Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 108
  2. Evaluating Your Practice
     … And how did he know whether it was right or wrong? He developed the ability to watch, and as he was watching, he could ask a few questions: “Where does this lead? What does it do to the mind?” Over time, he gained a balanced sense of what’s skillful and what’s not. The word “balance” here is really important. It’s like … 
  3. Constant, Easeful, Self
     … And, of course there’s the stress of actually doing the concentration, developing a new skill. That takes effort and it requires you have a mature attitude toward your goals. In other words, you are focused on getting there, but you also know that if you focus only on the goal and not on the steps toward the goal, you’re never going to … 
  4. Agreements to Perceive
     … Then you’re more free to learn how to figure out what counts as a skillful perception, which perceptions get the best results, and then stay with those perceptions. You have the choice. So much of our suffering comes from our belief that we don’t have a choice. A particular sensation comes up, and we immediately label it as a pain. Then it … 
  5. Training Your Commentator
     … staying here, learning how to develop this as a skill.” Because there does come a point where you’ve adjusted the breath until it’s good enough for the mind to settle down, and that’s all you need. Ajaan Fuang’s analogy is of a putting water in a water jar. You keep adding water, adding water, adding water, and finally the jar … 
  6. Housecleaning
     … But it does take care, and it does take skill. You can’t just force yourself here into the present moment and expect the mind to be obedient. If there’s no pleasure at all in staying here, it’s going to find the fastest way out that it can. So think of the breath energy sweeping through the body, cleaning things up, and … 
  7. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … What is mentioned, though, is that you delight in developing skillful qualities and you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities. In other words, you give rise to chanda, the desire to do this. It’s the first base for success. For a lot of us, that’s difficult because often the skillful thing is going to be really hard to like doing, as when you … 
  8. Things as They’ve Come to Be
     … To get really familiar with the fabrication process, you have to keep doing it with as much skill as you can. It’s like learning about eggs. You could sit and look at an egg for days, but what would you know about it? Not very much, for all you can see is the shell. But what if you can crack it open? You … 
  9. Artillery All Around
     … An important part of being a skilled meditator is having a range of tools, a range of skills, and developing the sense to know how to read your situation, and how to figure out which of the tools is appropriate for that situation. Otherwise, you’ve got your artillery there set in the cement, pointing out uselessly to the sea, while the enemy army … 
  10. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … Now, the clarity of our awareness and our skill in shaping these things is something that will have to develop over time. It’s through observing these processes that we gain discernment. I was reading a while back an interview in which a teacher was talking with a student. The student said that she had been meditating on her breath and found there was … 
  11. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … That way you’ll become more skillful in how you engage with sensory objects. The same principle applies to using the requisites, which is the second approach. We have that reflection on why we eat: What is our purpose in eating? What is our purpose in using clothing, using shelter, using medicine? You want to make sure the purpose is in line with the … 
  12. A Basis in Well-being
     … They give you the strength and the sense of security you need in order to gain a really balanced discernment into the way you act, into the way you do things, into the way you could be more skillful about speaking, acting, thinking. If you’re strung out in the meditation, it’s difficult to see these things with any real objectivity. It’s … 
  13. The Whole Story
     … And they’re skillful. As the Buddha said, you want to see danger where there is danger, and realize there’s no danger where there is none. Our problem is that we get these things all mixed up through our delusion. Ultimately, there’s a fear that keeps us on course: the fear that we’re going to heedless, the fear that we’re … 
  14. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … So you have craving on the one hand, which is a cause for suffering, but you also have desire on the path, the desire to be skillful: to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, to abandon unskillful qualities that have arisen, to give rise to skillful qualities and then to maintain them. There has to be desire for these things for the path to work … 
  15. An Anthropologist from Mars
     … As the Buddha said, this is one of the things to be done by one who is skilled in aims: be a person of few activities. This doesn’t mean being lazy. It means deciding what’s really important in life and focusing your energies there. As for the things that fritter away your time, just drop them. That simplifies life a lot. It … 
  16. Pain Is a Noble Truth
     … Nobody, without the proper mental skills, can stay with it long enough to see it clearly. Our usual response to pain is that we want it to go away. Either we run away from it or we try to push it out of where we want to be. Occasionally we can succeed, but a lot of times we can’t. We need to be … 
  17. Flexibility
     … If you learn how to test them, getting a sense of time and place, that’s when you become skilled in the meditation. In Thailand they have the word diṭṭhi. It’s taken from the Pali word for view, opinion, but as it developed in Thai, it also means pride, conceit. That’s why we have to learn how to put our views aside … 
  18. Seeing the Stillness
     … Then the skill lies in maintaining that state: keeping the sense of awareness, keeping the sense of wellbeing filling the body as much as possible, and then maintaining contact with that state, allowing it to grow, allowing it to develop. Don’t jump away from it, thinking, “Well, this can take care of itself. I wonder what that’s like over there. I wonder … 
  19. Chickens from Hell
     … That’s a skillful action right there. And no matter how many times it takes, it’s a habit you’ve got to learn how to develop. Think about all the many lifetimes you’ve spent just learning how to think, learning how to master human language and enjoying the results, feeding off the results. Now you’re going to learn a new habit … 
  20. Goodwill Without Limits
     … Questions of deserving don’t matter right here, because if you’re going to be skillful only to people you feel deserve your kindness or your goodness, there will be a lot of limitations on your goodness. Do you want that? We’re not talking about love here, or even loving-kindness, just simple goodwill, wishing people to be happy. Now, this doesn’t … 
  21. All About Change
     … As he said, if we couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful qualities—i.e., if we couldn’t make changes in our mind—there’d be no use in his teaching. And if we didn’t benefit from developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, he wouldn’t have taught that, either. But we can make these good changes. So focus on … 
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