Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 118
  2. Best Friends
     … Then, as these things have become more and more skilled at bringing happiness about, when they’ve performed their functions, they begin to get milder. They drop away, drop away, not because you’ve stomped on them, but simply because their duty is done. So it’s a simple exercise we have here, just focusing on the breath, but it does a lot of … 
  3. Cosmic Scale, Human Scale
     … To face it, you’ve got to be willing to settle down and, as they say in the customs of the noble ones, to take delight in developing and take delight in abandoning – realizing that here’s your chance to develop some skillful qualities, here’s your chance to let go of some unskillful ones – and to regard that as a precious opportunity. We … 
  4. Borrowing the Buddha’s Wisdom
     … But when you look at the early teachings, the Buddha’s really consistent in saying that certain things are skillful, certain things are unskillful. There are areas of the path where it does get a little bit paradoxical, but those are at the very advanced stages. A lot of people want to go straight to the advanced stages, skipping over the basics. But the … 
  5. A Sense of Direction
     … As for uncertainty, that usually comes down to not being clear about what’s skillful and unskillful in any particular situation. The best way to deal with that is to realize, well, the roots of unskillful behavior are greed, anger, and delusion. And particularly delusion: The mind doesn’t even know itself. So ask yourself, well, what does it know? Bring everything back to … 
  6. Give Before You Get
     … The Buddha himself said that the secret to his awakening was that he never let himself rest content with skillful qualities. In other words, as long as he saw that there was still something more to do, still some dis-ease, some sense of stress, some sense of suffering in the mind, he wouldn’t rest content. He’d try to figure out what … 
  7. A Rare Gift
     … Your interactions with other people are going to be skillful or unskillful based on how well your mind is trained. So this should be the prime focus, your first priority when you’re looking at your life to decide what’s important, what needs to be done. There’s that famous passage where the Buddha recommends that every night, as the sun goes down … 
  8. Deep Understanding
     … So it’s a practical skill. It’s a doing, rather than just a thinking and listening. The word for meditation, bhavana, literally means developing. It’s something you do. And it’s more hands-on: how you develop alertness, how you develop mindfulness, how you develop concentration. You run into practical problems. Working through those practical problems is how you come to a … 
  9. Cutting Roads
     … As you get more and more skilled at keeping things in good order throughout the in-and-out breath, the mind can really settle down. So keep this in mind. You’ve got these potentials in the body. It’s as if you’re tuning in to them, and you want to be careful about how you tune in on them. Sometimes you can … 
  10. The Limits of Interconnectedness
     … But you want to lean in as skillful a way as you can, and provide other people with support too. That’s what makes social life bearable: that we help one another. But it always has to be with the consciousness that these relationships are going to end. And as you die, as you go towards death, for focus is going to be forced … 
  11. The Hall of Mirrors
     … This takes skill. In the course of creating it, you learn about lot about the mind right there, where it tends to be overly controlling, where it tends to be operating under wrong presuppositions. If you’re sensitive, you’ll notice a sense of strain or stress, a tightness that comes with the way you, say, try to control the breath or clamp down … 
  12. Complacency
     … As the Buddha said elsewhere, heedfulness is the underlying motivation for all of our skillful qualities. You think of all the different motivations we might have for practicing. One is a sense of shame. Here we’ve got this opportunity, and it would be a shame not to make the most of it. Another is a sense of pride, the realization that other people … 
  13. Lavish Goodwill
     … If you don’t have goodwill for yourself, how are you going to have it for others? And if you don’t have it for yourself, how are you motivated to do what’s skillful, what’s in your own best interest? So, take some time to create some inner wealth. The Buddha’s image is of a person blowing a conch shell trumpet … 
  14. The Need for Goodwill
     … In our own case, we meditate so that we can develop the skills inside that allow us to find happiness here, simply by the way we breathe, by the way we understand the breath, hold the breath in mind. We also do this as an example to others because the good examples of human behavior are what give us heart as we live in … 
  15. More than Ordinary Heedfulness
    More than Ordinary Heedfulness October 22, 2019 The Buddha said that all skillful qualities have their root in heedfulness. This emphasis on heedfulness is one of the remnants of Buddhism’s wilderness source: The Buddha gained his awakening in the wilderness, passed away in the wilderness, and recommended that his monks go out into the wilderness. One of the qualities you need in order … 
  16. Balanced Breathing
     … One of the basic skills you need to learn in the meditation is how to work persistently and just keep at it, keep at it, but not get tense about it. When you can find that proper balance, you can stay with the path. You don’t keep straying off into the woods. You have a sense of feeling at home as you work … 
  17. The Easy Way Out
     … An important part of the skill of the meditation is learning to see them as something separate, that they really aren’t you. You don’t really need them. So you want to develop a part of the mind that doesn’t identify with them. Learn how to identify with the part that wants to be on the path and is not looking for … 
  18. Happiness – Yours & Others’
     … We’re going to do our best, one, not to get in the way of their skillful intentions. And two, if there’s anything we can do to encourage them in the right direction, we’re happy to do it. Think of the Buddha’s statements about how you would repay your parents, how you make them happy: not by entertaining them, not by … 
  19. Working with Nature
     … The analogy he gives is of a skill, archery. The archer knows how to shoot long distances, fire shots in rapid succession, pierce great masses. You want to get that good at your concentration. Then you can observe it to get beyond it. So focus on doing things right, and the mind will develop. It’ll mature. You can think of a tree with … 
  20. To Excel
     … So are you ready to go? If you’ve just been getting by, you won’t have the skills you’re going to need. The Buddha talks about future dangers: aging, illness, death, social unrest, or a split in the Sangha. When these things come, he says, it’s going to be really hard to practice. This means you have to practice now. And … 
  21. The Pleasure of the Middle Way
     … As the Buddha said, there are some sensory pleasures that are skillful across the board: the pleasures of going out into wild nature, the pleasures of having the body healthy, the pleasures of living in a harmonious community. These things are good. But there are some sensual pleasures that are bad across the board. Any sensual pleasure that requires that you break the precepts … 
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