Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Desire Is Part of the Path
     … As for skillful qualities, skillful thoughts, skillful attitudes, you can let them roam around, just as the cowherd can let the cows roam during the dry season when the rice has been harvested and there’s nothing they can do to harm any more rice plants. Just be mindful about where they’re going. But, as the Buddha noticed, you could think skillful thoughts … 
  3. A Producer Mentality
     … So learn the skill of learning to be good at what you’re not talented at yet. Learning a skill, in that situation, is a skill in and of itself. It comes down to these qualities—conviction, desire, right resolve, learning how to talk to yourself, to lift your spirits, so that you can provide yourself with your own nourishment when the nourishment of … 
  4. Goodwill for All Beings
     … This is the whole reason why one of the central concepts the Buddha teaches is kusala or skillfulness. It opens the way to get out of our old habits. A skill is something a human being can develop. There are gradations of skillfulness. And you move from lack of skill to greater and greater skill by being observant. This requires patience. It requires sensitivity … 
  5. Don’t Objectify
     … As you get more and more skillful at this, you get a greater and greater sense of other areas in which the mind is skillful and unskillful, how its thinking can be used to drop the unskillful activities and continue with the skillful ones until finally you reach something that’s not an activity at all, and is not objectified at all. It’s … 
  6. Virtuous Beginnings
     … That old word “skillful means”: Actually, the Sanskrit means “tactical skill,” that you’re wise in how you use the powers you have. All too often that idea gets abused into meaning indulging your defilements at the same time you claim it’s Dhamma practice. Well, that’s not skillful means. That’s clever dishonesty. It’s not tactical skill. Tactical skill means learning … 
  7. The Skill of Stillness
     … learning how to master the skill of staying. We’re so good at jumping, but we need to learn the skill of staying. The mind will complain. It’ll say, “This is getting boring. Nothing’s happening.” Actually, a lot of things are happening in your mind all the time. We mentioned this this afternoon: There are perceptions, there are acts of attention, acts … 
  8. Cleaning Out the Stables
     … You look at the world you would have to inhabit, and realize, “Okay, that’s not a world I’d want to inhabit.” You look at the things you’d have to do and the skills you’d have to develop in order to make your way in that world, and you realize they’re not the kind of skills that would be helpful … 
  9. Breathing Skillfully
    A point that Ajaan Fuang repeated again and again was that the Buddha taught a skill. He wasn’t teaching us about reality out there. He wasn’t teaching a what. He was teaching us a how: how to breathe, how to think, how to talk to ourselves in a way that doesn’t cause suffering. As the Buddha said, we suffer because we … 
  10. Generating Desire
     … Honorable pride, the pride that comes with a skill, seems to be disappearing from our society—and it’s a real loss. The sense of honor that’s required to develop a skill makes better people out of us. If you can think of some skill you’ve mastered, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that came from having overcome whatever problems, whatever … 
  11. Training in Happiness
     … Those two skills are basic to every other skill you’re going to need in life. So it’s good to strengthen them. All the Buddha’s teachings are aimed in this direction, to find true happiness, and he tells us that often we’ll find happiness in places we didn’t expect it to begin with. For instance, he says you’re going … 
  12. The Buddha’s Last Word
     … Try to think of whatever skills you’ve developed: manual skills, a sport, music, carpentry or whatever. Try to bring the attitude that got you skillful in that way to the meditation. Now, if you don’t have any skills like that, you’ve got a problem. You have to consciously remind yourself, “Okay, I’m here to learn something. I’m here to … 
  13. Actor & Experiencer
     … Don’t berate yourself for not being skillful yet, because there’s only one way you’re going to get skillful, and it’s not by berating yourself. It’s by applying the skills you have. It’s like exercising the body. You don’t have to wait till the body is strong before you exercise. You take the body you’ve got and … 
  14. Looking Inward
     … So, when we look at life as a skill, we realize that the important thing is our own mastery of the skill. Once the skill is mastered, then it doesn’t really matter what the raw materials we get. This is why the Buddha said that the sign of a really wise person is seeing that it’s important—essential—to train the mind … 
  15. Something to Stand On
     … One is that you should abandon unskillful behavior and develop skillful behavior. And two is to look at experience in terms of the four noble truths, because those truths are what form what he calls vijja, the Pali word that means both knowledge and skill. This is a skillful way of looking at your experience so you can develop the other skills you need … 
  16. Teaching Old Dogs New Selves
     … So think of the path as new sets of skills, and there are going to be new selves that develop around those sets of skills. In the beginning, they’re pretty weak, and your old selves come barging in, and they say, “I want this, I want that. I want the old ways of doing things right now.” This is where your conviction in … 
  17. Two Kinds of Cross-Questioning
     … which kind of intentions are skillful, which kind of intentions are not; which qualities of mind lead to skillful intentions, which qualities lead to unskillful ones? This is like the cross-examination of the expert. Then you look at yourself: How do your actions actually fit in with the general principles? What things do you do that are skillful, what things do you do … 
  18. Discernment Fosters Concentration
     … our own skill and lack of skill. We’re not here just to accept the fact that we lack skill, we’ve got to do something about it. There’s a passage where the Buddha says you’ve got to see fear in death, or danger in death. The word is *bhaya *in Pali. It’s an interesting word that means both fear and … 
  19. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … What do you do to find it? That’s when you direct your worry to a skill—and it’s an inner skill. If you let yourself be concerned totally about things outside, you’ll never find any security. I remember talking to someone who was describing the behavior of the people on Wall Street back before the big crash. They knew that a … 
  20. Strength Training
    Meditation is a skill, something you work at, something you master. And as you approach it, it’s a good idea to reflect back on what skills you’ve already mastered in life, to see what lessons, what wisdom, you already have that you’ve already picked up from those skills that you can apply to the meditation. If your basic skill is strength … 
  21. Moving Between Thought Worlds
     … To learn how to pull yourself out of unhealthy worlds and into healthier ones first requires an understanding of how the mind creates these worlds, and then a development of the skills you need to move fluidly and beneficially between them. Both of these skills are developed in meditation. In other words, you get hands-on experience in creating worlds by trying to create … 
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