Search results for: middle way

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  2. Caring Enough to Doubt
    There are two ways you can have doubts about the practice or doubts about your own ability to do the practice. One is from caring a lot, and the other is from not caring at all. The second kind is not encouraged, of course. You say, “Well, I doubt that anyone could overcome sensuality or I doubt that I could overcome my anger or … 
  3. Look at Yourself
     … Yet you can look at the rest of the world and try to straighten out the rest of the world as much as you like, but, one, the world refuses to be straightened out in a lot of ways; and two, you can develop a lot of unskillful qualities that way. So you’ve got to turn around and look at yourself. Some people … 
  4. The Skill of Happiness
     … tip of the nose, the base of the throat, the middle of the chest, just above the navel—anyplace where you can clearly notice now the breath is coming in, now it’s going out. You breathe with a sense of refreshment. We’re trying to master this skill because it opens the way to other skills as well. As the Buddha says, you … 
  5. The Fortress
     … That way, it gives rise to a sense of pleasure and rapture. That’s the food. Because as we’re practicing, there are lots of things we have to give up. Like right now, you’re taking the eight precepts. Ways in which the mind used to go looking for food outside are suddenly cut off. But you’ve got better food inside, to … 
  6. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … The question is, how do you relate to the body in such a way, how do you relate to the breath in such a way, that you can actually bring this out? You have to look at the way you breathe. The problem is that you’re used to your way of breathing, and it’s hard to think, “Maybe there might be other … 
  7. Book search result icon The Heart a Flowing Stream Thinking about Jhāna
     … So, just as the Buddha’s path to the end of suffering follows a middle way in general, his teachings on the practice of right concentration teach a middle way, too. Of course, the middle here is not simply a matter of finding a halfway point between two extremes. It requires that you be sensitive to where you are in the practice and to … 
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  8. All-around Alertness
     … Messages get sent up through the bureaucracy and some of them get blocked, say, at middle-level management. Others make their way all the way through to the president of the corporation. But when they get blocked half-way up, you have to wonder: “Is there a good reason for blocking them, or is there a bad reason for blocking them?” If you’re … 
  9. Perfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal
     … You try to create that well-being by focusing on the breath, by adjusting the way you breathe, by adjusting your perceptions of the breath, and adjusting the ways you talk to yourself about the breath. You can try different rhythms of breathing. You can try different images in the mind of how the breath comes into the body, how it goes out, and … 
  10. Firm in Your Intent
     … We really want to be happy, and there is a way to find true happiness that doesn’t cause any harm at all. So he’s not the sort of person who says to forget about your desire for happiness, just accept things as they are, or try to submerge your desire for happiness in working for the happiness of others. After all, if … 
  11. The Mind’s Ostinato
     … You see that you have a habitual way of thinking about the world, a habitual way of thinking about yourself, a habitual way of looking for pleasure in sensuality, and that reduces everything to kamma. And there are better habits—the habits of the noble eightfold path, which are things you do. You develop the habits of right action, right speech, right livelihood, the … 
  12. Courage
     … There had to be another way. And so he kept looking for another way—and then he finally came across the middle way. Notice here that courage doesn’t necessarily mean stubbornness. It means facing down difficulties, not letting yourself get waylaid, not letting yourself get discouraged by those difficulties. When the Buddha met up with pain, it took a lot of courage to … 
  13. Samvega First
     … But then you remind yourself that the Buddha found a way out that’s not just a sour-grapes way out. He says that there is an ultimate happiness that we can find through our own efforts. And, fortunately, there’s nobody to prevent us from trying to find it. Nobody in the cosmos has a bigger plan, saying, “This is where you’ve … 
  14. Question Your Actions
     … One of the other ways we suffer is, once we’ve got an identity of that sort, we don’t like it. We want to destroy it or see it destroyed. So we go back and forth, dropping one identity, taking on another, not liking that, trying another, trying another. The Buddha says, one of the ways to get out of this dilemma is … 
  15. A Blameless Happiness
     … There was a period when he actually thought the best way to find true well-being was to deny yourself all kinds of pleasures He finally realized, however, that that’s not the way. And he found the middle way because he was able to realize there was more to life than just pain and sensual pleasure. There were other kinds of pleasure, other … 
  16. Choices
     … You try to breathe in a comfortable way. You experiment with breathing in different ways. Find what feels comfortable. Try to be aware of the whole body. And then soothe the whole body with the breath. In some places, he talks about first energizing the body by the way you breathe, because there’s a tendency if you just calm down right at the … 
  17. Skillful Attachments
     … Try to notice what way of breathing feels good, what way of breathing doesn’t feel good, and realize that you have the choice. If you want to breathe in a painful way, you can go ahead and do it, but it doesn’t really help anything. It’s much more productive to find a comfortable way of breathing, a way of breathing that … 
  18. The Noble Truth about Craving
     … a life that’s devoted to finding true happiness rather than just muddling around the way we’ve been doing in our wanton ways for who knows how long. You can make something noble out of yourself. That’s the message of the noble truths, all of them. So take that message to heart.
  19. Honest & Observant
     … We’re looking for patterns—patterns in our behavior that are unskillful—and for ways in which we can change our behavior so it’s more skillful. For that, you have to look at your actions over time and try to do them well, which is why there’s the ardency in there. There’s a strange passage in the Commentary, where it tries … 
  20. Imagine Your Breath
     … Ajaan Fuang once recommended a perception where you have a cord of energy running down through the middle of the torso. As you breathe in, the breath comes into that cord from all directions, and it goes out from that cord in all directions. You just hold that perception in mind. You don’t have to do anything to force the breath that way … 
  21. Commit & Reflect All Around
     … What you need is what the Buddha calls, “penetrative” knowledge, in which you understand some activity of the mind, good or bad; notice what’s causing it; notice its diversity—as the Buddha calls it—which means seeing what ways it’s good, what ways it’s bad; what’s the range of suffering or happiness that this particular phenomenon—like feelings or perceptions … 
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