Search results for: middle way

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  2. Stretch Your Mind
     … Work your way up through the torso, the neck, the head. Then with the arms, start with the fingers, up the arms to the shoulders. See if your mind is willing to settle down with the sensation of the body as it relaxes here into the present moment. If it is, fine. If it’s not willing to settle down, you have to ask … 
  3. Strong Against Anger & Fear
     … There’s the way you breathe, there’s the way you talk to yourself, the images, the perceptions you hold in mind. You have to realize that you can breathe in different ways, you can talk to yourself in different ways, you can hold different perceptions in mind. I was listening to a “Dhamma talk” a while back where someone was saying that if … 
  4. The Flowing Mind
     … The image the Buddha gives is, again, of a river flowing, and you’re creating an island in the middle of the river, an island above the flood, through your practice of mindfulness, being mindful in a way that leads to concentration. The flood can go by, but the island isn’t washed away. You can see these currents for what they are, but … 
  5. Asalha Puja – Completeness
     … But the Buddha pointed out that neither way succeeds in finding true happiness. He said the true path was a middle way between these two extremes, starting with right view, all way through right concentration. Then he explained right view in terms of four noble truths: suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. His teaching was like a doctor’s … 
  6. Hindrances Based on Delusion
     … And this is one way of analyzing things. Try to figure out what way of breathing is skillful right now, what way is not skillful. That’s the Buddha’s basic recommendation for how to analyze qualities: to ask that question of what’s skillful and what’s not. A couple of years back, I was talking to a group of people from up … 
  7. Help Others, Help Yourself
     … There’s goodwill, kindness—those are two separate things, by the way, goodwill and kindness—and then patience and equanimity. Goodwill, of course, means you want them to be happy. Kindness means you go out of your way to do good things for them. In going out of your way, you learn how to develop right effort. You don’t just see somebody working … 
  8. Tranquility & Insight with the Breath
     … down around the navel, the tip of the breastbone, the base of the throat, or right in the middle of the head at the palate. When the breath energy starts spreading in your body as the air starts coming in, where does the energy in the body start? And does it feel okay? Does it feel like it has to battle its way through … 
  9. Be Prepared
     … In this way, meditation is partly a preparation for the dangers of daily life, because the most dangerous people out there are the ones who are not prepared, the ones who live with a false sense of security. Things are going along okay, and all of a sudden something happens, and they thrash around. They feel like they’ve been violated, and they get … 
  10. The River Gauge
     … Ups and downs are normal.” When you find yourself in the middle of a down, you can remind yourself, “Okay, this is to be expected. It’s not the end of the world. Your meditation hasn’t crashed. It’s part of the normal cycle of meditation.” When you have that calm attitude, it makes it a lot easier to try to figure out … 
  11. Appropriate Attention
     … There’s nothing that the Buddha asks you to do that’s in any way mean or dishonest. It’s all very upright, honest, clear-eyed, compassionate. Compassionate, in the sense that when you stop creating suffering for yourself, you benefit, and the people around you benefit too. When we’re suffering, we’re constantly trying to lean on other people in one way … 
  12. Sitting & Walking
     … This requires extreme restraint of the senses because there is that tendency when you leave sitting meditation to just let the mind go back to its old ways, which means wasting the stillness you gained from the meditation. So you try to gather your mind together, keep yourself focused, say, in the middle of the chest or wherever your favorite spot is in your … 
  13. On Human Nature
     … This is a path that’s good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end—good all the way through. As for yourself, remember that you’re not stuck with any particular innate nature. If you find yourself thinking any petty or unwise or selfish thoughts, that’s not necessarily your nature. Those are just habits you’ve picked up … 
  14. A Complete Training
     … You have to learn how to talk to yourself in ways that make you want to extend goodwill to people you don’t like or to those you feel have been really behaving in horrible ways. Yet you have to have goodwill for them. So you have to talk to yourself in terms of the principle of karma, say. If you have ill will … 
  15. Feeding on the Breath
     … You’d start with a powder and then mix it with water, kneading the water through the powder in the same way you’d you knead water through dough for bread. In the same way, as you meditate, you get a sense of ease from staying focused on the breath and then you knead it through the body. So you have to figure out … 
  16. Virtue Fosters Concentration
     … This is important, too, because the way we make our livelihood tends to blind us to the harm that we’re causing. If, in order to feed, we need to do this or do that that’s harming someone else, we usually find ways to justify the harm. In that way, we create a lot of bad karma along with a huge patch of … 
  17. The Skill of Stillness
     … The Buddha expresses it this way: You give in to thoughts that say, “It’s too early… It’s too late… It’s too hot… It’s too cold… I’m too tired…” and the work that needs to be done doesn’t get done. In cases like that, you can’t let those attitudes get in the way. You have to put yourself … 
  18. Goodwill First & Last
     … So spreading thoughts of unlimited goodwill help in this direction is a way of preparing you to settle down with the breath. Then actually being with the breath is a very good way of showing goodwill for yourself right now. There’s enough suffering in life. You don’t have to compound it by breathing in a way that’s harsh, uncomfortable, or unhealthy … 
  19. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … from the back of the neck down the spine, out the legs; from the middle of the chest down through the stomach and the intestines; down the shoulders, down the arms; all throughout the head. Think of the breathing as a whole-body process. In the Buddha’s analysis, there’s breath element throughout the body. You feel it most prominently as you breathe … 
  20. Reclaim Your Breath
     … In the same way, there are certain intersections in your breath energy channels that tend to seize up first. It can be in the middle of the chest. It can be in the solar plexus, or someplace deeper down in the abdomen. We all have our own specific spots. So you want to be especially careful around those spots. Try to keep them open … 
  21. Directing & Not Directing the Mind
     … It’s simply showing two different ways you can get the mind to be mindful and* *concentrated. So if you find yourself having trouble settling down, remember these two ways of doing it: thinking in ways that will get you more interested in the present moment, and thinking in ways that can get you uninterested in anything that would pull you away from the … 
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