… So if you have to criticize your behavior to yourself in order to get back on the path, do it in a way that lifts your spirits—and sometimes the criticism will have to be strong to get the desired effect—but don’t do it in a way that gets your spirits down.
Frivolous chattering refers to any random thoughts that come in …
… Then Vajjiya Māhita the householder left Campā in the middle of the day to see the Blessed One, but then the thought occurred to him, “Now is not the right time to see the Blessed One, for he is in seclusion. And it is not the right time to see the mind-developing monks, for they too are in seclusion. Why don’t I …
… 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 …
… 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 …
… In the same way, there is the case where a certain monk, having gone to a village or to the wilderness, meets up with someone who upbraids him: ‘This venerable one, acting in this way, undertaking practices in this way, is a thorn of impurity in this village.’ Knowing this person to be a thorn, one should understand restraint and lack of restraint.
“And …
… This is why the Buddha talks about the path as being a middle way
where the voices in your mind, the imperatives that you tell yourself,
are wise and they’re just right. They get the results you want. That’s
how you know that things are balanced and that you really are
following the middle way. You tell the mind to settle down …
… 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 …
… There are people who say that
because the Buddha said that the middle way is a middle way between
self-torture and self-indulgence, you shouldn’t try to inflict any
pain on yourself at all. But that’s ignoring huge parts of the Canon
where the Buddha says it’s really going to depend on the individuals
how much pain they have to …
… For instance, a pain in your knee may actually come from a lack of circulation in the middle of your back or in your face. When that’s the case, you have to let breath energy flow in the middle of the back or in the face if you want to prevent the pain in the knee. The relationships between circulation of breath energy …
… Remember that famous passage where King Pasenadi comes to see the
Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asks him: “Where are
you coming from in the middle of the day?” The king is very frank,
unusually frank for a politician. He says, “I’ve been spending my time
obsessed with the things that people obsessed with power are usually
obsessed …
… In the same way, there are different kinds of Dhamma—so you can choose to stay with whichever of the 40 types of meditation themes you like.
When you stay mixed up with your defilements, or like to run back and forth with your external concepts and perceptions, you’re no different from a person floating in a boat in the middle of a …
… It’s like lying on your back out in the middle of a big field. If you
look up in the sky and there’s nothing on the ground that you can
compare things to, you look at the clouds you don’t know what they’re
doing. Which clouds are staying still, which clouds are moving, you
can’t really tell, because there …
… As the
Buddha said, this road is good in the beginning, good in the middle,
good in the end. It’s good all along the way. It’s a good path to be
on.
So we can take encouragement from the people who’ve been on the path
ahead of us, and we want to give good examples to the people who come
behind …
… You’ll end up sinking in the middle of the sea.
The Buddha contemplated this fact, which is why he advised us to develop our goodness. On one level, developing goodness is involved with the way we use our material possessions. On another, it’s involved with the way we look after our actions, improving the way we use our physical body so that …
… what’s causing us to act in ways in the
present moment that are causing suffering now and on into the future.
After all, it’s our intentions that shape our life. Where do
intentions happen? They happen right here, right now. All too often,
they’re relegated down to the middle-level bureaucracy in the mind.
It’s as if you were the …
… Or like the spider in the middle of a web: The spider is in one spot, but it’s sensitive to the whole web. Try to maintain this sense of centered but broad awareness all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out. Maintain this quality of awareness as long and as steadily as you can. Try to master it …
… You dawdled through the
practice saying, “Well, I’ll put it off till tomorrow and I won’t push
myself too hard.”
As Ajaan Maha Boowa says, for many of us, the middle way is right in
the middle of the pillow.
So you don’t want that regret.
That’s one way of stirring up a sense of desire: realizing there are
dangers …
When the Buddha first described his path, he called it a middle way
between two extremes: indulgence in sensual pleasures on the one hand,
and self-affliction on the other. This has led a lot of people to
think that the path is kind of a neutral mind state, not all that
pleasant, but not all that painful. That’s not the case. An …
… But to what extent is that rhythm caused by things going on in the mind that you’re not fully aware of?
The best way to see that is to consciously change the way you think about the breath, to change the way you breathe, to go against what’s subconscious. That’s how you dig up some subconscious assumptions. There’s a resistance …
Training in Skillful Kamma | The Karma of Mindfulness : The Buddha’s Teachings on Sati and Kamma
… So if you have to criticize your behavior to yourself in order to get back on the path, do it in a way that lifts your spirits—and sometimes the criticism will have to be strong to get the desired effect—but don’t do it in a way that gets your spirits down. Frivolous chattering refers to any random thoughts that come in …
AN 10:94 Vajjiya Sutta | About Vajjiya
… Then Vajjiya Māhita the householder left Campā in the middle of the day to see the Blessed One, but then the thought occurred to him, “Now is not the right time to see the Blessed One, for he is in seclusion. And it is not the right time to see the mind-developing monks, for they too are in seclusion. Why don’t I …
