Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Bring the Right Attitude… the desire to find true happiness, the desire not to let your life get eaten up by lots of little tiny concerns that ultimately don’t mean much of anything, don’t amount to much of anything, and even if for just a little while, to work on developing skillful qualities in the mind. Ajaan Fuang, when you would first come to meditate with …
- The Breath All the Way… So give time to this skill because it’s the most basic skill in training the mind. It’s your foundation, and you want to make sure the foundation is strong. If you try to build a building with a weak foundation, it’s going to fall over. No matter how beautiful the building may be, it’s going to collapse. But when the …
- Do You Want to Stop Suffering?… Because it’s your discernment that’s finally going to see this, your ability to make distinctions as to what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, what’s more or less pleasant, what’s more or less effective in getting you to see things. There’s a basic duality there that runs all the way through the path. This comes from the fact, of …
- Mindfulness, Discernment, & Peace of Mind… I’ve got to develop some skills in getting the mind to settle down and stay settled down.” As the Buddha said, mindfulness is useful everywhere.* *So you want your mindfulness to be really strong. That means keeping helpful things in mind. We have a lot of unhelpful things that we carry around with us: little bits and snatches of songs, things we heard …
- True Protection for the World… your lack of skill. Some people believe that you have goodwill for other people because everybody has Buddha nature, as if only Buddhas were deserving of your goodwill. But if you realize that anybody out there is going to be subjected to your actions, you want to make sure that the impact you have on that person is harmless. Only then are you safe …
- Afraid of Inner Pleasure… That’s the skill we’re working on here. We’ll find that, as we work on this skill, we’ll be stumbling and picking ourselves up, stumbling and picking ourselves up again and again. But you keep in mind the fact that, okay, what we’re working on here is an inner issue, so the outer issues don’t really matter. That helps …
- Nuts & Bolts… As the Buddha said, the source of all goodness, the source of all skillful actions, is heedfulness: the realization that your actions really do matter, that they really do make a difference between happiness and suffering—pleasure and pain. In Shōtai’s case, her death was totally unexpected. There was no illness leading up to it. It seems to have been an accident. There …
- Samvega… The first is that if you know that your mind has wandered off into something unskillful, you just replace it with something more skillful—as when you’re focused on the breath and you suddenly find yourself thinking about memories of the past, problems in the monastery, problems in the world outside. Those aren’t the issue right now. The issue right now is …
- Strategic Wisdom… It uses whatever little tricks you may need in order to get the mind to abandon its unskillful habits and to develop skillful ones, whatever little rewards you can promise yourself for doing the right thing, sometimes little punishments for doing the wrong thing, and your ability to keep a good humor about the whole process. Don’t be grim and puritanical about it …
- What Makes Concentration Right… But the reason we’re suffering from things outside, both good and bad, comes from the fact that the mind is not skilled in how it processes its information about the world. Or if you use another analogy, it’s as if the mind is cook, and it has both good ingredients and bad ingredients brought to the kitchen. But the cook is not …
- Cherish Your Friends… This is one of the most basic skills in meditation. If you can’t master this one, you can’t do anything else basic, like sticking with the breath. For some of us, this is easy. We’ve had parents who encouraged us and we’ve learned how to listen to those voices of encouragement. If your parents didn’t encourage you, you have …
- Think of the Consequences… realizing that if you’re not skillful in what you do, you can cause some pretty bad harm. So you have to restrain yourself. You have to think about the consequences of your actions. You have to be willing to resist the impulse to just do what you feel like doing. If some voice in the mind says, “Do this,” you don’t just …
- Defilements Are Real… Conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, conviction in the power of action; persistence in trying to give rise to skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones; mindfulness to keep all this in mind, so that the mind can get into concentration and have a sense of its home where it can stay apart from the greed, aversion, and delusion; and then the discernment to take …
- Feeding on Feeding… Mindfulness is the gatekeeper, who remembers, using perception, who’s friendly and who’s not, i.e., which activities are skillful and which ones are not. That way you let in the friendly people and keep out the unfriendly ones, the enemies. You act on your skillful intentions and you’re mindful not to act on the unskillful ones. The soldiers inside are your …
- Anger… Given that people will do things you don’t like, how can you live in this world in a skillful way, not letting your anger to take over? Seeing the issue that way is half the battle right there, because a lot of people really like their anger. They feel that this is how you get things done in the world —by getting angry …
- Learning by Doing… It’s a skill that you work on. So it all comes together right here. That’s why the Buddha said that right concentration is the heart of the path, whereas all the other factors in the path are it’s requisites—the things that help it along, keep it right. But the concentration is where you’re going to see things. After all …
- Representing the World to Itself… His approach was to explore first what could be done.” As you learn new skills, your sense of who you are is going to change. And you begin to see that your sense of who you are is just that: It’s a sense. It’s a perception. If you hold on very tightly to a particular perception, you’re limiting yourself. But if …
- A Clean Break at Death… So training the mind to let go of that sensual desires and all the other hindrances that go along with them is an important skill to develop as you prepare yourself to the fact of death. The same with your attachment to your own body: As long as you identify the body as yours or as you, death is going to be really scary …
- Energy… preventing unskillful qualities from arising, abandoning them if they do arise, giving rise to skillful ones, and then maintaining the skillful ones when they’ve arisen. In each case, you’re supposed to generate desire and activate persistence or activate your energy to do the right duty. Generating desire and activating persistence are pretty similar. In both cases, you have to use heedfulness. When …
- Occupy Your Space… Because without that sense of a good, strong sense of a healthy, skillful identity, all these other identities are going to take over. They’re going to maintain their old power. Here you are. trying to change the balance of power inside, so try to train your skillful intentions to be as solid as possible. And when they’ve done their work, then you …
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