Search results for: middle way
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 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 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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Compassionate Duties… He recommends instead the middle way, the noble eightfold path. That’s a value judgment right there. Toward the end of his life he was asked if there were awakened beings in other teachings, and he said any teaching that has the noble eightfold path can give rise to awakened beings. If there’s a lack of the noble eightfold path, then no awakened …
- 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 …
- The Basic Medicine… Everyone comes up here wounded in one way or another, suffering either from things outside or from things inside. At the time of the Buddha people were suffering from greed, anger, and delusion just as we are. With modern culture, modern society, it seems as if we have more diseases of the mind, more complex ways of getting involved in creating delusion, but they …
- Technique & Attitude… men, women, children, young, old, middle-aged, wealthy, poor, sick, healthy, smart, dumb in the ways of the world. But they’ve all taken the practice and they taken it to heart, and they have all been able to benefit from it in the ways that the Buddha promised. At some point in their practice they all had the same strengths and weaknesses that …
- How to Leave Meditation… Whether you’re focused on the chest, the middle of the head, wherever, there’s some spot in the body where you should feel most natural in your focus. And some ways of breathing are particularly conducive to get your mind to settle down. If you notice that, make a note of it. As you sit down to meditate the next time, remember what …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… The breath, when you’re not watching it, just comes in and out every which way. But take some time to notice: What kind of breathing really feels good for the body right now? You can focus on the body in any one spot: the tip of the nose, the middle of the chest, at the abdomen. Those are the three main spots, but …
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The Karma of Questions
De-perception
… If the new sensations aren’t helpful in that way, you can throw the new tool aside. For example, if you have a sense of being on one side of a blockage, try thinking of being on the other side. Try being on both. Think of the breath as coming into the body, not through the nose or mouth, but through the middle of …Show one additional result in this book
- Tranquility & Insight Together… We’re already shaping our experience—through the way we breathe, through the way we think about things, the perceptions we apply to things, the labels, the ideas we impose on our experience. These are all active processes. And as the Buddha said, we do these things out of ignorance for the most part, and as a result, even though we’re looking for …
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