Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Inner Wealth
     … Mindfulness is remembering that the mind needs to be trained and remembering what you’ve learned about how to do it, so that when something comes up in the mind, you learn how to recognize that quality of mind as skillful or unskillful, helpful or unhelpful in training the mind, and then you remember what to do with the skillful qualities, what to do … 
  3. A Willingness to Learn
     … So a large part of the skill in the meditation is learning how to read your mind. Because after all, that’s what the meditation is all about: learning how to read the mind, how to notice, okay, when there’s greed, when there’s anger, when there’s delusion, when there’s too much desire, when there’s too little desire in the … 
  4. Staying Still
     … The maintaining is a different skill. The first skill is coming out of the noise and into the stillness. In some cases, that requires nothing more than just reminding yourself that you’d like to be with the breath—and there it is. Other times, you have to think your way here, cut your way through the vines of the mind: its attachment to … 
  5. The Taste Is Release
     … You see that you can form a skillful intention. Then, to maintain that intention, you spread thoughts of goodwill: goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people you’ve wronged, goodwill for everybody. But as for new things as you’re going through life day to day, you want to make sure you stick with the precepts. Otherwise, you start thinking about new things you … 
  6. The Uses of Concentration
     … How do you deal with them? By getting more skillful at your concentration: getting more observant, more mindful, more alert. Remind yourself that you do have these better pleasures, and there’s a pleasure even greater than that of the concentration. So these three main functions of concentration all go together. We have a pleasant abiding in the here-and-now *so that *we … 
  7. Noble Happiness
     … It may not seem like much right now, but as you develop your skills in mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, you find that they lead to a really special kind of happiness. This is why we bow down to the Buddha, because he teaches us of this potential. He teaches us to respect within ourselves things that are really are worthy of respect. And … 
  8. The Chess Game
     … The whole point is that you learn how to use these things with skill. For most of us, suffering comes, and we just try to push it away. Pleasure comes, and we try to indulge in it. But the Buddha says to use them as tools to learn more, to go further. The pleasure that comes when the mind is still and at ease … 
  9. Stay with the Breath
     … It’s a really basic skill for the survival of the well-being of the mind. So don’t think of this hour as a long time. It’s actually very short. Try to make use of the whole hour to heal the mind, to do just this one thing: to stay with the breath as if your life depended on it—because it … 
  10. The Challenge of Faith
     … It means knowing how to put them to use skillfully, being strategic in figuring out what’s skillful and what’s unskillful and how to talk yourself into doing the skillful thing that you might not want to do, or out of doing the unskillful thing that you might want to do. It’s in all of this that you get to know your … 
  11. No Happiness without Restraint
     … But if you have experience, you can see all kinds of things there in the egg, because you’ve developed skills and you’ve learned some restraint, focusing your attention on that one thing and trying to make the most of the potentials in what you’ve got. This is a theme that Ajaan Suwat would stress again and again and again. He saw … 
  12. The Raft
     … We let go of unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. We let go selectively. Then we get to the other side. That’s when we get off the raft and get onto the shore. Here again, there are people who say that the whole purpose of the path is to arrive at right view, but that’s like saying the whole purpose of the … 
  13. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … We do this by approaching the issue of being at peace in the present moment as a skill. It’s one thing to hang out with something that’s calming, but it’s another to gain insight into how you’re actually shaping your experience right now, and how you can shape it more skillfully, and what the limits of that skillful shaping can … 
  14. The Dhamma Eye
     … Now, all these activities are skills. They take time. In the Buddha’s case, he did it very quickly in one night, but for most of us, it takes time to develop these skills, to learn how to comprehend our suffering, let go of its cause, realize its cessation, and develop the path to its cessation. But ultimately he finally reached the point where … 
  15. Your Hair Is on Fire
     … Still, how are you going to see which movements in the mind are going to be unskillful unless you have a skillful, still place to stay. This is one of the reasons why we stay with the breath. It’s a good place to stay so that when the mind moves away from the breath, you can recognize that something’s wrong and that … 
  16. The Buddha’s Eight Principles
     … As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them. Once they are there, you try to develop them even further. Contentment here means contentment with your physical surroundings. If your food, clothing, and shelter are enough for you to practice, then it’s enough. You don’t have to go squirming and wiggling and trying to … 
  17. Safety
     … You can’t go back and undo what you did in the past, but you can develop skills right here, right now, that you can depend on, skills that provide you with safety. It starts, he said, with having a sense of shame and compunction: shame in the healthy sense, the shame of not wanting to do anything that’s really beneath you. And … 
  18. The Four Jhanas
     … So which ways of breathing help the mind get more refined? In terms of mental qualities, which ways of breathing are associated with the hindrances, which ways of breathing are associated with the factors for awakening? For example, the first three factors—mindfulness, the analysis of qualities, and persistence—are related to your directed thought and evaluation, trying to see what’s skillful and … 
  19. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … Now, as you get more skilled, you will let go of the thinking to get into deeper stages of concentration, but you learn how to balance the thinking and the stillness all along the way. Because it’s the balance between the two that enables you to develop the discernment that can root out your defilements or, as he said, burn them away. So … 
  20. Perceptions of Self & Not-Self
     … One is the principle that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful actions should be abandoned. The other is the four noble truths. The first truth is the truth of suffering, which is clinging to the five aggregates of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. There’s a duty with regard to that truth, which is to comprehend it—in other words, to understand … 
  21. A Committed Relationship
     … You learn to content yourself with what you’ve got in terms of material things., but you never let yourself rest content with whatever level of skill you have as long as there’s more work to be done. Similarly with equanimity: We need equanimity in order to deal with difficult situations, but you don’t want to be equanimous about everything that comes … 
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