Search results for: middle way

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  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. Book search result icon Noble Warrior Chapter Five: 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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  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. Book search result icon Through the Doors to the Deathless : Awakening while Listening to the Dhamma 4 : Setting the Standards
     … Avoiding both of these extremes, the middle way realized by the Tathāgata—producing vision, producing knowledge—leads to stilling, 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 stilling, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to unbinding? Precisely this noble eightfold path: right view, right resolve, right speech … 
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