Search results for: middle way

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  2. A Refuge in Mindfulness
     … can be ardent, alert, and mindful all at once—in that way, you provide yourself with a safe haven. It’s the little world you inhabit inside as you fend off the world outside. As the Buddha said, when you have this refuge inside, it’s like having an island in the middle of a flood, or like having a lamp in a dark … 
  3. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … One thought leads to another, leads to another, and you end up who knows where in the middle of Siberia. Other times, when the mind is settling down, there’s a part of the mind that’s afraid of concentration so it tries to break things up. That’s divisive speech. Harsh speech, of course, is when you tell yourself you’re a miserable … 
  4. Responsible Conviction
     … Finally, he comes across a big bull elephant in the middle of a clearing. That’s when he knows for sure he’s got the elephant he wants. In the same way, as we practice virtue, we practice concentration, even the psychic powers that come with concentration: Those count as footprints and scratch marks. They’re promising, but they don’t prove things yet … 
  5. Finding Your Own Balance
     … Watch and then test the way you read the experiment, to see if you really can trust it. Over time, your ability to read things will get better and better. Your sense of balance will get better and better. That’s why it’s called the middle way. The whole point of it is to find true balance. And as with any balance, the … 
  6. Undividing the Mind
     … As for the guild, which is the Ssangha, I was reading recently about Benvenuto Cellini and how he’d broken from the guild of goldsmiths in the late middle ages because he thought he was way more talented than everybody else. And he wanted to promote himself as the Michelangelo of gold. He did some amazing things, but in the course of his career … 
  7. Truths Noble in the Heart
     … Where is the stress? What are you doing that’s putting extra stress on to the mind? And what could you do to stop that and put an end to that stress? You have to examine all the various issues in your life that you’re concerned about, and you have to peel away the other ones that get in the way of this … 
  8. Protection
     … One way of cutting off those little Velcro hooks is to keep reminding yourself: Where’s the stress right now? The things that you latch on to as being especially true or especially real: You have to remind yourself, are they really so real? Are they really that true? You can think in terms of their inconstancy, their stressfulness, the fact that they’re … 
  9. Pitching Your Tent in the Present
     … In other words, breathe in a way that helps to dissolve the tension around the pains. As for any pains that don’t go away that way, well, you just focus your attention in some other part of the body. There’s got to be some place in the body that you can make comfortable with the way you breathe. Then it’s simply … 
  10. Seriously Happy
    The Pali word sukha can be translated in a lot of ways*.* Its range covers everything from simple ease and pleasure to happiness, well-being, and bliss. The whole purpose of the teaching is to find true happiness—in other words, to take your desire for happiness seriously. You have to ask yourself, are the ways you’re looking for happiness giving you true … 
  11. Feelings Not of the Flesh
     … A good bathman preparing the dough would mix it in such a way that the entire ball of dough was moist, with no dry spots, but the water didn’t leak out. That means that you have to knead the water through the dough the same way that you’d knead water into bread dough. So there’s work to be done. This is … 
  12. Admitting Mistakes
     … Even the Buddha himself made mistakes before his awakening, going down the wrong path many, many times in many different lifetimes before he discovered the Middle Way. It was through those points in his practice when he realized, “What I’ve been doing, sometimes for years, was a mistake,” and he was willing to look for other ways to do things: That’s what … 
  13. Book search result icon Noble Warrior Spreading the Dhamma
     … Avoiding both of these extremes, the middle way realized by the Tathāgata—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding. “And what is the middle way realized by the Tathāgata that—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding? Precisely this noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech … 
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  14. Evaluation: The Voice of Heedfulness
     … What feels best? And what does the body need? If it’s tired, can you breathe in a way that’s energizing? If you’re tense, can you breathe in a way that’s more relaxing? If there are pains in the body, can you breathe in a way that’s soothing for the pains? This is something you have to evaluate for yourself … 
  15. Chanting on Your Own
     … In that case it’s goodwill, and goodwill expresses itself in different ways—in this case, a wish for safety. One of the chants, the Ratana Sutta, has a story to go with it in the commentary: There was a plague in Vesālī, and the Buddha had Ven. Ananda go around the city chanting this sutta as a way of driving the plague out … 
  16. On Your Own Two Feet
     … So it’s not a Catch-22, it’s simply that these two faculties of the mind—the ability to watch things and observe and come to reliable conclusions; and your inventiveness in trying out different ways to experiment with the breath and the way you focus on the breath—go hand-in-hand. They develop together. After all, a lot of things are … 
  17. In Tune
    The word samaṇa, which we translate as contemplative, literally means someone in tune, someone in harmony—someone who tries to live in harmony with the way things really are. It’s by living in harmony that you can understand how things are: what causes what, what kinds of causes are proportional to what kinds of results, and looking for the best results. In other … 
  18. Mange in the Mind
     … Like those old maps of the North American continent, the big white space is in the middle. They knew the coast, but they didn’t know the interior. That’s the way it is with most of us. We know the surface of our lives, but we don’t know what’s going on inside. When you’re meditating, this is what you want … 
  19. Timeless
    King Pasenadi once came to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asked him, “What have you been up to today?” And in a remarkable display of candor, the king said, “Oh, the typical things of someone who’s obsessed with power, consumed with the desire for more power.” The Buddha asked him, “Suppose a reliable person were to … 
  20. Your Inner Ally
     … Sometimes he talks about the breath energy coming in right at the middle of the chest and going down through your intestines, and other times it’s the breath energy that comes in at the navel and goes up the front of the body. So the breath can flow in lots of different directions, and your perception, your mental image of the breath flowing … 
  21. Analyzing Suffering
     … You try to find the middle way, where you feed the body enough to get along. Keep it comfortable enough so that it can function. Find pleasure in the wilderness. Even Ven. Maha Kassapa has a long passage talking about the beauties of the wilderness, because it’s a conducive place to practice. He doesn’t go out there just to enjoy the wilderness … 
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