Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Changing Your Default Settings
     … One of the reasons why we meditate is to give us some new skills in this area. Your intention now is to stay with the breath, to stay with one thing continually. And you can add to that the intention that you want to make this as pleasant an experience as possible. That means you’re going to be focusing on the feeling that … 
  3. Steering the Raft
     … What it’s good for is as a tool to develop skillful qualities in the mind—as we practice generosity, as we practice virtue, as we meditate. So you’re using this tool. You’re using this raft. Be very clear about the fact that the raft is something just slapped together out of inconstant things, but if you steer it properly, it’ll … 
  4. Solving Real Problems
     … The Buddha’s teachings are full of examples of skillful ways to shape these fabrications. His sixteen steps for breath meditation, of course, deal with bodily fabrication. You get sensitive to how long the breath is, how short the breath is, all the variations of the breath. Then you learn to breathe in and out aware of the whole body, so that you can … 
  5. An Equanimity You Can Feed On
     … It needs to be backed up by the skills that come from learning how to breathe well, learning how to breathe in a way that really feels nourishing for the body and nourishing for the mind. Sometimes you hear people warning you away from the pleasures of jhana practice, saying that you’re going to get stuck there because the pleasure is so great … 
  6. Intelligent Restraint
     … That way, when things come in that would aggravate you, you remember that you have to treat them in a skillful way, and you have the strength to treat them in a skillful way. Take, for instance, the Buddha’s instructions on dealing with unpleasant words. All too often someone says something and we immediately react: “How could that person say that?” We get … 
  7. Issues of Control
     … But again, this is a skill you learn—observing what the mind needs, observing what the body needs, and learning how to provide for those needs. And you are exerting some control here. Sometimes we’re told that the lesson of the meditation is that you have no control—but that would be depressing. As you sit there watching whatever comes up, sometimes some … 
  8. The Power of Human Effort
     … One was lack of contentment with skillful qualities, and the other was relentless effort. In other words, the Buddha never let himself rest content with how well his mind was—unless it was really, really good. If there was any smidgeon of stress or suffering or anything less than ideal in the state of his mind, he wanted to figure out how to get … 
  9. A True Person
     … If you’ve got a good teacher—I can’t say that I’m 100% skilled in this particular area, but I’m learning—these are important skills to master. We tend to forget that there’s a social dimension to the practice. All the time we think of the practice as sitting here with our eyes closed, or doing walking meditation. But there … 
  10. Meditators at Work
     … This is a skill you’re learning. Learn how to be captivated by the skill. There was a study one time of people who were really good at sports, as opposed to people who are just good. We’re talking about the real geniuses, the physical geniuses in the sport. The question was, what made them different from the ordinary good athletes? And they … 
  11. Focus on Your Intention
     … But as you get into the state of concentration, you can step back and say, “I can change the way I breathe so that I’m not faced with the simple choice either of exploding or bottling up this uncomfortable energy in the body.” There’s a more skillful alternative. Just dissolve the tightness and tension in that way of breathing. So it’s … 
  12. Sitting & Walking
     … They’re both good for each other—and they develop different skills. Sitting meditation is more for deep concentration. Walking meditation is more for discernment. Ajaan Suwat would often mention that he got his best insights while doing walking meditation. But you have to know how to do it well. There are a few rules for walking meditation that are different from sitting meditation … 
  13. Recovering Your Balance
     … So the skill of recovery is one of the most important skills you’re going to have as a meditator: noticing a mistake and then correcting for it right away. It’s when you refuse to notice a mistake that you fall.
  14. Mind Control
     … The main skill in the practice is learning that sense of time and place, what works and what doesn’t work when and where. You learn this through trial and error. This is why it’s a skill. The Buddha didn’t just put you in a pressure cooker and say, “Okay, when the pressure gets enough, and you have a neurotic breakthrough, that … 
  15. From Anxiety to Confidence
     … It gets you to do what’s skillful. You read those stories about people meditating, getting discouraged, thinking they’re going to give up, and the Buddha appears right in front of them. On the one hand, they probably felt very embarrassed. But on the other hand, they thought about how kindly his action was. He went to all that trouble to search them … 
  16. A Thread into Awareness
     … That, too, is a skill and it’s an important one. You’re going to learn some interesting things about the mind as you do that skill. You have to remind yourself that you’re learning things about the mind as you maintain it in concentration. Otherwise, part of the mind will say, “Well, where’s the insight?” Actually, this is where you’re … 
  17. The Heightened Mind
     … So to be fully mindful and to have the energy to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and to delight in developing skillful ones, you need concentration. This is what lifts the mind. As you leave the monastery and head out into the world, think of having your mind lifted above everything around you. Not necessarily that you’re better than other people, but it … 
  18. Delight & Beyond Delight
     … well learn how to make it more than it is.” But now, when you’ve got the path here, you can learn how to develop some of its skills and get some mastery over the skills. You learn how to delight in that. Delight in the idea of freedom. Delight in the idea of not being a slave to your defilements, because otherwise, you … 
  19. Your Mind is Lying to You
     … So the concentration, as you’re working at it, develops a set of skills that enable you to gauge what’s being said in the mind, so that you can figure out who’s lying to you and who’s telling the truth. Who has your best interests in mind and who doesn’t? Remember that image of Ajaan Lee’s, of all kinds … 
  20. Analyzing Anger
     … seeing where they’re stressful, seeing where they’re not stressful; seeing where they’re helpful, skillful, where they’re not helpful, not skillful. Then we can translate that knowledge into the rest of our lives, because it’s not the case that we’re creating suffering for ourselves only when we sit here and meditate. It’s happening all the time. You want … 
  21. Factors for Stream Entry
     … that it’s through our efforts that we shape our experience—and we can learn how to do it in a skillful way, all the way to the end of suffering. One of the big misunderstandings about karma is the idea that everything you experience in the present moment can be traced back to past actions, but then you can take this present moment … 
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