Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- In Cahoots with Your Defilements… That is an important skill but it’s not the whole practice. We also have to look at our defilements to see why we like them. What’s their appeal? When you’re immersed in sensual desire, why do you like it? When you’re immersed in anger, why do you like it? When you’re lazy, despondent, why do you like that? Restless …
- Reflections on Kamma… But if you take that as a working hypothesis, you find that you get more skillful in your actions, your life begins to improve. And if you take this principle all the way, it leads to awakening. When you achieve awakening, that’s when you realize that it really is true: Your actions do make a difference. And it’s the intentions behind them …
- Breathing Easy… When you’re meditating, you try to impose some order on the discussion, so that your intention to do what’s skillful, your intention to stay, say, with the breath right now, can be maintained so that it’s not just right now, but it’s carried all throughout the hour. And you’ve got everyone on board. The first thing you’ve got …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… This is why right view is the beginning of the path, because it focuses particularly on the most skillful way of attending to things. Once you’ve got a skillful way of attending to things, that changes your intentions. The focus of your attention should be to understand: “What is the cause of suffering? What are the causes for the end of suffering? If …
- Admirable Friendship… When you’re evaluating the breath, it’s up to you to be skillful in your evaluation. In other words, figure out what kind of breathing really is comfortable right now. Then figure out how to maintain it or to change it if it’s not so comfortable anymore. When it stays comfortable, figure out how to let that sense of comfort spread throughout …
- Homage Through the Practice… So it’s a good skill to have: to be able to bring your mind to stillness. That way, you can choose: Is this a good time to think? If not, you’ve got a good place to rest with the breath. Once you have this center, then as you go through your life, your mind isn’t so hungry. When the mind is …
- Right View Tells You What to Do… We can’t understand why they’re unskillful until we’ve learned how to do more skillful things. That’s what concentration is. It’s one of the most skillful things you can do with your mind, because you’re getting it under control. You’re putting it in a place where it can really understand itself, where it can start shining a light …
- A Touchstone at the Breath… In other words, even the way you pay attention falls under the categories of skillful and unskillful karma. You can pay attention in a way that causes suffering, or you can pay attention in a way that helps alleviate suffering. So you want to know what kind of attention helps alleviate suffering. With just that much understanding, you can listen to the Buddha’s …
- Right Next to Ignorance… He was talking about how in more modern anthropology, when you’re going to go study a primitive tribe, you try to learn all the skills that the people in the tribe practice so that you really understand the life of the tribe from within. And he was saying that there’s one skill that educated Westerners really have trouble mastering. In fact, they …
- Adjusting the Flame… When you see what’s skillful, you try to do your best to encourage it. When you see what’s unskillful, you try to discourage it. You get a sense of refreshment as the skillful qualities get stronger. That’s what helps strengthen the fire. Then there’s mindfulness, which is trying to keep all this in mind and is always appropriate however strong …
- Generosity First… As you become more mindful, more alert, more skillful in undercutting the hindrances in your mind, other people are less subject to those hindrances as well. Less greed, anger, and delusion come out in your actions, and so the people around you suffer less. Your meditating is a gift to them. The quality of generosity, what they call caga in Pali, is included in …
- The Mind’s Eating Disorders… These can be skillful or unskillful. As we’re practicing, of course, we do have to develop skillful habits, but we also have to realize that they’re a means, they’re not the end. Unskillful clinging to habits and clinging to practices is the attitude that “If I obey all the rules, I’m going to be a good person and that’s …
- Finding the Openings… Where are they now? Usually what remains is the karma that comes from that attachment, the things you did in order to hold on, some of which were not very skillful at all. Reflect on the past, then look at the present: What are you doing right now that’s going to be of real worth for the future? What ways are you holding …
- The Dhamma Wheel… And then, to get the mind into concentration, you have to let go of unskillful mental qualities and develop skillful ones. You have to have an establishment, a place where you can settle the mind. That’s what the establishings of mindfulness are for. You connect with the body in and of itself, or feelings in and of themselves, mind states, mental qualities in …
- The Spider on the Web… So perfect your skills on the little entertaining thoughts and also have your values prepared so that when the bigger thoughts come, you’ll be willing to question your desire to go with them—your desire not to disturb them, not to analyze them. Actually, those are the thoughts that are most deserving of analysis. That’s where the real work needs to be …
- Admirable Intentions… As the Buddha said with any skillful quality, if it’s not there, you’re mindful to try to give rise to it; when it’s there, you’re mindful to get it to develop and come to the culmination of its development. So, whatever you need to do once the mind does settle down to keep it settled down, to deepen that sense …
- Simple & Basic… checking up on how things are going with a very clear sense of what counts as skillful and what doesn’t. Work on these things—keep it basic—these four bases of success, and you find the practice goes a lot more smoothly, the results come a lot more quickly, and at the same time they’re a lot more solid. It’s when …
- The Dhamma Wheel in the Heart… On the first level, mundane right view, it’s belief in the principle of karma and in the principle that you should act in skillful ways and avoid unskillful ones. So the duties are just that: Develop skillful actions; abandon unskillful ones. Then you move on to the four noble truths. Stress is to be comprehended. Its cause is to be abandoned. Its cessation …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… It’s a skill. It needs to be protected. You have to watch out for it, to look after it. There’s that phrase where the Buddha talks about protecting your mindfulness by putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Okay, there are lots of things out there in the world that are going to pull you away saying, “This would …
- Hobo Mind… This is really an essential skill for the survival of all the good qualities in mind, for the survival of your happiness. Without this sense of fullness, everything gets very dry and shriveled up. And when you have this dry and shriveled up sense inside, it’s very difficult to have the strength to do or say what you know is right in difficult …
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