Search results for: "Feeling"
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- Determined on Goodwill… It’s important to realize that there’s a distinction between harming others and hurting their feelings. If hurting their feelings were harming them, then people would have ways of blackmailing you with their emotions. You have to look at if you’re harming them in ways that really would cause damage to their spiritual well-being, and that’s something else. On the …
- Truth Without Air Quotes… No perceptions, no thought constructs, no feelings, no sensory consciousness, no awareness of the body. As the Buddha said, it’s the ultimate happiness. And it is a state of knowing, even though you’re not engaged in the six senses. As he said, this consciousness is not experienced through the six senses. It’s something outside. The image he gives is of a …
- A Special Time… When you’re focused, when you’re paying attention, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breath feels. This way, you develop two other qualities that are important for concentration. The first is directed thought. You keep thinking about what you’re doing. You’re actively engaged. The other is evaluation: You judge how things are going. This is how …
- Bases of Success… You can either let it find its own rhythm or you can nudge it a little bit, to see if longer breathing would feel better—or if you’d prefer the breath to be shorter, faster, slower, heavier or lighter. When there’s a sense of ease, think of your awareness spreading out throughout the whole body, and allow the ease to spread out …
- Non-Reactive Judgment… You probably didn’t mean to.” She told me, “Well, I did mean to.” The friends who were trying to make her feel good were actually trying to anesthetize her inner critic. But when that happens, your precepts start getting sloppy. When your precepts are sloppy, then your concentration gets sloppy and your discernment gets dishonest. So you have to start training the critic …
- Dhamma Medicine… How is it going? Is it smooth? Is it easy? Does it feel refreshing? That can be your home base, your standard of measurement, so that you can get a true picture of what’s going on in the mind. Other methods, like contemplation of the body, can get you in a state where you don’t want to eat at all. Or if …
- Exploring What You’ve Got… Like right now it may feel a little cool because of that rainstorm going on outside. Well, do you have any warm sensations in the body? Where are they right now? Focus on them and think of the warmth spreading from those sensations. Don’t focus on the cool sensations. You’ll find that that changes your experience of the present moment. If you …
- Mindfulness as a Goad… If you think of the breath as simply the air coming in and out through the nose, that gives a very restricted area where you can feel pleasure. But if you think about it as the energy that goes coursing throughout the body each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, that creates a much larger field in which you can find …
- The Buddha’s Shoulds… There’s a passage where King Pasenadi comes to visit the Buddha, and his first question is, “Where should a gift be given?” The Buddha responds, “Wherever you feel inspired.” In other words, there are no shoulds in this area aside from your own sense of inspiration — where you feel the gift would be well used or where you just want to give. There …
- Not-self, Not No Self… You focus on the breath and then you try to breathe in a way that feels good. That makes it easier to stay focused. If the breath is uncomfortable, you’re going to find a lot of other things to do pretty quickly. Think of the breath as the whole body of energy. When you breathe, the whole body’s breathing in, the whole …
- 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 …
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