… In the same way, there are certain intersections in
your breath energy channels that tend to seize up first. It can be in
the middle of the chest. It can be in the solar plexus, or someplace
deeper down in the abdomen. We all have our own specific spots.
So you want to be especially careful around those spots. Try to keep
them open …
… Daily Life
For the Survival of Your Goodness
June 20, 2011
Try to notice what way of breathing seems most refreshing. Notice where in the body you’re most sensitive to how the breathing has an impact on your feelings. These sensations may be around the heart, in the throat, in the middle of the head. Where are you most sensitive to the impact …
… Even though the present moment
may not be all that good, you can’t let that get in the way. In fact,
that’s a lot of what it means to dig down into the present moment:
getting past the things that are not good, and finding what potentials
you have there that really are worthwhile.
Think of the breath—who would have thought …
… Often they had to go out of their way and face a lot of
difficulties. For that they deserve your gratitude. If everything were
predetermined, there’d be no need to be generous, because things would
just happen on their own. You wouldn’t have to go out of your way to
be generous. As for the people who helped you, they had to …
… There has to be a middle way between the expression and the suppression. This is important. Often as you meditate you try to tell yourself, “Don’t react. Just be equanimous. Don’t get excited. Don’t get worked up about things.” And then you try to convince yourself that that’s what’s actually happening. You see ideals of what an enlightened person …
… This image would have special resonances with the Buddha's teaching on the middle way. It also adds meaning to the term samaṇa—monk or contemplative—which the texts frequently mention as being derived from sama. The word sāmañña—“evenness,” the quality of being in tune—also means the quality of being a contemplative: The true contemplative is always in tune with what is …
… Ups and downs are
normal.”
When you find yourself in the middle of a down, you can remind
yourself, “Okay, this is to be expected. It’s not the end of the
world. Your meditation hasn’t crashed. It’s part of the normal cycle
of meditation.” When you have that calm attitude, it makes it a lot
easier to try to figure out …
… Try other ways of testing your perceptions
until ultimately you develop a repertoire. You get a more and more
intuitive sense of what feels right for any particular state of the
body.
Say you’ve got a headache. There are certain ways of breathing that
are good, that help counteract the headache. And you also find there
are ways of breathing that aggravate it …
… Find which part of the body responds
to the way you breathe, is sensitive to the way you breathe. For a lot
of people, it’s down around the sternum, or it could be in the throat,
or some place in the middle of the head. But wherever you’re
especially sensitive to how the breath feels, try to focus your
attention there and …
… This requires extreme restraint of the senses
because there is that tendency when you leave sitting meditation to just
let the mind go back to its old ways, which means wasting the stillness
you gained from the meditation. So you try to gather your mind together,
keep yourself focused, say, in the middle of the chest or wherever your
favorite spot is in your …
… Place yourself in the middle and take a good look at the body, until you see that, when taken apart in this way, it vanishes into nothing, into ashes—what they call ‘death’—and you will come to feel a sense of dismay and detachment. If, however, you don’t see any results appearing, go on to—
5. Consider the fact that the body …
… It’s like putting a salt lick in the middle of a forest.
You’re going to get all the animals eventually. They’re all going to
come there because they all need the salt. So you can set up your
camera and get pictures of whatever you want.
In the same way with the breath, whatever aspect of the practice needs
to get …
… the way you feed, physically and emotionally.
He’s holding you to a high standard, and there will be parts of the
mind that resist. To overcome that resistance, you have to remind
yourself: This really is a respectable, honorable path that we’re
taught here. As the chant says, it’s “admirable in the beginning,
admirable in the middle, admirable in the end …
… But remember, the Buddha has us focus on ways of breathing that make
us sensitive to how the mind fabricates its experience through its
perceptions, through its feelings, and even—in the way the
instructions for breath meditation are given—through the way you talk
to yourself. The act of becoming sensitized to these things is what’s
really going to make a difference …
… We have to
recognize that our practice tries to find a middle way between those
mental extremes.
For many people, the issue is, “Should I learn to accept myself or
should I reject myself?” And the psychologists would say, “Learn to
accept yourself.” Well, acceptance and rejection of yourself are two
extremes. We need to recognize them as extremes and start looking at
behavior …
… Right effort doesn’t mean middling effort all the time, you know. What makes the effort right is that it’s skillful, appropriate for right here, right now—and you’re up for the challenge.
In the Buddha’s description of right effort, you’re told to generate desire. And one of the best ways of generating desire is to learn how to enjoy …
… The Buddha expresses it this way: You give in to thoughts that say,
“It’s too early… It’s too late… It’s too hot… It’s too cold… I’m too
tired…” and the work that needs to be done doesn’t get done.
In cases like that, you can’t let those attitudes get in the way. You
have to put yourself …
… If he wasn’t getting the
results he wanted, he’d ask: “Okay, what am I doing wrong?” He’d tried
to find some way around that impasse. We read about the mistakes he
made along the way, but they were always followed by his ability to
stop and take stock. That’s one of the character traits you want to
develop as a …
… But you’ve got to be consciously making the
comparisons and seeing the areas where you can focus on things outside
in certain ways so that your center is not disturbed by other ways of
focusing, i.e., involving greed, anger, delusion, and all the other
unskillful mental qualities that knock your center off kilter.
This requires discernment: comparing things, seeing connections, and
seeing …
… We can either be
enthusiastically resolved, in the sense that we really like our
self—attached to our wants, attached to our thoughts, attached to
however we identify ourselves—or we can be resolved in a negative way:
We look at ourselves, we don’t like our habits, we don’t like the way
we interact with the world. We see how we create …
MN 61 Ambalaṭṭhikā Rāhulovāda Sutta | The Exhortation to Rāhula at Mango Stone
… This image would have special resonances with the Buddha's teaching on the middle way. It also adds meaning to the term samaṇa—monk or contemplative—which the texts frequently mention as being derived from sama. The word sāmañña—“evenness,” the quality of being in tune—also means the quality of being a contemplative: The true contemplative is always in tune with what is …
Frames of Reference | Frames of Reference
… Place yourself in the middle and take a good look at the body, until you see that, when taken apart in this way, it vanishes into nothing, into ashes—what they call ‘death’—and you will come to feel a sense of dismay and detachment. If, however, you don’t see any results appearing, go on to— 5. Consider the fact that the body …
