Search results for: "Feeling Tone"
- Changing Your Default Settings… What this means is that although you may have been living with a general feeling tone of your life, you don’t have to stay stuck at that particular feeling tone. If you find that your general default mode is pretty low, ask yourself what kind of feelings you’re creating in the present moment by the way you breathe. We tend to think …
- Pain & Patience… There’s a feeling tone and there’s your awareness. Is the feeling tone the same thing as the awareness? Awareness is aware; feeling tones are not aware—they’re just something there. Can you see this distinction? Now, this requires that you get the mind really quiet, so that it can see these things. There’s a part of the mind that keeps …
- Equanimity on the Path… As far as feeling tones, the Buddha’s not concerned about what’s a true feeling tone. He wants you to cultivate the ones that are skillful. In other words, here the issue is simply a matter of beneficial and timely. Is this feeling tone going to be beneficial? Is this the right time and place for what’s pleasant? Is this the right …
- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… As he describes the different levels of jhana you can get into, he’s talking about how you can use the framework of mindfulness to get the mind into different feeling tones. And it’s interesting to note that the jhanas are defined in terms of their feeling tone. Sometimes you see the first jhana translated as, “The first jhana, accompanied by pleasure or …
- The Knife of Discernment… After watching it for a while, you’ll find that certain ways of breathing give rise to a feeling tone that feels good, feels healing. Try to maintain that feeling tone. This may require adjusting the breath now and then, because the needs of the body, as the mind begins to settle down, begin to change. The breath can grow more and more still …
- Knowing & Acting… When you finally get a feeling tone that feels good right there, notice what other spots in the body have the same feeling tone. Think of them connecting. It’s as if you’re starting a fire in a wind. At the very beginning, you have to protect that little tiny, tiny flame until the fuel catches fire. With the breath meditation, realize that …
- Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna… States of right concentration all the way up through the dimension of nothingness are called perception attainments, and the different levels of jhāna are defined by the feeling tone—pleasure and rapture in the first jhāna, more pleasure and rapture in the second, just pleasure in the third, and equanimity in the fourth. So you’re dealing directly with these three fabrications. You get …
- Right Next to Ignorance… As you protect the feelings, the feeling tones, the feelings of pleasure and rapture, then the pleasure gets stronger, the rapture gets stronger. Then it gets too much. You try to tune into a subtler level of pleasure, and the rapture begins to evaporate. It’s worth noting that the levels of jhana are defined by their feeling tone. As I mentioned the other …
- The Stages of Meditation… And then when you’ve got one spot in the body where you can maintain that feeling tone, you can allow that same feeling tone to spread to other parts of the body, so that as you breathe in there’s nothing in the body that gets tensed up, as you breathe out you’re not holding on to tension in any part of …
- What You Sense Directly… Feelings are the feeling tones you have right here: pleasant, painful, neither pleasant nor painful. Then perceptions are the images you hold in mind that help you stay with the breath—the markers of the mind, the signposts—or the way you visualize to yourself how the breath goes through the body. So the question is, are those two different types of fabrication—in …
- Your Main Foundation… The feeling part of the mental feeling is the feeling tone, either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. But rarely do we have feelings that are simply positive, or negative, or neutral. We have stories that go along with them and color the particular feeling. Those stories come from perception and fabrication in the mind, which gets you more into the framework of mind states or …
- Focus on What You’re Doing… How are you breathing? What are your perceptions about that particular issue that’s got you pulled away? What’s the feeling tone in the mind? What are the feeling tones in the body? What’s the inner conversation you’re having about that? What are the values you’re expressing in that conversation? In other words, when you get sensitive to these things …
- Dealing with Pain… You can develop a certain feeling tone there that you can maintain through the in-breath and the out-breath; it’s not disturbed by either. It’s actually nourished by both. Then you can allow that to spread. If, while you’re trying to develop this level of concentration, you find that the pain becomes unbearable, or if it becomes hard to stay …
- Full Attention… We forget the Buddha’s analysis of feelings, which would place feelings and emotions, in our sense of those terms, under the aggregate of fabrications, rather than under the aggregate of vedana, which is a matter of the feeling tone: pleasant, painful, or neither pleasant nor painful. We forget how fabricated our feelings are, how conditioned they are, and the fact that just because …
- The Buddha’s Standards or Yours?… Mental fabrication consists of perceptions and feelings—feelings here not so much as emotions, but rather as feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain. Now, the way these things are defined, you can see that they don’t happen only when you’re meditating. It’s not that you’re going to do jhana and suddenly say, “Well, I’m going to …
- Observe Yourself in Action… And of course, there are the feeling tones. In fact, the feeling tones are how the states of jhāna are defined. That’s just one of the links, one of the more important links, in dependent co-arising, but if you get started with this link, your insights spread to the other ones as well. The important thing is that you learn how to …
- Holding on Strategically… It’s a feeling tone. And when you don’t glom it together with the body, you begin to see that that feeling tone moves around a lot. In particular, it moves around in connection with your perceptions, the labels you’re putting on things: the label that says “pain” or the label that says, “The pain is here.” You begin to realize there …
- Safety in an Uncertain World… As the Buddha describes concentration, it’s basically feeling tones of pleasure, rapture, and the calm of equanimity after the mind has been nourished with pleasure and rapture. We’re feeding the mind so that it’s not so hungry for quick fixes. That way, it can learn to trust itself more. But even then we’re still subject to further dangers: the simple …
- Lessons in Fabrication… That’s the feeling-tone you want right now. When the Buddha defines the various levels of right concentration, he starts out with a feeling-tone: pleasure and refreshment or just pleasure or equanimity. Those are the things we’re working on. As you get more and more sensitive to how these processes put together a state of concentration, it gives you insight into …
- Shelter… The feeling tones in the body will change; the feeling tones in the mind will change. These are things you need in order to develop that desire, that sense of patience and persistence, so you want to pay them really close attention. Figure them out. It’s in this way that your hut inside is going to succeed. It’s actually going to get …
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