Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Helping Others… He had to put up with a lot of difficulties, but it all contributed to his skill in concentration because he took it as that: a challenge in how to maintain concentration and to exercise his discernment even if spite of difficulties. So we have to remember that this is how concentration and discernment get exercised: not only as we do the formal practice …
- Rewriting the Mind’s Song… As I said, one of the ways of doing this well is to make goodwill and all these other skillful attitudes the new normal in your mind, so that you can see thoughts of ill will as something abnormal. If you hang around people who are dealing in ill will and all kinds of other unskillful attitudes all the time, those attitudes begin to …
- Energy & Efficiency… He was skilled at playing the lute. And the Buddha asked him, “When you tightened the strings too tight, what happened?” It didn’t sound right at all. “How about too loose?” Didn’t sound right either. And the Buddha then said, “In the same way, you should tune your energy to the point where it’s just right and then tune the rest …
- Breathaholic… Once you develop this skill, you really do become addicted to the breath because you find that it’s your protection in all kinds of situations. You need this grounding because the world outside isn’t designed to be nurturing and kind. Sometimes it can be kind, sometimes not. Sometimes causes and conditions can work for a very pleasant situation, and sometimes they can …
- Count Your Blessings… So this is one of the important skills that enable you to develop stamina in the practice: to focus on the areas where you do have advantages, where you do have comforts, where you do have things going well. And take strength from those. Take comfort from them. You might compare yourself, say, with the forest ajaans and think about how they grew up …
- Your Intentions Come First… You’re here for the skill of dealing with the breath. You’re not here for those other things. You’ve had thoughts before; you’ve had pains before. You don’t have to get all excited about them. Even if it’s an amazing and original thought: If it’s really that good, it’ll be there when you come out of meditation …
- Fear of Others… Try to sort through your fears and see which ones are actually useful and which ones are hobbling you from doing the skillful thing. Realize that you’re hobbling yourself. You can take off those shackles and walk with a lighter step.
- Jhana & Insight… So this practice we’re doing right here—working on the breath—is giving us hands-on experience with how to use fabrication in a skillful way so that we can get to know fabrication and get to some fabrications that are more and more subtle, more and more subtle. And that will deliver us to a spot where we can access—as the …
- Developing the Heart… The question is, will your actions be skillful or not? This is why the heart needs to be trained as much as the mind: trained in how to feel, trained in how to will. The Buddha gives lots of training in this direction. Those five reflections that we chanted just now are not just to think about. They’re also for you to contemplate …
- Turn Off the Automatic Pilot… You develop a taste for developing skillful qualities in the mind and you can bring this into your relations with other people; you can bring this deeper into your meditation. The good effects spread in all directions. It’s like the ripples in a pond. When you throw a stone into a pond, the ripples don’t always go out in the direction in …
- Stop & Think… If you’re not skillful, if you come back in the wrong ways, it’s going to be hard to find the Dhamma again. And you’re going to be suffering again and again. So you ask yourself: “What kind of happiness would you want that would not involve having to have a body?” There are the formless pleasures of the formless jhanas. Of …
- How to Be Self-Centered… We have to be self-centered in a wise way, a skillful way. And that deals with two big problems. One is when you’re irritated by other people’s behavior. You should center your attention not so much on what’s irritating about their behavior. Center on your own irritation. Why do you let yourself get worked up about it? What’s the …
- The Bridge to Concentration… The more skilled you are in restraint, then the easier it’ll be when you meditate, the easier it’ll be for the mind to settle down. You’re not placing a lot of irritants into the mind or into anybody else’s mind. There’ll be less garbage, less underbrush to clear away.
- Play with the Breath… And in playing, you get skilled. It’s like playing a musical instrument. Say you’ve got a guitar: You take it into your room, close the door, and experiment with different sounds. You may know a few songs already and you try to pick them out. But then you can experiment with new ones. You find that some of the new songs don …
- You’ve Got Friends… You have to remember, it’s doing it out of ignorance, lack of skill. Or as Ajaan Suwat would sometimes say, it’s our own stupidity that’s making us suffer. We don’t like to see the stupid things going on in the mind, so we cover them up. Yet this is one of the reasons why the suffering hangs on: Part of …
- Testing Karma… There’d be no incentive to make the effort to choose a skillful path and stick with it. There’d be no incentive to make an effort at all. So on a pragmatic level, it makes sense to take as a working hypothesis that you do have choices, and that your choices do make a difference. Then you can put them to the test …
- Determined on Goodwill… He said if it weren’t possible to develop skillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught people to develop them. If it weren’t possible to abandon unskillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught to abandon them. Everything he teaches is a possibility. Now, the speed with which we’re going to practice and develop those possibilities depends on our own actions, our own …
- Will Meditation Make You Grim & Dull?… He said that all skillful qualities in the mind come from heedfulness. Heedfulness is a realization that there are dangers around us—but we can manage them. And our actions make a huge difference. So you have to be careful. But being careful doesn’t mean that you have to be grim. Barry Lopez, when he stayed with the native Alaskans for a long …
- The Mind Comes First… You can bring the right attitude; bring the right recipe; bring the right skills to your experience. Even when things are pretty bad, you can still make something good out of them. So remember: The breath is prior to everything else in the body; the mind is prior to the breath. This often requires a reordering of your understanding of what’s going on …
- Right & Right… Warrior knowledge has more to do with skills: learning how to read a situation, learning how to approach the situations strategically. Sometimes you take what you’ve learned from the scribes, other times you have to put it aside, because it may not be right for the situation you’ve got. It may actually be very wrong. Even though what the scribe teaches you …
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