Learning from The Middle Way Buddhist Teachings

This is a journal entry I wrote on November 25th, 2021 that I recently revisited and is part of my blog series where I share private journal entries with the intention of building connection with others through vulnerability and authenticity.

Eight Worldly Winds in Buddhism:

gain ---- loss

success ---- failure

praise ---- blame

pleasure ---- pain

Through meditation and reflection on his own mind and experiences, the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, realized that these states or worldly winds are present in our current human lives and most importantly that they all are impermanent (even though they don't feel that way when they show up) and that suffering (dukkha) happens when we cling or get attached to one and try to push away the other. The Buddha taught that all eight states or winds can be very important teachers, helping us to find deeper compassion for ourselves and others.

Without examination, these can control our lives and continue to blow us back and forth without consciously realizing the suffering they are causing. By cultivating a meditation and mindfulness practice where we spend intentional energy feeling into and getting curious about them, we can become an observer, a compassionate witness and the winds can begin to have less power over us. They will still be there but our relationship to them can shift and that can be incredibly empowering.

In my own reflections, I am noticing situations, many, when I am craving praise (people pleasing) to know what I did was okay...and that craving just leads to more craving. It feeds itself, endlessly, like the hungry ghosts in Buddhism, it is never satiated.

Just recently (this was in 2021 when I first started working with these practices), I am feeling it more clearly, the pattern, and sensing that the middle way between them is freedom. Yesterday I felt a pause in the endless cycle of craving and in that pause, I felt myself standing on the road in between praise and blame, looking at both of them in stillness, like the usual rhythm stopped for a moment and I could see another reality. It felt so strange and surprising and so much better. What might it be like to walk the middle path most moments of most days? What would it be like to free my mind from these programmed realities and change the script entirely? I wonder... I'm seeing the humor in the patterns and cravings of my mind and the absurdity of them sometimes and that helps take their blinding power away because I am no longer them and they are no longer me. They are part of the operating system installed within me and maybe I can do upgrades to the system over time to continue to shift things within me…