Search results for: middle way
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- A Real Education… We come out to a place like this, where you can sit under the trees in the middle of the day and you’re face to face with your own mind, because it’s the mind that’s going to determine—when aging, illness, and death come—whether you’re going to suffer or not. You need to get it under control. This is …
- Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts… It might be around the heart, around the stomach, in the neck, or in the middle of the head. Keep directing your thoughts to the breath energy there. Ajaan Lee’s image is of holding on to a post. You can run around the post, and as long as you hold on, you don’t get dizzy, you don’t fall down. But if …
- Metacognition… As the texts say, it’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. You start with good principles, you apply them honorably to your life, make yourself a noble being. So it’d be a shame to just let this Dhamma go. So there are all kinds of ways that you can talk to yourself to encourage yourself on …
- The Six Properties… in different ways. As I said, first there’s just the energy flowing through the body, then you perceive the breath as originating in the body, then you allow it to spread smoothly. You think of that sense of radiating energy from any of the resting spots that Ajaan Lee talked about—the tip of the nose, the palate, the middle of the head …
- What Are You Doing Right Now?… It could be the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, anywhere in the body. Then try to keep that spot open and relaxed, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. Don’t squeeze it out. Allow it to remain open all the way through the breath process. A sense of fullness will develop …
- Food Insecurity… The Dhamma is admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end. It’s a good path all along the way. Whatever’s required to make you want to follow it, talk to yourself in that way. As long as the mind has energy to think, think in ways that are positive. Try to find food in the path itself. Let …
- Educating Equanimity… That way, if the mind wants to jump into a particular situation and say, “We’ve got to help it this way or change it that way,” you can step back and ask, “Okay, is that really the wisest thing to do? Or are you just being reactive or operating out of fear?” In other words, the best expression of compassion or of equanimity …
- Make the Most of What You’ve Got… With some pains, if you breathe in a particular way, the pains get worse. If you breathe in another way, they go away. With other pains, the breath has nothing to do with them. They’re just there. How do you learn this? You learn by experimenting; you learn by trial and error, by trial and success. We’re bringing the mind into a …
- The Noble Truths of the Breath… It might be down in the middle of the brain, in the area of the heart, the area of the stomach, or some of the more outer parts of the body that need to be refreshed. We look for these areas and refresh them because the qualities of right concentration are pleasure and refreshment. And you can create those qualities by the way you …
- Fighting Spirit… So if you feel any discomfort from the breath, think of different ways of breathing in. Even if you’re not sure that the discomfort is actually coming from the breath, think about different ways of breathing to test it; and think about different ways of perceiving the breath to test that as well. Then look at what the Buddha calls verbal fabrication – the …
- Basic Stuff… So hold it just right, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. Try to find what kind of rhythm and texture of breathing feels best right now. If you’re feeling tired, you may want to breathe in a way that’s more energizing. If you’re feeling tense and stressed out, you may want to breathe in …
- A Legacy of Strengths… right above the navel, the base of the throat, the tip of the breastbone, the middle of the head, top of the head. Think of breath energy emanating from any one of those spots, and if anything seems to be getting in the way of its spreading, let it dissolve away so that the breath energy flows smoothly throughout the entire body: That’s …
- The Karma of Pleasure… Could there be another way? Because self-torment obviously wasn’t getting results. He recollected a time when he was a child and had naturally entered the first jhana. He asked himself, “Could this be the way?” And something inside him said, “Yes.” “If so, why am I afraid of that pleasure?” Because prior to that he had lumped all pleasure together as bad …
- The Water in Your Cup… This way you get to see things you didn’t see before inside, both in the body and in the mind. Because as the mind begins to gather around the breath like this, and you give it one thing to stick with, you begin to see other movements in the mind: other intentions that may come up, other thoughts referring to the past, referring …
The Buddha Smiles
2 : Sensuality
… Resembling a ball of sealing wax, set in a hollow, with a bubble in the middle and bathed with tears, eye secretions are born there too: The parts of the eye are rolled all together in various ways.’ Plucking out her lovely eye, with mind unattached she felt no regret. ‘Here, take this eye. It’s yours.’ Straightaway she gave it to him. Straightaway …Show 2 additional results in this book- The Adventure in the Present… But the Buddha had to make those mistakes before he was able to find the middle way. And it wasn’t the case that after six years of really strong effort, he just gave up and said, “Well, effort doesn’t get anywhere. Let’s have a practice of no effort.” Fortunately, he didn’t go in that direction. If he had, we probably …
- The Same for Everyone… Now, the Buddha did admit that there are various ways of conceiving the path, but there are a limited number of variations. And they all basically contain the same factors: virtue, concentration, and discernment, sorted out in different ways. When you look at the different lists in the Wings to Awakening, you see that the factors are sometimes listed in different orders. For instance …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… change. And it didn’t necessarily go up. Sometimes it would go down. Way down. An analogy he used later was that it’s like throwing a stick up into the air. Sometimes it lands on this end, sometimes it lands on that end, sometimes it lands splat in the middle. So his question was, is there a pattern to the ups and downs …
- Achieving Balance… This, combined with mindfulness, is probably your best guarantee of getting the mind into balance, so that when things aren’t going the way you’d like them to, you don’t get upset, you don’t get flustered. You simply take it into account and see what you can do to balance it out. So try to think in ways that are encouraging …
- Caught in a Thorn Bush… success in doing detailed work, with a sense of urgency, but also with a sense of patience, because each of the bases for success has to be done in a balanced way. We are, after all, on a middle way here, and that requires a lot of discernment. If we were on a path that involved a lot of extremes—say, just do without …
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