Creative Guidance-IASbaba, Inspirational & Educative Articles
The Middle Path:
Watching the disturbance of the mind is the whole purpose of meditation. Relaxation will eventually happen as a natural consequence of observing and accepting your thoughts, but this won’t happen in a day or two – it will take a little longer.
A day will come when you will be sitting in meditation as usual, and you will suddenly realize that both your mind and body are very quiet, but you are fully awake. For the first time, in that purity, in that clarity, in that magnanimous moment, when both your body and mind have become quiet, your Self awakens to a totally different reality.
That is all the difference there is between Awakening and being asleep. This is the Buddha’s middle path. What is the middle path? The middle path is not about avoiding the extremes of life; he was talking about avoiding the extremes of the mind and the body.
The middle path is just keeping your mind alert enough to stay awake, and your body relaxed enough to be here in the present moment. Buddha’s middle path is quite literally the path between the mind and the body, where you are. Buddha taught for almost 40 years after his Enlightenment, and the only method he taught was “Watching the Breath”.
Just a simple process of watching your breath will reveal the secrets of your mind and body. The effort you put in to stay with the breath will help you to understand the actual functioning of your mind.
“This article is a part of the creative endeavor of Meditation Farm and IASBABA.”