Search results for: middle way

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. An Interest in the Breath
     … going down the shoulders, the arms, down to the tips of the fingers; starting in the middle of the chest, right at the heart, going down through the organs down through the intestines. He found that by breathing in this way, focusing on his breath in this way, he could actually reassemble his health. At the end of the rains retreat, he was able … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. Focus on What’s Important
     … He realized that this couldn’t be the way. If he continued with those austerities, he would die without having found anything. So he reflected, “Could there be another way?” He thought back to a time when he was a child, sitting under a tree, spontaneously entering the first jhāna: rapture and pleasure born of seclusion, accompanied by a direct thought and evaluation. He … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. Book search result icon 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 … 
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  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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