Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 109
  2. Get Out of Yourself
     … And all the various mind-states that you can be mindful of, skillful and unskillful: Everybody else has those, too. This is a good way of getting yourself out of yourself, because when things go down—particularly when the mind turns into a whirlpool and keeps spinning around and around and around on certain themes—as it goes around, it just gets pulled down … 
  3. The Body Doesn’t Care
     … So there’s a skill in letting go. It has to be done with knowledge—as when you’re concentrating here. The Buddha’s instructions are that you stay focused—the word is anupassana—continuing to follow and watch one thing. In this case, the one thing would be the breath. At the same time, you subdue or let go of greed and distress … 
  4. How to Save the World
     … When you do, you’ll find that your life really does take on new shape as you act in more and more skillful ways. The things you have to watch out for are greed, anger, and delusion. We were talking today about a person who was teaching that now that Buddhism has come to America, it should get rid of these teachings that look … 
  5. Goodness & Goodwill
     … So you learn how to let go of behavior that’s unskillful and do things that are skillful. Then you do things that are skillful and you let them go. You leave them as a gift to the world. That way, you can travel lightly.
  6. Discernment Through Right Effort
     … As for skillful things, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them. When they are there, you try to maintain them and bring them to the culmination of their development. Those are four different types of effort. But right effort is not just a matter of making the effort; you also have to motivate yourself. There are lots of … 
  7. Terror & Revulsion
     … And it helps put more energy into learning how to develop the skills that will protect you from those dangers: mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, all founded on a sense of pasada or saddha, which means conviction, conviction that your actions can make a difference and that there is a way out. This way, samvega’s paired with heedfulness. You realize that your actions … 
  8. The Thoroughbred Horse
     … The first one is that unskillful behavior, whether in body, speech, or mind, should be abandoned; skillful behavior should be developed. The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths. and they’re not just idle truths or things to think about. They’re truths that carry a should. Suffering should be comprehended. Its cause should be abandoned. The cessation of suffering should be … 
  9. The Joy of Curiosity
     … But it can master the skills that lead there. That’s an important problem to figure out, and it’s important that you learn how to take joy in the process of figuring things out. There’s a word in Thai, songsai, that means both to doubt and to wonder. In some cases, the doubt is a hindrance if you doubt that you can … 
  10. Xtreme Drama
     … This requires a lot of skill, but it’s an interesting skill to develop. It may not be dramatic, but there comes a strong sense of well-being and accomplishment when you’ve mastered it. That’s what you’re looking for.
  11. The Resolve to Let Go
     … It just builds and builds things that take over the mind, and your capacity for seeing what’s skillful and doing what’s skillful really gets harmed. So you can look over the drawbacks of the sensual thinking and also the drawbacks of the actual objects on which you’ve been focused, to see that they’re really not worth all of that obsession … 
  12. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … This is a series of issues that will be with you all the way, so you want to get as skilled as possible in handling them. Then, when you learn how to handle your own suffering, you’re much less of a burden on others. So as you look around, you see a large world with lots of possibilities and it’s tempting to … 
  13. Luminous
     … This is how skills are developed in the world outside, and this is how the skill of working with the mind is developed inside. Notice that the Buddha doesn’t say the mind can be developed because we know how to obey or do as we’re told. It can be developed because it can observe itself. So the Buddha recommends that you give … 
  14. Barriers in the Heart
     … Treat your actions as skills. As with any skill … Say you’re making furniture. You want a fine finish on the furniture. You want a snug fit between the pieces of wood. And that comes from being scrupulous, very precise. As you learn to take the same attitude toward your life, it requires putting more energy into what you’re doing so that you … 
  15. Learning How to Learn
     … In other words, what’s motivating the action? What kind of mental quality underlies the action? Is it skillful or not? Is it harmful or not? Look into that. And how do you see the connection between an action and its result? You have to look continually. This is one of the reasons why we meditate, to develop that ability to look continually, to … 
  16. Get Real
     … You have to be sensitive both to what you’re doing and to the results you get, so that you can learn to be more and more skillful. Many people think that self-acceptance means celebrating what’s there already: that you’re good enough, that you don’t have to make any changes. That’s not the case at all. Acceptance means accepting … 
  17. Healing Awareness
     … Figure out what’s exactly the right amount of pressure to put on it, so that you can stay with it but you’re not interfering with the flow of the energy in the body.” Learning how to focus on something and allow it to flow, learning how to focus on something and allow it to relax, is a very useful skill. This is … 
  18. Why It’s Good to Know Why
     … Let’s follow them.” But you can strengthen your original intention by taking an interest in the breath, finding joy not only just in the physical sensation of comfortable breathing, but also in the mastery of a skill, figuring things out, trying to find out why. Why does the mind go for unskillful things? What does it think it’s going to get out … 
  19. Respect Opens Possibilities
     … He talks about developing skillful qualities, abandoning unskillful ones—and if it were not possible for us to do that, he wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t have taught at all. He would have gone off and sat under a tree someplace, enjoying the bliss of release. But instead, he went to all that trouble. Think about it: Walking all over India … 
  20. Because the Mind Is Purposeful
     … by doing something skillful with it. It’s like learning about wood. When you make different pieces of furniture out of wood, you learn its characteristics: how the different kinds of wood respond to being planed, how they respond to being sawed. You learn this because you want to use the wood for the sake of something. If you just sat and stared at … 
  21. The Noble Truths of the Breath
     … Once you’ve learned to maintain that sense of comfort, and it is a skill… Sometimes you get really excited when it feels really good and then you’ve lost it. So try to have a balanced state of the mind as you deal with this sense of ease. Once you’ve got that sense of ease, think of it spreading around. Think of … 
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