn how to breathe in a way that doesn’t add to the difficulty and that keeps reminding you, okay, where did you learn this technique? Well, you learned it from the Buddha. Okay, remember the other things the Buddha taught, and use those lessons to talk to yourself, to address …
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