Search results for: middle way

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  2. Ideals
     … He had to go back and question those presuppositions, think in a new way, think outside the box. That’s what the Middle Way was—thinking outside the box. He’d fallen in with a group of people who saw the world as having only two alternatives: sensory indulgence and self-torture. Self-torture was more noble, they thought. But he discovered that, No … 
  3. A Good Narrative
     … This feeling gives rise to a sense of urgency, but it can become a sense of hopelessness if it’s not balanced by the sense that there is a way out. Once you sense there is a way out and it’s something that you can actually do, that calms the lake, and once the lake is calm, it grows clear. There’s a … 
  4. A Post for the Heart
     … And as they say with climate change, it’s not just that things are gradually warming up in every way. The weather goes through wild swings—extreme hot, extreme cold, floods, droughts—and that’s the way it is with human life. There are a lot of wild swings back and forth. But we want to be in the middle of the swings without … 
  5. Worldly Dhammas
     … What’s even better is if you can maintain that perspective even when you’re in the middle of the game. This is what meditation does. It gets you in touch with a different level of reality. It’s like tuning your radio to a different station. The breath that’s the energy flow in the body: What does it know of gain? What … 
  6. Book search result icon Sublime Determinations Thursday — Goodwill
     … Now, this doesn’t mean that you go out of your way to help other people when they abuse your help. Remember, one of the best ways to help others is to get them to act wisely. If you can’t do that, maybe it’s time to go your separate ways, wishing the other person well, but staying out of each other’s … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. Meditation as Play
     … What kind of breathing would gladden your mind right now? What way would be fun to breathe? Can you think of breathing in and out through the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, through the base of your spine? What way of perceiving the breath would make it more interesting right now and have a good effect? Think of someone learning … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. The Best Use of Your Time
     … You can breathe in any way. You can breathe long in, long out; short in, short out; long in, short out; short in, long out; heavy or light; fast or slow; deep or shallow—any way that feels good right now. That’s the carrot that pulls you in to the present moment, realizing that simply paying good attention to the way you breathe … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. What’s Real
     … The suffering we create for ourselves is real, and the way we create it is real. Even though we may be operating under illusions, the suffering we create from our illusions is real. And the way we can solve that problem is also real. There’s a passage in the Canon where one of the Buddha’s disciples, Ven. Gavampati, reports that he heard … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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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  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  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. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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