Search results for: middle way

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. Book search result icon 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 … 
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  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Not Swept Away
     … The good news of the Buddha’s teaching is that it doesn’t have to be that way. All too often the Buddha is accused of being pessimistic, but the whole import of the four noble truths is that you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to get blown away. At the very least, suffering is manageable. As someone once said … 
  13. Believe in Your Actions
     … You can work with the mind, and that gives a greater sense of well-being as you learn how to stay focused and solid in the midst of all the changes that come your way. After all, we do live in a middle level of being. The Buddha talks about levels of being that are exclusively painful, those that are exclusive pleasant, and then … 
  14. Streams of Anger
     … Then there’s the way you talk to yourself about it, about how this person behaves this way—always behaves this way—and it’s unbearable. Something’s got to be done. Well, learn how to question that. We do have the choice of how we talk about our experiences as we go through the day. And the way we talk about our experiences … 
  15. Capture Your Imagination
     … If they don’t work, then try to imagine a different way of changing things. You may have noticed this when reading Ajaan Lee’s instructions for meditation, especially in his Dhamma talks. In Keeping the Breath in Mind, he gives you some basic principles, but in his Dhamma talks he plays with all kinds of other ways of playing with the breath, ways … 
  16. Delight in Concentration
     … One of the ways of taking pleasure in doing this, even before you can find a sense of well-being with the breath, is to talk to yourself about what a good thing it is that you’re on this path. The Buddha lists six different ways of taking delight that he says can lead to the end of the effluents. It’s interesting … 
  17. Your Inner Teacher
     … It could be the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, any part of the body where you have the sensation that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Allow that area to stay relaxed all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, and all the way through the spaces … 
  18. Precarious Knowledge
     … The body has to function in a certain way, the brain has to function in a certain way, to maintain that knowledge, and yet we know these things can change. This is why we need to look for a refuge. We talk about taking refuge in the path, but even the path is uncertain until it’s reached the goal. Once the goal is … 
  19. The Graduated Discourse
     … middle of the night. He saw beings dying and being reborn in line with their karma, going up and down and up and down. It’s almost as if samsara is playing a trick on people. You work really hard to develop good karma and you get the rewards. But then if you’re attached to the rewards, you start behaving in unskillful ways … 
  20. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … All the qualities you develop are good qualities of mind, noble qualities of mind, which is why they say that the Dhamma is good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end. The quality of ardency is especially important. It’s what helps the other good qualities of the mind grow. It’s part of right effort. Right effort involves three … 
  21. Duties
     … In the same way, it’s important that you keep your spirits up as you practice. Realize that if you’re going to make your way to release, it has to be through doing your duties. So don’t see these duties as onerous, as a weight bearing you down. They’re an opening, an opening to freedom: freedom from suffering, freedom from all … 
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