Search results for: middle way
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- The Karma of Pain… If there’s a pleasant feeling, say, in the middle of the chest, try to breathe in a way that keeps that pleasant feeling going all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out, without any breaks in-between. Don’t let the in-and-out of the breath disturb the ease and spaciousness and pleasure that come with that …
- Why We Train the Mind… So right effort doesn’t mean just a middling effort, it means appropriate effort, appropriate to what you can handle—and appropriate to the task. As I said earlier, as the Buddha pointed out, there are some problems in the mind and all you have to do is to look at them and they go way. Others require a lot of effort. You have …
- Even Animals Can Be Trained… You’ll have to learn how to stop clinging to them, but first you have to cling to them in a way that gets you across. In this way, you’re taking the ordinary, everyday functions in the mind, where it has feelings and perceptions—the labels you put on things—thought constructs or thought fabrications, where you put thoughts together, and your consciousness …
- The Duties of Happiness… That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness, based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in the …
- A Warrior’s Strengths… Well, the martial arts expert finally comes around, he sees a donkey, he walks way around the donkey, stays away from it. You need concentration as that ability to walk your way around things. When the storms in your mind are blowing and they seem really strong, just say, “I’m going to stay right here with the breath and focus on that and …
- Healing & Protection… a magical way of protecting himself so that no matter how much you spear the middle of his chest, you can’t get to his heart, so you can’t kill him. What they do is to go out and find the tree where the heart is, and all they have to do is squeeze it, and he dies. It’s the same with …
- Dhamma Warrior… Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Don’t let the external wat get in the way of your internal wat.” In other words, the concerns of making things nice outside, nice food, nice place to stay, nice whatever: If they start getting in the way of your meditation, you’ve got to cut back. So you have to look all around you. As Ajaan Lee …
The Craft of the Heart
The Nine Stages of Liberating Insight
… trying to figure out a way to escape from all fabrications that appear, in the same way that a caged quail keeps looking for a way to escape from its cage. h. Equanimity with regard to fabrications (saṅkhārupekkhā-ñāṇa): viewing all fabrications with a sense of indifference, just as a husband and wife might feel indifferent to each other’s activities after they have …Show 2 additional results in this book- Remembering Ajaan Lee… You find yourself facing a wall, you’ve got to figure out, “Well, maybe there’s some way around the wall. Maybe I’ve created the wall. How can I un-create it? How can I stop doing the things that create the wall?” Because remember, look at things as actions. That’s one of the most useful ways of looking at the problems …
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Straight from the Heart
The Conventional Mind, the Mind Released
… Whatever is a matter of convention follows these conventional ways. But whatever is a matter of release—of purity—cannot be made to follow those ways, because it is not the same sort of thing. To take release or a released mind and confuse or compound it with the five khandhas, which are an affair of conventional reality, is wrong. It can’t be …Show 2 additional results in this book
- Creating Your Environment… all the time, but it very rarely works out that way. That’s why we have to learn how to create our own environment. Ajaan Fuang once noted that even though the place where he taught in Bangkok was not especially conducive—it was fairly noisy, it was right down in the middle of the city—the fact that he was there made it …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… He starved himself until he was skin and bones, but then he had the good sense to realize that that wasn’t the way out, either. You can’t starve the mind of its suffering simply by avoiding sensuality. It just begins to suffer in different ways. It starts feeding in different ways. The person who engages in the self-denial of that sort …
- Homage Through the Practice… If you didn’t stop, you’d think this was the normal way the mind has to be. Look around you: This is the way everybody else’s minds are, so you begin to think, “Well this is the way it has to be.” But it doesn’t have to be. As you get the mind more and more still, you begin to realize …
- The Path to the Top… We look at the Buddha, the way he behaved, the way he talked. He doesn’t fit into some of our preconceived notions about what a teacher should be. There are some portraits of the Buddha where he’s just all sweetness and light, very gentle, very kind, who would never say anything harsh to anybody. But if you look at the record in …
- Looking at Your Life… in the middle of a web. Usually the spider is off to one side of the web, but it’s sensitive to what’s going on in the entire web. Wherever a fly or other insect comes and gets caught in the web, the spider immediately goes there, deals with it, then returns to its original spot. In the same way, you have your …
- Change Your Perceptions… bodily fabrication—the way you breathe; verbal fabrication—technically, it’s directed thought and evaluation, but in plain terms, it’s the way you talk to yourself; and then mental fabrication—perception and feelings. As you look at the Buddha’s teachings, you can see that a lot of them have to do with instructions on how to fabricate all these things more skillfully …
- Virtuous Beginnings… Right livelihood means that we make our living in ways that are not harmful to anyone, that don’t exploit anyone unfairly; in ways that are honest. We choose honest ways of making a living because the way we make a living permeates through our whole life. So that’s another topic we can reflect on. Are there any areas in our livelihood that …
- Admirable Intentions… But you look at the world of the path and you realize, as they say, “It’s admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, admirable in the end.” Good all the way through.
- The Best News in the World… the conviction that there must be something deathless, and that there must be some way it can be attained by human effort. So he cast about for another possible way. He came across right concentration. He had entered right concentration spontaneously when he was a child. He recollected that. Could this be the way? Something inside him said, “Yes.” So he stuck with it …
- Mindfulness the Gatekeeper… And the best way to keep those duties in mind is to simply be with the body in and of itself, how it feels to be with the body right here right now. For example, the breath: If you’re concerned about the duties of the world, the breath has only one function for you, which is to keep you alive. So when you …
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