taming your inner demons

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Wesley1982
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Location: Magga ~ Path to Liberation.

taming your inner demons

Post by Wesley1982 »

I read somewhere about the process of taming your inner demons ~ TODAY would be a good time to start that process. Any info? thanks.
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sangyey
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Re: taming your inner demons

Post by sangyey »

Sure,

Not too tense and not too slack

......

And always a deep kind heart....... A process of disollution back to the center (heart). IN THIS EXTREMELY TENSE WORLD....


:anjali:


'May all being have happiness and it's causes
May all beings be free from suffering and its causes'
shel
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Re: taming your inner demons

Post by shel »

The way to tame a demon is to make friends with it, but remember the fox's secret, the secret men have forgotten, that we are forever responsible for what we tame.
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Ogyen
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Re: taming your inner demons

Post by Ogyen »

Nice responses!!

What helps me is knowing that the demon is essential. It is not something to subjugate, it is nothing to 'conquer' or 'fight'... the demon came about because of the fighting and resistance to 'what is.' Remembering that helps 'make friends' with it. The demon is my own personification of how I've misunderstood something essential I now routinely fail to see with clarity.

I often for myself make myself sit with the demon, offer proverbial tea and cookies in meditation, by looking at its nature, I gain a touch more insight into how NOT to fight it. Fighting only makes demons stronger and feeds them... But facing them... well, what's hard for me is the ego investment I get with the demon, like I'm right, IT'S WRONG and dammit, I'm invested in being right about it NOT getting in the way of my practice. What I have had to look at is how the demon is the problem child you cannot get rid of, so you have to work with it.

My own demon, if it helps, is often feeling like I have to shoulder it all myself. It is a tough one to fight because the more I fight it the more I do things without asking for help. Ego fuels that one hugely. I'm only putting myself here as an example to show you how it can be approached in a practical way. Basically, you have to be kind of gentle in not feeding it, but weakening it with positive actions that don't forget the demon's own humanity... The positive actions can be things like exchanging self for other, so if you have the demon rearing his nasties at you, exchange yourself for the demon. What does it want and why? Another action can be defusing its self-importance by DOING something different than how you normally react with it. So with anger for example, if it rears its head, notice how your face gets hot, or your gut gets tense, and then look at how you start accusing the object of your anger, directly and indirectly. Then exchange yourself for the other.

I think it was Thich Nhat Hanh who said something about when you get angry at someone it's like chasing the arsonist down in the middle of the street while your house is on fire. Demons much work that way, we tend to shift the focus towards something, the object of its appetite and leave our house burning down. First things first, take care of the burning house, where does the flame need to go out? THEN worry about the object. The object is mostly secondary, all demons are essentially afflicted emotions compounded into a stacked into a kind of complex appetite, but as pointed out by shel, they are completely yours. By looking at them, they are said to self-liberate...

My friend has a great blog entry about this that recently really helped me:
http://greatmiddleway.wordpress.com/201 ... -are-ours/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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The Heart Drive - nosce te ipsum

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget." –Arundhati Roy
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