Search results for: middle way

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  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. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. A Happiness Based Inside
     … But you’ve got to be consciously making the comparisons and seeing the areas where you can focus on things outside in certain ways so that your center is not disturbed by other ways of focusing, i.e., involving greed, anger, delusion, and all the other unskillful mental qualities that knock your center off kilter. This requires discernment: comparing things, seeing connections, and seeing … 
  18. To Be Sure
     … If he wasn’t getting the results he wanted, he’d ask: “Okay, what am I doing wrong?” He’d tried to find some way around that impasse. We read about the mistakes he made along the way, but they were always followed by his ability to stop and take stock. That’s one of the character traits you want to develop as a … 
  19. True Happiness Starts with Giving
     … Sometimes it falls splat in the middle, without much rhyme or reason. Karma is what drives all this, but the workings of karma can be very complex. And they can come out in very unexpected ways. We’ve been through this so many times, the Buddha said, that it’s very hard to meet someone who has never been your mother or your father … 
  20. Respect for What’s Noble
     … the way you feed, physically and emotionally. He’s holding you to a high standard, and there will be parts of the mind that resist. To overcome that resistance, you have to remind yourself: This really is a respectable, honorable path that we’re taught here. As the chant says, it’s “admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end … 
  21. Together but Separate
     … Find which part of the body responds to the way you breathe, is sensitive to the way you breathe. For a lot of people, it’s down around the sternum, or it could be in the throat, or some place in the middle of the head. But wherever you’re especially sensitive to how the breath feels, try to focus your attention there and … 
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