Balanced Sensitivity

Statement of the Problem Because of the deeply rooted habit of confusion about reality, our mental activity instinctively and constantly produces not only dualistic appearances, but also "triplistic" ones. According to madhyamaka (middle way) theory, it fabricates a deceptive...

What Is Sensitivity? Certain people seem naturally more sensitive than others. Sometimes this is an admirable quality. Partners are sensitive to each other's moods and do not make demands when the other has had a difficult day. Because of this type of sensitivity, our...

The Relation between Sensitivity Training and the Buddhist Teachings “Developing Balanced Sensitivity” is a program I developed for training to achieve emotional balance. It is based on the Buddhist teachings, so all the various practices in it derive from Buddhist sources;...

[As an introduction to this training program, see: Mind-Life Balance: How to Get More Satisfaction in Life] Introduction This weekend, we are going to discuss and practice methods for integrating our life. We don’t actually find them in the Buddhist teachings or elsewhere....

Why We Need to Develop Balanced Sensitivity? We’ve seen that “Developing Balanced Sensitivity” is a training program concerned about how to develop balance with our attentiveness: how we pay attention to situations and to the effect of our behavior on others and ourselves,...

Dispelling Insecurity through Deconstruction To dispel the problems of insecurity that our confusion and its instincts create regarding mind's natural functions, we need to identify the triplistic appearances that fuel these problems. Recognizing the absurdity of our...

Creating a Quiet, Caring Space Traditional sadhana practice for deconstructing one's negative self-image and creating a more positive one begins with quieting the mind of preconceptions and establishing a "circle of protection." The latter practice may consist of an...

Developing balanced sensitivity requires a clear idea of the goal we wish to achieve so that we can focus our efforts in that direction. A Buddha is a paramount example of someone fully sensitive in the positive sense and totally free of all negative aspects. The...

The Three Objects and the Three Poisonous Attitudes The text continues with what we do after formal meditation on the tonglen giving and taking practice for developing relative bodhichitta. It says: (In regard to) the three objects, (take) the three poisonous attitudes and...

Quieting Down We started the training just briefly with the exercise for quieting the mind. When we say “quiet the mind,” that doesn’t mean to turn off everything like the radio is off, but rather it means to quiet down the unnecessary things that are going on in our mind so...