Search results for: "Skillfulness"

1. Page 105
2. 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 … 
3. 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 … 
4. 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 … 
5. 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 … 
6. 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 … 
7. 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 … 
8. 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 … 
9. 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 … 
10. 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 … 
11. 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 … 
12. 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 … 
13. 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 … 
14. 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 … 
15. Play AudioPleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … When you do this, you’re learning the basic skill that will take you all the way, at the very least, to stream entry, because it’s all about seeing and developing dispassion for the activities of the mind. The same holds true with the concentration that comes from contemplating the body. At first, you’re focused on your image of the body. But … 
16. 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 … 
17. Play AudioInner Critics
     … On the other hand, it means being skillful in learning how to move you in that direction. So we do hold high standards here. As the Buddha once said, the secret to his awakening was two things. One was not resting content with skillful qualities. If he hadn’t truly reached an end of suffering, he wasn’t going to let himself rest. And … 
18. Play AudioWhat’s Worth Doing?
     … But the wise person who has developed good qualities, developed good skills, can share them. So the amount of stress and suffering that goes into following the path is really worth it. Just make sure you don’t get waylaid, particularly with sensuality. There are four kinds of clinging: clinging to sensuality, to habits and practices, to views, and to ideas of the self … 
19. Play AudioSome Assembly Required
     … You’ve got the raw material coming in from the past, but your skill in putting things together right now is what’s going to make a difference. If it didn’t make a difference, there wouldn’t be the four noble truths, or, if someone did talk about the four noble truths, they wouldn’t make any difference. This is one of the … 
20. Play AudioThe Happiness & Suffering of Others
     … If their actions were based on right view, done with skillful intentions, then they were going to benefit from those actions. But if they were based on wrong view and unskillful intentions, they were going to suffer. It was from that much larger perspective that he was able to turn around and look back at his own suffering in the present moment: looking for … 
21. Play AudioTaking Stock
     … Of course, you’ll find, as you look in your mind, there are a lot of other potentials as well, a lot of less skillful potentials. You’ve probably had some practice in developing those, too. But it’s important that you realize you do have the choice: You don’t have to just go with old habits, good or bad. You want to … 
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