A Balanced and Skillful Approach to Life

[icy]

"A balanced and skillful approach to life, taking care to avoid extremes, becomes a very important factor in conducting one's everyday existence. It is important in all aspects of life. For instance, in planting a sapling of a plant or a tree, at its very early stage you have to be very skillful and gentle. Too much moisture will destroy it, too much sunlight will destroy it. Too little will also destroy it. So what you need is a very balanced environment where the sapling can have a healthy growth. Or, for a person's physical health, too much or too little of any one thing can have destructive effects. For example, too much protein I think is bad, and too little is bad.

"This gentle and skillful approach, taking care to avoid extremes, applies to healthy mental and emotional growth as well."

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

[dondrup]

What His Holiness Dalai Lama had said is the Middle Way - the very essence of Buddha’s teachings. Buddha taught about avoiding the extremes of indulgence in sense pleasures and the extremes of self-mortifications.  Buddha advocated the Middle Way i.e. to practise the Noble Eightfold Path as the path that leads to liberation.  In the Mahayana Madhyamika teachings, Buddha taught about emptiness and avoidance of the extremes of permanent existence (eternalism) and the extremes of non-existence (nihilism).  If we adopt the Middle Way, we will have a balanced and skilful approach to life because it is the path to ultimate liberation – Enlightenment.

[RedLantern]

We begin to block our way to growth the moment we start defining success and failure according to the conventions set up by the society and media.Growth has different meanings for different people.For some growth means growing lots of trees and saving forests and for some means earning lots of money and for some growth means helping the unpriviledged and then again for some growth means increasing influence over people.What we need to have is a balanced approach towards life.We need to  understand what success actually means.Sometimes what seems extremely important right now may seem irrelevant after 6 months.
Dalai Lama teaches that balance is a key element of a happy life. A balanced and skilful approach to life,taking care to avoid extremes becomes a very important factor in conducting one's everyday existence.To avoid extremes applies healthy mental and emotional growth as well.

[DS Star]

Yes Middle Way is THE WAY

In the Deer Park near Varanasi, Buddha expounded the Dharma in what is known as the First Turning of Dharma Wheel to his former companions in asceticism:

"These two extremes, monks, are not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the world.

What are the two?

That conjoined with the passions and luxury, low, vulgar, common, ignoble, and useless; and that conjoined with self-torture, painful, ignoble, and useless.

Avoiding these two extremes the Tathãgata gained the enlightenment of the Middle Path, which produces insight and knowledge, and tends to calm, to higher knowledge, enlightenment, Nirvana."

[Barzin]

This is a very profound and deep teaching of His Holiness.  He explained it so well yet so applicable to us modern people.  It is getting harder and harder to focus in today's world when the standard of society if getting higher and higher.  People are losing the true meaning of life which is to nurture their soul besides just reaching or becoming what the society wants him/her to be.  Just like what it said here, maintaining a balanced life and have the skill approach to life is essential in today's society.  Many have not have the skills to handle most things in life, many are just trying to make end meets.  Therefore dharma is essential as a fundamental ground for us to acquire more knowledge to counter our stressful life.