Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Empathetic Joy Is Ennobling… Just make sure you give yourself the time and the space to develop the skills that make the most of them.
- Take Time to Evaluate Your Life… There’s right effort, where you try to abandon what’s unskillful and try to develop what’s skillful. Right concentration: You’re trying to get the mind to settle down and be really, really still. All of these things are active: There’s an abandoning and there’s a developing. Now, if mindfulness were simply accepting whatever’s there, it wouldn’t fit …
- A Pleasure Without Stories… It’s a matter of developing the skill. It takes a while to get the hang of it. But it’s a skill worth developing. It requires that you invest your activity, your intelligence, your ingenuity in getting the mind quiet with the breath. Just sitting here observing things coming and going, coming and going, arising and passing away: That’s going to do …
- Right View Comes First… So you’re going to use clinging, and you’re going to use the aggregates in a skillful way: That’s what the path is. Then you make an effort as you swim across, buoyed up by the raft. When you get to the other side, you’re not going to carry the raft with you any longer. As it’s served its function …
- The Battle of Your Selves… You’re being given a new set of skills, with more mindfulness, more alertness, more ardency. In the course of mastering these skills, you learn an awful lot about who you think you are, and who you don’t want to be any more. And as you create your sense of your self as a meditator, that gives you a better self to be …
- The Dhamma Eye… Now we’re going to do the actual practice, sitting here meditating, because concentration is one of the factors of the path, right concentration, which involves right effort, trying to abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. And right mindfulness, keeping the proper object in mind. In this case, we’re focusing on the breath. Be mindful of the breath. In other words, keep …
- Friends & Enemies… If there are gaps in your goodwill, there will be gaps in your skillful actions. So you want to make sure your goodwill is all-around constantly. You make this a constant practice. The second quality you develop is empathy. You get a sense of how other people are feeling, and that becomes one of your own virtues. As you get more sensitive to …
- The Lightning Bolt… You try to generate the desire to do what’s skillful and to abandon what’s not. It doesn’t mean you have to wear yourself out. This is why there are lots of topics for meditation. We take the breath as our home base, as the object we keep returning to, because as the Buddha said, it’s the best one for clearing …
- Unsentimental Goodwill… It’s just that when you think about all the suffering there is in the world, you should say, “Isn’t there already enough? Do you have to wish more suffering on yourself, or more suffering on other people? Wouldn’t it be better if we could all learn how to be skillful?” This, of course, doesn’t mean that everybody will be skillful …
- Hunting & Foraging… That, too, is a skill. It may seem like nothing is happening, but it’s like being a hunter. You never know when the animal is going to come, so you have to be alert and quiet all at the same time, continually. If there are any lapses in your alertness, you’ll miss the little signals that tell you that the animal is …
- Forgiveness… What kind of kamma do you want to create? If the answer is “skillful kamma,” then one of the things you’ve got to learn how to do is not to get focused on how you’ve been wronged by other people. You don’t want to go around getting revenge because that just keeps the bad kammic cycle going on and on and …
- Choosing Your Allies… We have to try to train them to be skillful intentions. Before you do something, ask yourself, “What are the results going to be?” If you expect any harm, you don’t do it. If you don’t expect any harm, go ahead and give it a try. While you’re doing it, look for results that are coming up in the immediate present …
- Loss… He said that to whatever extent you feel that something is accomplished by eulogies or making merit for the dead, you do your best to express your grief in a skillful way. But then you start reflecting again on the universality of it all, and this can give rise to different emotions. One is compassion. Think of all the people out there who are …
- See Yourself as Active Verbs… How do you get these things to stay together so that breath and mind are acting in concert? That’s the skill we’re trying to develop right now, because when they act together we become more sensitive to them. It’s as if the mind had lots of little minds, and they’re all headed out in different directions. They don’t know …
- Nuclear Thinking… The skill in meditation is learning how to think when you want to, how not to think when you don’t. It’s not a process of putting yourself into a totally blank state where no thinking is ever possible. At the same time, it’s not a process of ceaseless thinking. It means learning the right time and the place for your thoughts …
- The Big Picture… At the same time, you focus on the present to develop the skills you’re going to need to deal with the big issues that are sure to come later on in life. Think about the Buddha and his initial impulse to go out into the forest. As he reflected on aging, illness, and death, he realized that his whole life up to that …
- Honest & Observant… One was the principle that you should abandon unskillful behavior in body, speech, and mind, and develop skillful behavior in body, speech, and mind. There are no cases where he would recommend breaking the precepts, no matter what your motivation might be. The other categorical teaching, of course, are the four noble truths. In these two cases, you keep running up against fences that …
- Friends Inside & Out… So where is our companion leading us? Hopefully at the present moment our craving is focused on doing something skillful: training the mind, getting a handle on what we’re doing right now that’s causing suffering and how we may put an end to it. Not all craving is bad. But you have to remember craving is not one person in your mind …
- Seeing Through Your Defilements… As the Buddha said, one of the principles of this culture is that we want to learn how to delight in abandoning unskillful actions in the mind and to delight in developing skillful actions. That’s not what our normal cultures around us tend to encourage, that kind of delight. They want us to delight in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, especially the …
- Fully Here… This is an important skill. We’ve read so much about how vipassana is superior to samatha that it’s skewed everybody’s practice. For one thing, the Buddha never taught them as separate techniques of meditation. They’re two qualities of mind that you bring to the meditation regardless of what meditation you’re doing. And you do want to bring the mind …
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