Search results for: middle way
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Solo Practice… Try other ways of testing your perceptions until ultimately you develop a repertoire. You get a more and more intuitive sense of what feels right for any particular state of the body. Say you’ve got a headache. There are certain ways of breathing that are good, that help counteract the headache. And you also find there are ways of breathing that aggravate it …
- Everything Gathers Around the Breath… It’s like putting a salt lick in the middle of a forest. You’re going to get all the animals eventually. They’re all going to come there because they all need the salt. So you can set up your camera and get pictures of whatever you want. In the same way with the breath, whatever aspect of the practice needs to get …
- 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 …
- For the Survival of True Happiness… But remember, the Buddha has us focus on ways of breathing that make us sensitive to how the mind fabricates its experience through its perceptions, through its feelings, and even—in the way the instructions for breath meditation are given—through the way you talk to yourself. The act of becoming sensitized to these things is what’s really going to make a difference …
- Accepting Yourself… We have to recognize that our practice tries to find a middle way between those mental extremes. For many people, the issue is, “Should I learn to accept myself or should I reject myself?” And the psychologists would say, “Learn to accept yourself.” Well, acceptance and rejection of yourself are two extremes. We need to recognize them as extremes and start looking at behavior …
- 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 …
- The Joy of Growing… Think about the ways in which you’ve been generous. Think about the ways in which you’ve held to the precepts. Think in any way that helps you feel confident that you’re doing something good here and that you’re capable of doing it. But that attitude has to be confirmed as you get the mind to settle down. This is why …
- Focused on the Breath… Here you are focusing on your breath, and if I’m talking about other things, it can often get in the way. So, tonight’s talk is about breath. Let’s start with a couple of good long, deep, in-and-out breaths, and see if you can make long, deep breathing comfortable. This doesn’t mean that you’re sucking a lot of …
- Not Resolved on Self… We can either be enthusiastically resolved, in the sense that we really like our self—attached to our wants, attached to our thoughts, attached to however we identify ourselves—or we can be resolved in a negative way: We look at ourselves, we don’t like our habits, we don’t like the way we interact with the world. We see how we create …
- Judging Just Right… It’s the same with the middle way as a whole. It’s very easy to practice in extremes. Sometimes it might be exhausting, but it’s easy in the sense that you don’t have to do much thinking, just plow into whatever you do. But finding the point of just right requires discernment. And it’s going to take time. This is …
- Let Go Like a Millionaire… It’s part of the middle way, a pleasure that’s actually conducive to developing clarity and discernment in the mind. So work on your concentration to make sure that it’s something you can rely on. Work on your virtue, work on your discernment so that you can hold on to them with confidence. When the Buddha says that the self is its …
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