Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Determination… There are skills to develop. There are old attachments to let go. If you keep your focus—focusing your desires on finding an end to suffering, finding an end to the way in which you’ve been causing yourself lots of unnecessary grief and pain—that goal can be attained. Be true in your pursuit of it. Learn to relinquish the things that get …
- Pleasure from the Body… Developing that pleasure, instead of developing unskillful habits, actually requires skillful habits of the mind. It requires mindfulness. It requires alertness. It requires ardency—lots of skillful qualities. This is why this pleasure is part of the path, the pleasure of jhana, with strong absorption in the form of the body. This is why we work with the breath until we learn how to …
- Maybe the Buddha Knew Something… As for delighting in abandoning and delighting in developing, that means to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and to delight in developing skillful ones. Here again, this goes against our usual habits. We tend to delight in our craving, and we do a lot to develop them. But here the Buddha is saying, “Abandon them.” Things that are supposed to develop inside are often …
- Right View & Right Resolve… You’ve also got to produce skillful mind states. As you do concentration, it’s a way of producing skillful mind states that also create pleasure at the same time. This way, the mind gets used to being with pleasure but not getting distracted by it. If you get distracted by the pleasure, it turns into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, moha samadhi …
- An Auspicious Day… Once things have settled down and they’re comfortable like this, how can you maintain them? What are the skills around this? There will be parts of the mind that are happy to be here and other parts that just want to wallow and forget about doing anything more. They just want to sink into it. Well, that doesn’t work. The other extreme …
- Dhamma Medicine… That’s important, because as the Buddha said, there will be times when you’re really strongly tempted to do damage to those people, but if you learn how to think about their happiness, make that a consideration in your mind, you’ve opened up a pathway to more skillful actions. So that’s one strategy in learning to keep practicing these things over …
- Exploring What You’ve Got… You’re more and more skilled in dealing with the breath. Then, as your concentration develops, you can start asking other questions as well. That whole series of questions the Buddha teaches on inconstancy, stress, not-self: The first time he introduced those concepts, he introduced them as questions. “Is the body constant or inconstant?” Well, look and see. How can you tell? The …
- A Meditative Life… This doesn’t mean that you go around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears; it simply means that you’re skillful in how you look at things, skillful in how you listen. If you know that something tends to arouse lust or anger, learn to look at it in a way that counteracts the lust, counteracts the anger. In other …
- Stepping Out of Yourself… When a particular emotion comes up, when you feel that it’s not healthy or not positive or not skillful enough, try breathing in a different way. Breathe in a way that helps pull you out of that vicious cycle of a thought that leads to a bodily sensation and a way of breathing, and then that way of breathing leads back to a …
- Guardian Meditations… And part of your skill as a meditator will be learning how to know when to use them, and how to work variations on them. Because when the defilements come, they don’t come with just one disguise, with one set of reasons. They have lots of different reasons, lots of different disguises. You have to learn how to vary these techniques so that …
- The Prison Break… to delight in developing skillful qualities and delight in abandoning unskillful ones. You do this because you realize you can’t stay content with what you’ve got in your mind. There are things you’ve got to develop and things you’ve got to abandon if you’re going to be happy. If you want to do it well, you have to delight …
- Willing to Question Yourself… It’s a process of doing and gauging the results and then doing again and gauging the results again, as with the questions that the Buddha told the Kalamas to ask: “What when I put into practice, is actually going to give rise to results that are skillful; results that are blameless?” You start with questions and then you move in to focus on …
- A Soiled, Oily Rag… The Buddha’s talking about a way of perceiving that helps you see through your attachments, that helps you see through your delusions about where you can find happiness, so that the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom—What when I do it will lead to my true long-term welfare and happiness?”—finally gets its answer in the skills you’ve …
- A Private Matter… As your skill is being developed, you’re growing more sensitive to what that experience is, and more honest with yourself about where you’re still causing yourself stress. Your experience of stress is your only proof of whether the meditation is working, and even then it’s reliable only if you’re honest with yourself. You may want to look for an outside …
- Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self… We remember his good qualities, his many skills, his work with animals, his many kindnesses. We admire his goodness and feel gratitude that we had the opportunity to know him. Now he’s gone on. We’ll miss having him here. We wish him well where he’s gone, dedicate the merit of our meditation, dedicate the merit of our chanting to his wellbeing …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… To stop that suffering, you want to learn how to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones, which often is the opposite of what we’ve been doing. We tend to delight in developing our craving. We don’t delight in abandoning it. The idea seems very restrictive, very unpromising, but the more you think about it, the more you realize, okay …
- Four Bases of Success… In right effort, you generate the desire to abandon unskillful qualities that have already arisen and to prevent unskillful qualities that haven’t arisen from arising, to give rise to skillful qualities and then, when they’ve arisen, to develop them as far as you can take them. There’s an effort here, and effort requires desire. In fact, the Buddha says all dhammas …
- Good Friends Inside… You find that once you can do this, you’ve learned some very important skills. These are just as important in the meditation as your ability to stay focused for long periods of time: things like your ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and just keep on going, finding ways to energize yourself. This is how tasks get done. This is how …
- Square One… We’re mastering a skill that requires a sense of what you’re doing, what results you’re getting, and what you can adjust. That principle of causality is actually two principles that intersect. One principle — “When this is, that is. When this isn’t, that isn’t” — talks about things that occur immediately as a result of their causes. When the causes go …
- To the Far Shore… Sāriputta once said that if you want to understand any skillful quality, any skillful teaching, you have to put it in the context of the four noble truths. That’s because the truths are not just truths about suffering. They’re categories in which you can sort out all your thoughts, sort out all your experiences. One category is stress, suffering. Another category is …
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