… So the middle course here is to stick with the breath. Remember that the pleasure is created by the flow of the breath, the stillness of the mind, working together. Both of these conditions depend on the focus of your mind on the breath, alert and mindful. You don’t want to drop your alertness; you don’t want to drop your mindfulness, because …
… How can I inflict on others what is displeasing & disagreeable to me?’ Reflecting in this way, he himself refrains from taking life, he gets others to refrain from taking life, and he speaks in praise of refraining from taking life. In this way, his bodily behavior is pure in three ways.1
“Further, he reflects thus: ‘If someone, by way of theft, were to …
… That way, instead of fighting back-and-forth between indulgence
in pleasure and then self-affliction, you’ve got this other place to
go which is much better than either one. This is the Middle Way.
Having this sense of well-being that can come simply from being
centered changes the equation, changes the balance of power in the
mind. You get less tied …
… Messages get sent up through the bureaucracy
and some of them get blocked, say, at middle-level management. Others
make their way all the way through to the president of the
corporation. But when they get blocked half-way up, you have to
wonder: “Is there a good reason for blocking them, or is there a bad
reason for blocking them?”
If you’re …
… You try to create that well-being by focusing on the breath, by
adjusting the way you breathe, by adjusting your perceptions of the
breath, and adjusting the ways you talk to yourself about the breath.
You can try different rhythms of breathing. You can try different
images in the mind of how the breath comes into the body, how it goes
out, and …
… Watch that for a while until everything feels easy and open
there, and then move up to the solar plexus, the chest, the base of
the throat, middle of the head, and then move down the spine, past the
hips, down the legs to the tips of the toes. Then start again at the
back of the neck and this time, go down the …
… You hear so many times, “Focus your attention on one spot.” Yet here’s another way of doing it—two spots. You also might look at how you conceive of the focusing, because our notion of focusing is affected so much by the way our eyes work. One of the ways we gain a sense of the three-dimensionality of space around us is …
There are two ways you can have doubts about the practice or doubts
about your own ability to do the practice. One is from caring a lot,
and the other is from not caring at all. The second kind is not
encouraged, of course. You say, “Well, I doubt that anyone could
overcome sensuality or I doubt that I could overcome my anger or …
… tip of the nose, the base of the throat, the middle
of the chest, just above the navel—anyplace where you can clearly
notice now the breath is coming in, now it’s going out. You breathe
with a sense of refreshment.
We’re trying to master this skill because it opens the way to other
skills as well. As the Buddha says, you …
… There was a period when he
actually thought the best way to find true well-being was to deny
yourself all kinds of pleasures He finally realized, however, that
that’s not the way. And he found the middle way because he was able to
realize there was more to life than just pain and sensual pleasure.
There were other kinds of pleasure, other …
… There had to be another way. And so he kept
looking for another way—and then he finally came across the middle
way.
Notice here that courage doesn’t necessarily mean stubbornness. It
means facing down difficulties, not letting yourself get waylaid, not
letting yourself get discouraged by those difficulties. When the
Buddha met up with pain, it took a lot of courage to …
… This is why a lot of people who say they have no sense of self as they practice, try to practice in a way that’s stress-free, confrontation-free. They don’t press themselves too hard. They say, “This is the middle path.” But remember the Buddha’s analogy for the path is victory: The practice is a battle, or the practice is …
… Then the
Buddha says, there is this middle way that is noble and does lead to
awakening.
So the Buddha set the five brethren onto the noble path before saying
anything about not-self at all. First, he got them to develop their
actions. As we know from other suttas, the eightfold path is a path of
action that leads to the end of …
… They say, “Do a moderate
amount of practice”—which is the middle way of the defilements. They
say, “Well, do it a little bit but don’t take it too seriously.”
So the practice is always going to be countercultural. This is why, as
Ajaan Mun said, you have to replace the culture you were raised in
with the culture of the noble ones …
… One of the other ways we suffer is, once we’ve got an
identity of that sort, we don’t like it. We want to destroy it or see
it destroyed. So we go back and forth, dropping one identity, taking
on another, not liking that, trying another, trying another. The
Buddha says, one of the ways to get out of this dilemma is …
… You see that you have a habitual way of thinking about the world, a
habitual way of thinking about yourself, a habitual way of looking for
pleasure in sensuality, and that reduces everything to kamma. And
there are better habits—the habits of the noble eightfold path, which
are things you do. You develop the habits of right action, right
speech, right livelihood, the …
… So that if, in the middle of a task, you suddenly realize you can’t
stay in your body any longer, you can drop the work outside, focus on
the work inside, and prepare yourself to go. To go well. That’s the
whole purpose of this.
Because the way the Buddha teaches mindfulness of death, it makes
sense only in the context of …
… So, just as the Buddha’s path to the end of suffering follows a middle way in general, his teachings on the practice of right concentration teach a middle way, too. Of course, the middle here is not simply a matter of finding a halfway point between two extremes. It requires that you be sensitive to where you are in the practice and to …
… Try to notice what way of breathing feels good, what way of
breathing doesn’t feel good, and realize that you have the choice. If
you want to breathe in a painful way, you can go ahead and do it, but
it doesn’t really help anything. It’s much more productive to find a
comfortable way of breathing, a way of breathing that …
… Once you’ve got a good way of breathing that maintains a good sense of
fullness in at least one spot in the body, in one of the centers—in
the middle of the chest, the base of the throat, the roof of the
mouth, the nose—try to expand that sense of well-being because you’re
going to be trying to inhabit …
SN 55:7 Veḷudvāreyya Sutta | The People of Bamboo Gate
… How can I inflict on others what is displeasing & disagreeable to me?’ Reflecting in this way, he himself refrains from taking life, he gets others to refrain from taking life, and he speaks in praise of refraining from taking life. In this way, his bodily behavior is pure in three ways.1 “Further, he reflects thus: ‘If someone, by way of theft, were to …
Thinking about Jhāna | The Heart a Flowing Stream
… So, just as the Buddha’s path to the end of suffering follows a middle way in general, his teachings on the practice of right concentration teach a middle way, too. Of course, the middle here is not simply a matter of finding a halfway point between two extremes. It requires that you be sensitive to where you are in the practice and to …
