Search results for: "Skillfulness"

1. Page 103
2. Play AudioWithstanding Pleasure & Pain
    … This is a very essential skill for living in the world in a way that’s good for you, and good for the world. We see injustice all around us, but we have to realize that the sources of injustice lie inside. There are basically four. There’s desire, aversion, delusion, and fear. And a lot of our desire, aversion, delusion, and fear are … 
3. Play AudioA Handful of Leaves
    … In addition to the four noble truths, though—the truths that are true across the board—there’s the truth that skillful qualities should be developed and unskillful qualities should be abandoned. This truth, too, is categorical. Then, toward the end of his life, he called the monks together and taught them the seven sets of dhammas that are wings to awakening. Those can … 
4. Play AudioVirtue
    … It also develops some important skills, such as mindfulness, alertness, and persistence. You have to keep your precepts in mind, remembering that you’ve promised yourself not to lie, not to speak divisively, not to speak harshly, not engage in idle chatter. And you’ve got to be alert to watch your mouth to see: Are you engaging in any of those kinds of … 
5. Play AudioDetermined to Stay with the Breath
    … That forces you to learn the skills that are required to stick with that determination, to stay with it. And then you learn how to apply those skills to the meditation as well. Think of the meditation as a promise you make to yourself, in the same way as you take the precepts as a promise to yourself. Have a sense of honor about … 
6. Play AudioThe Broken Gong
    … Then you can take this skill and apply it to other parts of your life as well. If you find you’re driving yourself crazy over some incident in your family life, at work, whatever, and it echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes in the mind, you can question it: What actually happened, and where right now is the sensation of that event? It’s at … 
7. Play AudioYour Committee of Addicts
    … It’s part of the range of skills that you develop as you practice. And it’s in the course of developing these skills that you really do come to comprehend suffering. When you comprehend suffering, the Buddha said, you comprehend all the other factors of the path—all the other noble truths. So, look at your addictions—the things you like to do … 
8. Play AudioRight View from Right Effort
    … They come from your own efforts to abandon unskillful behavior and develop skillful behavior. That requires desire. So discernment comes from desire. Ajaan Chah has a nice analogy. He says it’s like you’ve gone to the market and picked up a banana and you’re taking it home. Someone asks you, “Why are you carrying the banana?” And you say, “I’m … 
9. Play AudioCountercultural Conditioning
    … In the fourth custom, you delight in developing and delight in abandoning, which means that you delight in developing skillful qualities and in abandoning unskillful ones. The unskillful ones include your cravings. Now, there are skillful desires. But the cravings that go deep and cause trouble are three: craving for sensuality, craving to take on an identity in a world of experience, or if … 
10. Play AudioRefuge
     … So right here is where you find refuge as you develop these skills We talk about the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha as refuge. On the external level, they’re a refuge in the sense that they give us good examples on how to act, because everything in the path is about our actions. We come to the meditation so that we can … 
11. Play AudioThe Middle Way
     … When you resolve not to engage in unskillful qualities, unskillful states of mind; when you try to figure out which ones are skillful, which ones are not, that’s basically right resolve. The Buddha lists the unskillful qualities as sensuality, ill-will, and harmfulness. A lot of people can see easily how ill-will and harmfulness would be bad things to resolve on. Sensuality … 
12. Play AudioMeditate to Win
     … Then there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes when you know that you’ve mastered a skill. Take joy in that as well. Remember what the Buddha said to Rāhula: You reflect on your actions—your thoughts, your words, your deeds—and if you’ve done something that doesn’t harm anybody—doesn’t harm you, doesn’t harm other people—take joy … 
13. Play AudioThe Buddha’s Currency
     … Think about the teachings that tell you that by developing skillful qualities like this, you’re going to find a sense of well-being. Well, here’s the proof. You’ve got this well-being here in the mind. You think about the people who taught you this, starting with the Buddha, and you get a greater sense of conviction in the Buddha’s … 
14. Play AudioThe Intelligent Heart
     … A much more useful skill is learning how to turn pain into pleasure. In other words, sitting here with a sense of well-being that comes from the breath, even though it may not be totally filling everything in your body and mind, at least gives you a toehold in the present moment. Then you can look at the things that otherwise would push … 
15. Play AudioThe Elephant Hunter
     … You want to develop skillful intentions, and for that, you have to learn from your mistakes. Sometimes you act on good intentions and it turns out there’s some delusion involved in what you think is good. When you see that the results are not good, you have to turn around and look back at your intention to see where the delusion was. You … 
16. Play AudioThe Six Properties
     … It’s a skill you’re developing, but you can’t develop the skill unless you have that ability to be non-reactive, so that you can be with mental states and physical states that you don’t like, and you can look into them, try to understand them, see why they invade the mind, and see what you can do so that they … 
17. Play AudioA Sense of Yourself
     … You’re trying to rechannel your energies, rechannel your interests in a more skillful direction. You realize that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There are some skills where, if you’re going to pick up them up, you have to abandon your desire to master something else. I remember learning when I was young that if you want to … 
18. Play AudioPain
     … It’s up to you now to develop these skills. When you have these skills, they put you in a much better position. You can treat the pain with less fear. And when you don’t have fear of pain, that’s one less thing that the world can use against you. We see how people are driven, driven, driven by pain, and how … 
19. Play AudioGood Humor
     … Grace under pressure is an important skill in the meditation: the ability to smile to yourself no matter what happens — what the Thais call smiling in defiance of the tigers. That ability has saved a lot of meditators from going off course, getting discouraged, and letting their meditation crash. So whatever comes up in the meditation, treat it with good humor. The ability to … 
20. Play AudioConcentration: A Balancing Act
     … We can see that, as we work on developing skillful actions, we do really become more skillful. That induces us to want to get the mind to settle down. So you focus on the breath. You try to get the mind in a state where it fills the body. Concentration is sometimes defined as cittass’ekaggata: singleness of mind. That ekaggata is a term … 
21. Play AudioThe Will to Awaken
     … This is why the Buddha said that heedfulness is what lies at the basis of all that is skillful. So try to develop that and learn how to live with that and not get scared by it; learn how to make it energizing, so that it keeps you alert while at the same time developing the sense of patience and equanimity, the calm that … 
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