Search results for: middle way
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 Truth of Rebirth
5 : An Appropriate Frame
… Either the life force was identical with the body, thus allowing no way for rebirth to occur after the body dies; or else there was a soul or life force separate from the body, which either died along with the body or else survived death. Yet when the Buddha’s contemporaries pressed him to take sides on this question and related questions, he consistently …Show one additional result in this book- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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