Search results for: middle way

  1. Three Levels of Evaluation
     … Say there’s a sense of ease and wellbeing in the middle of the chest: How do you maintain that ease and wellbeing? What way do you breathe? How do you adjust your breath so as to maintain that sense all way through the in-breath, all the way through the out? Once you can do that, how do you let that sense of … 
  2. Your Gyroscope
     … This is why reflecting on the eight ways of the world is a helpful practice. What does the world have to offer? Just those eight things: material gain, material loss, status, loss of status, praise, criticism, pleasure, pain. That’s it. And what is there of any lasting value in any of these things? The only value is if you find a way to … 
  3. Accepting the Buddha’s Standards
     … This is the right effort that really constitutes the middle way: in other words, appropriate effort, appropriate for whatever the occasion, whatever the defilement coming up in the present, and whatever your state of mind. Sometimes this requires very delicate work, very refined, very easy. Sometimes it’s hard and takes a lot of effort. You have to sit through a good amount of … 
  4. Isolating the Aggregates
     … It’s the same way with the meditation. We start out trying to focus on the breath and we put a lot of pressure on it, for fear that if we don’t, the mind’s going to slip away. Of course, a lot of the pressure on the breath has an effect on the circulation of fluids and energies in the body. You … 
  5. Virtue Contains the Practice
     … That’s the only way you’re going to come to any kind of certainty. And it’s the only way you’re going to lead a life that provides a good container for the practice. You see this so many times on retreats when people come in off the street to spend a whole week just being with their breath. If they have … 
  6. Recollecting the Devas
     … It was rare for him to search out other people to refute in that way, but he saw the importance of emphasizing time and again that determinism is not the way things work. As he says, practice would be totally pointless if everything were predetermined by the past. So conviction also focuses on the principle that right now you can develop what’s skillful … 
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