Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 112
  2. Antidotes
     … Just as when you sit here and a thought comes into the mind you learn not to run with it, you’ve got to learn to use this skill in other areas, other parts of your life, where things are more rushed, where there’s a lot more going on. If you forget the skills you’ve developed here, you’re going to get … 
  3. Comfortable with Yourself
     … And whatever skills you learn in the course of becoming friends with the breath, you can take those with you. After all, what do you have here? The mind and the breath. No matter where you are, you still have the mind and the breath. The problem is that you let other things interfere. That’s the part of the practice that takes place … 
  4. Self-Reliance
     … You’ve seen for yourself that certain things are skillful, certain things are not. So the Buddha’s tactic in training us is not to spoon-feed us the truth. It’s to teach us how to feed ourselves—how to learn, how to experiment, how to evaluate the results of our experiments, how to try new approaches when things don’t work, and … 
  5. Into the Light of Consciousness
     … Heedfulness, the Buddha said, is the beginning of all skillful qualities in the mind. And it requires a strong sense of self: that you’ll be the one responsible for acting and who will reap the results of your actions. So you don’t want to cause yourself unnecessary harm. Then it gets expanded with the next principle for judging, which is altruism; when … 
  6. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … That’s where the skill of the four noble truths comes into the practice: learning to distinguish between these things right at the very start, just in the simple area of the breath, and then that same principle carries you through all the way. In fact, the principle starts even before you sit down and meditate. The Buddha once said that wisdom starts with … 
  7. Karma & Gratitude
     … Basically it was intentions, and intentions were skillful or unskillful depending on whether they were based on right view or wrong view. So the third question was, “What kind of intentions and views might lead out?” That’s when he gained the knowledge that led to his awakening. That’s how he got out. So sometimes, as you sit down to meditate, it’s … 
  8. Outside the Box
     … The purpose of the teaching at that point, when you’re talking about kamma, is to try to induce people to do skillful things. If you say, “Everything you do is going to lead to pain,” why bother trying to be skillful? So these perceptions are not always useful. It’s through trial and error that you figure out where they’re best used … 
  9. Two Guardian Meditations
     … What does it mean to act skillfully? How do you develop skill? Well, you look at your actions, and before you do anything, you try to make up your mind that you’re not going to harm anybody. If there’s any intention that would cause harm, you don’t follow it. Act only on the intentions that you don’t think are going … 
  10. In the Eyes of the Wise
     … You also need to have some skills. This is what we work on as we meditate. We try to get a sense of what it means to have the mind really balanced—so that it’s not leaning under the power of its likes or its dislikes, or under the power of its delusions or fears. As the Buddha said, there are four ways … 
  11. The Seven Treasures
     … When the Buddha gave his summary of the teachings—“The non-doing of any evil, the full development of skillfulness, the cleansing of the mind: these are the Buddha’s teachings”—all of those things are part of the practice. All those things are part of the path. So it’s important that we understand this, that we’re not just here to meditate … 
  12. Thoughts, Wanted and Unwanted
     … So as you’re stepping back from your distractions, realize that you’re learning an important skill: the ability to pull yourself out of these thoughts and not identify with them. Instead of getting upset at the distractions, just try to remember: It’s going to happen again, and you simply have to try to recover more quickly the next time, and more quickly … 
  13. Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas
     … This is a skill you’re working on, because you’re trying to create a good foundation in the mind. You’re trying to create a new sense of what is normal for you. Psychologists have noticed that a lot of people have a happiness quotient, where the events of life may raise or lower their level of happiness for a little while, but … 
  14. Multi-Dimensional Dhamma
     … putting right effort into practice, the effort of developing skillful qualities that foster the health of the mind and abandoning the unskillful ones that keep it diseased. This effort, in addition to leading to dispassion, also needs to make use of whatever dispassion you can muster. That’s because we all tend to view our unskillful qualities as our friends—we like our greed … 
  15. The Questions of Suffering
     … So when we give you meditation instructions, we’re giving instructions in how to shape things in a more skillful way. You’re going to take all of these aggregates and you’re going to turn them into a path, which is very different from just accepting what comes. The views that we hold to as we do this: They’re instructions on how … 
  16. Disconnecting
     … He does celebrate the fact that you can choose to be interdependent in a skillful way through your actions, through your thoughts, your words and deeds. But there’s also that danger: You can act in skillful ways and then get waylaid, get distracted, get born in a comfortable place, and then forget about the practice. One of the sad things about saṁsāra is … 
  17. The Uses of Equanimity
     … You developed those skills in search of happiness. And they do provide some measure of happiness, but that happiness has its limitations, for it’s based on skills that will have to deteriorate someday. Learning how to identify with the equanimity helps you step back from those identities, because it gives you something more solid on which to take your stance. But eventually you … 
  18. Holding On to the Path
     … You have to want to let go of unskillful qualities and you have to want to develop skillful ones. It’s written in the definition of right effort. As for attachment, even though the Buddha doesn’t say that you have to be attached to the path, still, you have to really want to work on, you have to really stick with it, and … 
  19. Working Hypotheses
     … When you look in the Buddha’s accounts of his own quest for awakening you see that there were a lot of things he questioned, but the one thing he never questioned was that your actions do have results, and some actions are more skillful than others, i.e., they give better results than others. That’s the only hypothesis that’s worth exploring … 
  20. Learning from Desire
     … You can change the breath in ways that are not skillful—for instance, putting a lot of squeeze on it. But that makes it uncomfortable. You have to learn just the right touch. All this is part of that inner conversation. And then there’s the conversation about how to take that sense of well-being that comes with the breath and then getting … 
  21. To Discern Suffering
     … Under right effort he talks about having the desire to give rise to skillful qualities of mind when they’re not there and then to develop them when they arise; and then the desire to abandon unskillful qualities that have arisen and to try to keep them from arising again. This desire is a part of the path. It’s something good, something you … 
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