Search results for: middle way

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  2. Square One
     … There are lots of ways you can use your perceptions to deal with feelings of discomfort in body or mind. So you can see that these fabrications are not separate things. It’s not the case that the breath is one thing, and unrelated to the breath is the way you talk to yourself, and unrelated to the way you talk to yourself are … 
  3. Hold on for All You’re Worth
     … Once you’ve gotten to the other side, that’s when you let it go—but you don’t let go in the middle of the river. The ajaans have their own way of making the same point. Ajaan Fuang’s image was of a rocket booster. You want to send a capsule to the moon. The capsule can’t go on its own … 
  4. High-Level Dhamma
     … But it’s not the case that you go straight to those things without having to muck around with your defilements, because the defilements are going to get in the way one way or another. Because our habit is to deal unskillfully with whatever comes up, then when the results of skillful actions come and are nice, we tend to get complacent—an unskillful … 
  5. The Dhamma Eye
     … He basically taught them the noble eightfold path, and especially explained the first factor of the path, explaining it as a middle way between the two extremes of sensual indulgence and self-torment. And explained the four noble truths as the first factor of the path. It was just after the explanation of those four truths and the duties appropriate to each that Koṇḍañña … 
  6. The Lightning Bolt
     … Death can come in that way. And you want to be ready to go in a way where there are no regrets, nothing you hang on to. So these are all ways of generating desire to focus on the practice so that you can take delight in seeing an unskillful quality slough away, and seeing skillful qualities growing. No matter how slowly they may … 
  7. Victory over Death
     … It comes from a sutta where a king comes to see the Buddha in the middle of the day, and the Buddha asks him, “What have you been doing?” The king is remarkably frank. He says, “The typical things of someone who’s obsessed with gaining and maintaining his power.” So the Buddha asks him, “Suppose that someone trustworthy came from the east, saying … 
  8. Life Well Lived
     … Then you can turn back to look at the movies again., until you can see through the way the mind deceives itself, the way it deludes itself. In that way, you’re in control. Once you’re in control, it’s a lot easier to live life the way you want it to be lived, to do with your life what you really want … 
  9. The Balance of Power
     … Then move up to the middle of the chest, and the same way around the body in the chest area, then the base of the throat, and the head. You can go down the shoulders to the arms, and then start at the hips, going down the legs to the toes. Work through the body, section by section, making sure that whatever section you … 
  10. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
     … He started his first sermon by explaining the noble eightfold path as the middle way between self-torture and indulgence in sensual pleasure. And to the very last person he taught, he said that it’s only in a teaching where you have the noble eightfold path that you’re going to find anyone awakened. The eight folds of the path are actually eight … 
  11. Choosing Your Allies
     … Where does that start? How does it spread through the body? What are the energy channels? What are the energy centers? When the in-breath starts coming in, where does it feel like it starts? Around the navel? The middle of the chest? Ask yourself. Look. And when the energy starts to spread, is there anything to get in the way? If there is … 
  12. The Power of Intention
     … What’s interesting about the breath? Well, you can breathe in all kinds of ways. You have all kinds of ways of visualizing the breath to yourself, experiencing the flow of energy through the body. It can actually deal with physical pains and help with some illnesses. As I mentioned the other night, Ajaan Lee’s method of dealing with the breath—thinking of … 
  13. Reclaiming the Breath
     … But you could find others as well—the middle of the head, right where the legs join the torso, or the base of the spine. If you focus your attention there, just stay with that sense of stillness as you breathe in and breathe out. You’ll find that that’ll have a calming effect on the breath. That way, if the breath has … 
  14. Four Determinations
    Your practice doesn’t come together simply because causes and conditions happen to be that way. There’s something inside you that has to want it to happen and to make it happen. You look at the images the Buddha gives for people who do the practice: people who are searching for something; people who are struggling, fighting in battles; people who are being … 
  15. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … You were actually going to figure out what kind of breathing would lead to rapture, what kind of breathing would lead to pleasure, how to breathe in a way that you’re conscious of the whole body, how you can calm bodily fabrication, how you can breathe in a way that calms mental fabrication, and how to breathe in a way that gladdens the … 
  16. Staying Power
     … And was there a continent behind the mountains, or were they simply a chain set in the middle of the sea? A lot of things they didn’t know at all. Just finding a path through the mountains was quite an endeavor. But they learned about the mountains in two ways. One was through their initial forays, just trying to find a path through … 
  17. The Karma of Ideas
     … There are skillful actions on the worldly level, in other words, there are skillful ideas that help you live in the world in a happy and pleasant way. There are unskillful ones, which make you live in an unpleasant or unhappy way. There are mixed ones, and then there are the ideas that take you beyond ideas, take you beyond action entirely. Those ideas … 
  18. Not Getting What You Want
     … Then you hold onto the raft as you use your hands and feet to make your way across the river. When you get to the other side, okay, *that’s *when you let go. Don’t let go before you’ve gotten to the other side, though. If you let go in the middle of the river, you just get washed away. So, as … 
  19. Acceptance
     … The gradual slope is the practice of getting more and more sensitive to what’s actually happening right here, and also getting more and more sensitive to what it means to practice the middle way, to know when you’re putting too much pressure on things and when you’re not put enough pressure on things. That sort of sensitivity you can develop only … 
  20. You Are Not Powerless
     … You look for ways in which you can improve your life around you, the life of the people around you, and you work at it. You look for ways in which to improve things. Try to find some form of right livelihood and engage in it. The second quality is that once you’ve gained your livelihood in a good way, you try to … 
  21. Diagnosing the Mind
     … This way, you learn how to become your own doctor. There’s nobody who can stand over your shoulder and say, “Now you breathe this way, now you breathe that way, now you focus on this, you’d better drop that.” If there were somebody doing that and they were accurate, they would scare you—that somebody could read your mind that accurately. What … 
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