Search results for: middle way

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  2. Friends with The Breath
     … In normal life, an intention moves in, pushes another one out of the way, and another one comes in, pushes that out of the way. We’re like a boat on a river with no anchor. Whichever way the currents flow, that’s the way we tend to go. If you were to draw a map of where the mind goes in the course … 
  3. Outside of the Box
     … So, either way, the solution to the problem is to settle the mind down. Think in this way if you’re having trouble getting the mind to stay with the breath. Ajaan Maha Boowa once compared meditators to two types of trees. One type of tree is standing alone out in the middle of a field. If you want to cut it down, it … 
  4. Befriending the Breath
     … Allow the flow to be easy all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, and all the way through the spaces in between, so that you’re floating on a comfortable breath energy. When you can maintain that, the sense of well-being inside begins to grow. Allow it to become continuous, so that it develops momentum. And then … 
  5. Mindfulness of Death
     … We’re out in the middle of nature. It’s a comfortable day to meditate. And the problem is that on the comfortable days to meditate, we tend to just fall for the comfort and get lazy. We need to remind ourselves that good days like this don’t often come. We don’t know when the next one’s going to be, or … 
  6. Book search result icon The Skill of Release The Skills of Jhāna
     … There’s no way it can not become sharp. So we should keep at the practice in the same way that we sharpen a knife. If any part of the body or mind isn’t in good shape, we keep adjusting it until we get good results. When good results arise, we’ll be in a state of Right Concentration. The mind will be … 
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  7. Feelings of Pain
     … For instance, say you focus on the middle of the chest. It feels good breathing in, it feels good breathing out, right there at the middle of the chest. You breathe in a way that feels like it’s massaging the muscles around the heart so that the blood flows all around, nice and evenly. And there’s a sense of fullness there—not … 
  8. Limitless Compassion, Limited Resources
     … Remember that phrase in the expression of goodwill, “May we all look after ourselves with ease”—in a way that we’re not harming ourselves, we’re not harming other people. Is there some way you can teach other people to act that way? That’s one of the best gifts there is. As for people you can’t teach in that way: To … 
  9. Respect
     … It might be in the middle of the head, the chest, the abdomen. Focus your attention there and let it stay there for a while. See what kind of breathing feels good there. It could be long breathing, short breathing, fast or slow, heavy or light. Just try to focus, pay careful attention because we’re trying to get ourselves grounded in the body … 
  10. Page search result icon Talk collections | dhammatalks.org
     … Breath Meditation 12 Taking a Stance 13 The Joy of Effort 14 Experimental Intelligence 15 The Path of Mistakes 16 A Post by the Ocean 17 The Active Truth 18 The Middleness of the Path 19 The Grass at the Gate 20 A Magic Set of Tools 21 Perception 22 Little Things 23 Stepping Back 24 Generosity First 25 Self Esteem 26 Goodwill All … 
  11. The Cost of Happiness
    Psychologists who have studied the way people look for happiness report that most people will pursue a particular type of happiness until they see that the cost is too great and then they’ll stop. In other words, there are too many difficulties, too many drawbacks, too many side effects. The problem is that most people are very insensitive to the costs of the … 
  12. Jhāna & Discernment
     … Ask yourself, “Where do you feel it most clearly now?” Try to stay with that, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change: Make it faster, slower, shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter. Try to get in touch with what feels good right now … 
  13. Judgmental vs. Judicious
     … One way of doing that, of course, is to wait until all the information is in. Then you pass judgment. But we live a life in which not all the information is in, and yet we still have to act. In fact, that’s the way most of our life is. So we have to practice what’s called success by approximation, doing our … 
  14. Truths That Are Noble
     … This is why the Buddha said his path is admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, and admirable in the end, because it requires us to be responsible all the way through.
  15. Book search result icon Head & Heart Together Mindfulness Defined
     … The Buddha discovered that the way you attend to sensory contact is determined by your views about what’s important: the questions you bring to each experience, the problems you want to solve. If there were no problems in life, you could open yourself up choicelessly to whatever came along. But the fact is there is a big problem smack dab in the middle … 
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  16. Your Ancestral Territory
     … That way—when, in the course of the day, something difficult comes up, either from outside or inside—you go to the breath, and surrounding the breath are thoughts about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, thoughts about the brahma-viharas, to give you some perspective on the issue facing you. That way, as you stay with the breath, you’re not simply hiding … 
  17. Watch What You’re Doing
     … In other words, you tell yourself to focus on the breath in a certain way, to work with the breath a certain way, then you do it, and then you have to evaluate the results—one, to make sure you’re doing things the way you tell yourself to do, and when the results don’t come out, you have to figure out why … 
  18. Seclusion
     … There’s another passage in the texts where they talk about how once you settle down, you remind yourself that here you are out in the middle of a very quiet countryside, not quite wilderness here, but it’s quiet. All the issues related to back home, if they come up in your mind, aren’t really related to anything around you. Issues coming … 
  19. The First Noble Truth
     … You want sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations to be this way, and they’re not that way. Sometimes the pleasures and pains come from your desire to gain awakening. Those, the Buddha said, are actually useful. There’s the pain that comes when you realize, “Okay, there’s awakening out there and I haven’t gotten there yet.” He says not to try … 
  20. Opting Out
     … This is another example in how the Buddha’s teaching is the middle way that steps outside of the either/or that so many people in society present us with. It steps out by framing the issue in a totally new way. The Buddha’s question is: Do you want to be free? That’s in line with the example he gives. He left … 
  21. A Well-stocked Memory
     … People learned the Dhamma by listening to it and memorizing it, and there was a very systematic way of memorizing long passages of Dhamma. We’ve lost that ability now. Our memories get shorter and shorter because we get more and more dependent on gadgets to keep things in mind for us. Which is sad, because those gadgets are not going to be with … 
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