Search results for: middle way

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  2. Strength from Within
     … actions make a difference and you want to act in ways that are skillful, the precepts are a good test for your conviction—and also a good training in maintaining that conviction. But the precepts on their own are not enough. You’ve got to train the mind. That’s what the three middle strengths are about. Persistence basically means right effort. Anything unskillful … 
  3. Page search result icon Attention & Intention
     … When you’re still in the middle of the river, don’t be too quick to let go of the raft or you’ll drown. Wait until you’ve gotten to the shore. Then you let go. But all the way across the river, from this shore to the far shore, it’s a matter of developing attention and intention. You let go of … 
  4. What Are You Doing in the Present?
     … This way, when the mind and body are in harmony like this, both sides benefit. The mind has a good place to stay. The body has someone looking after it. One of Ajaan Lee’s images is of a parent looking after a child. The parent has to make sure the child doesn’t get sick, doesn’t do anything wrong. And as long … 
  5. A Well-thatched Roof
     … When you begin to see, though, that the way you put things together is causing suffering, and you don’t have to put things together that way—there’s another way—this is how insight cuts through. You see it’s not necessary, that suffering. You have an alternative. Go for it. When you develop the mind in this way, you’re getting the … 
  6. Working Hypotheses
    There are a lot of ways in which the Buddha compares the activities of the mind to fire. Greed, aversion, are delusion are fires that burn away in the mind, and as we chanted just now, they set fire to our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind, and to the things we know through the senses. It’s almost as if our minds … 
  7. Directing Yourself Rightly
     … By the time we come to the Dhamma, we’re already in the middle of all this. What makes the Dhamma special is that it shows us a way out, because a lot of those muddling mistakes we make create a lot of suffering for ourselves or the people around us. An important part about choosing a life of the Dhamma is that you … 
  8. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … But the question is, do you do it skillfully? There’s a skillful way to breathe in, a skillful way to breathe out. There’s a skillful way to relate to the breath as you breathe in, breathe out. If it’s nourishing for the body, if it feels good inside, down to the more sensitive parts of your body, the mind will respond … 
  9. On Being Non-reactive
     … In the same way, when the breath energies in the body are very still, you can sense the movements of the mind very clearly, and that’s what we’re here for. The breath is like a thread that you follow through a maze to get to the mind in the middle. When the breath gets still, the mind becomes more and more clear … 
  10. Xtreme Drama
     … The way out was not to buy into it, to have a more sensible attitude toward the whole thing. Whatever ups or downs there may be, you don’t have to take them all that seriously. You just stick with your practice. You have to find the middle way between the extremes that the dramatic side of our personality likes to read into things … 
  11. Breath Energies
     … And to help sensitive you to them, there are various ways of conceiving them. Sometimes Ajaan Lee talks about breath channels in the body. There’s one that goes down through the spine. Another breath channel goes through the front of the body, right down the middle. There are breath channels in your head, breath channels down your legs and your arms. Some of … 
  12. Set Your Heart on the Breath
     … Think of it going up and down a line drawn right down through the middle of your body from the head down to the base of the spine—in front, in back, down the legs, out the arms—in whatever way it’s going to flow. If you find there’s a sense of blockage in any part of the body, think of the … 
  13. Protect Your Inner Center
     … Learn to drop the thought right in the middle and come back to the breath. When you come back, reward yourself with a really nice breath, one that feels really refreshing. That way, the next time you wander off, you’ll be more inclined to come back because you know when you come back it feels good. While you’re with the breath, try … 
  14. Practicing All the Time
     … That way your practice becomes timeless. Or as he would say, make your practice samma. The word means “right” but it also means “just right,” and it also means you want to do it all the time. “Just right” doesn’t mean a middling right. It means whatever is appropriate for the task. Sometimes if really strong anger comes up in the mind, you … 
  15. Our Sense of Self
     … It’s the way it’s been ever since I was born, so it’s the way it’s going to be until I die.” But the Buddha didn’t think in that way. As with so many other things, he saw a sense of self as something we do. We want pleasure, we want to avoid pain, and so we try to get … 
  16. Visakha Puja
     … Then he went off and practiced austerities for six years, until he was ready to admit that that, too, wasn’t the way out. Eventually he found a way that worked: the middle way, which essentially is composed of three things—virtue, concentration, and discernment. The symbolism of our circumambulation right now relates to that. The incense relates to virtue. There’s a saying … 
  17. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … Stay with it all the way in, all the way out, and notice what feels comfortable. As the Buddha says, you try to make yourself sensitive to the whole body and then try to breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of ease. So that’s what you experiment with as you meditate—sometimes feelings of ease, sometimes feelings of more energy … 
  18. A Safe Haven Through Alertness
     … It becomes a way of occupying the whole body with a sense of well-being. This is important because you need a safe place. You want to be able to put wheels on this home and make it mobile. That way, it’s not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but when you get up there’s still a sense … 
  19. Book search result icon Frames of Reference Foreword: About the Author
     … Otherwise, he’d drive you out, even in the middle of the Rains Retreat. Even then, you’d just have to take it and try to use your powers of observation. ‘In other matters, such as sitting and walking meditation, he trained me in every way, to my complete satisfaction. But I was able to keep up with him at best only about 60 … 
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  20. Book search result icon Poems of the Elders Thig 14 Subhā & the Libertine
     … Resembling a ball of sealing wax, set in a hollow, with a bubble in the middle and bathed with tears, eye secretions are born there too: The parts of the eye are rolled all together in various ways.’ Plucking out her lovely eye, with mind unattached she felt no regret. ‘Here, take this eye. It’s yours.’ Straightaway she gave it to him. Straightaway … 
  21. The World of the Noble Truths
     … They are a way of looking at the world but they play a role in a path of action—determining how you’re going to act. For most thinkers, the underlying structures start with first principles and then argue from those first principles to build a structure, like building a building based on a foundation. But the image the Buddha gives is of a … 
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