Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 124
  2. Specifics
     … Take them on one by one, and after a while you start getting skillful. You’re not dealing with generalities. You’re dealing with things as they’re actually happening, which is where you can make all the difference.
  3. All Your Old Baggage
     … After all, the whole notion of skillful causes and good results, unskillful causes and bad results lies at the essence of the four noble truths. So the Buddha never said not to pass judgment on things or not to be judicious in what you’re doing. There’s a difference between passing judgment and being judgmental. Being judgmental coming to a situation with a … 
  4. “My Way”
     … As for other thoughts, the ones that were skillful, the Buddha said it was like being a cowherd during the dry season. The rice had been gathered, there was no danger in the rice fields, so the cows could wander pretty much where they wanted. All you had to do was be aware of the fact there were cows out there. You were going … 
  5. The Four-in-One Establishing of Mindfulness
     … As the Buddha said, when mindfulness is a governing principle, then if there’s something skillful that you haven’t developed yet, you keep reminding yourself that it has to be developed, and you work on developing it, first by giving rise to it. Once it’s there, you keep on maintaining it until it gets fully developed. In other words, you make good … 
  6. Self-Starting
     … In other words, you delight in developing skillful qualities in the mind, and you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities. That delight is what keeps you going. We’re not here to please anybody. As Ajaan Fuang would often say, “Nobody hired us to be born, nobody hired us to get ordained, nobody hired us to come here to the monastery.” We’ve done this … 
  7. Still
     … Once you’ve got this stage, then the skill of using it for the sake of discernment will become a lot clearer. So. Patience. Steadiness. Consistency. Learn to regard those as real virtues.
  8. Catch It in the Act
     … That way, you can keep cutting away, cutting away, cutting away the mind’s unskillful habits, until ultimately there are no more skillful habits to cut away. You’ve got them all. None of the dogs in town will never come back to make a mess in your yard ever again.
  9. Keep Your Spirits Up
     … It’s probably one of the most essential skills that the inner teacher is going to have to develop. This is why so many of the Thai ajaans, when they give Dhamma talks, are basically giving pep talks. They want you to be constantly up for whatever is happening in the mind—good, bad, indifferent—and not to get blown away. **Take every meditation … 
  10. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … It’s a skill you want to master, because we can harm ourselves so much by the way we give into our anger and express it. Now, goodwill and kindness are not the same thing. Goodwill is wishing for happiness for everybody. Kindness is when you go out of your way to be gentle. You sympathize. That’s why that word anukampa can be … 
  11. A Heart Bigger Than the World
     … You can live with yourself, and your actions are much more likely to be skillful. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to be difficult. Often, the people who are most difficult in our lives are the ones that are closest to us. Goodwill is not a Pollyanna kind of wish, thinking that “Everybody’s going to be good, therefore I’ll … 
  12. Everyday Feeding Habits
     … That’s what’s going to give your discernment the opportunity to look into your feeding habits and do something skillful about them.
  13. When You Hit a Plateau
     … I’ve never been a hunter, but hunting is a skill. It requires that you be alert and still at the same time. If you move around, you chase away the game. If you stay still but fall asleep, the rabbits can be right under your nose and you’re not going to know. So ask yourself, “Are you still enough? Are you alert … 
  14. Breath Energies
     … This, too, is an important skill to develop, to protect yourself in this way. And you find that you’re also protecting others, because if you find that their energy is coming in, you tend to lash back out at them. But this way, people can stay in their respective places, as in the old saying that good fences make good neighbors. This is … 
  15. From Grief to Compassion
     … What we’re trying to do here is develop the skill so that each of us can remove the arrow in his or her heart. Then as long as we’re in the world, we don’t have to suffer. When we leave the world, there’s no suffering, either. This is how we abandon grief and show true compassion for ourselves and for … 
  16. Respect for Concentration
     … So we bring them all together in a way that’s really skillful. And try to have respect for that. It’s all too easy to overlook the well-being that can come from concentration. So you show some respect for this. Care for it. Look after it. This is where the principle of heedfulness comes in. You’ve got to realize that your … 
  17. A Boxing Lesson
     … Look for it in mastering the skills of the path. So even though the world may hit you and stab you and piss on you and spit on you and saw you up into little pieces, you don’t let it get to your mind. You don’t let it get in the way of doing your duty, which is to act on goodwill … 
  18. Against the Grain
     … that his effort was relentless, and even then he didn’t let himself rest content with his skillful attainments. So the path is not one of simply relaxing. At the same time, just because people get deluded by the ease of concentration doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to get the mind into concentration. That’s not the path after all. The path … 
  19. Like Earth and Space
     … He was telling Rahula to engage in some thinking that was proactive in developing skillful qualities of the mind, protective qualities in the mind. When you have that kind of foundation, that kind of protection, then you do breath meditation, because the mind is more solid now. You can see more clearly when you’re actually training yourself properly and when you’re not … 
  20. Introduction to the Breath
     … Then you can judge for yourself what a useful skill this is.
  21. The Fool & the Wise Person
     … Every little movement of the mind is either skillful or unskillful, so you have to watch for each movement. You can’t just say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter.” Because it does matter. Unskillful thoughts hide unskillful intentions, and where do these unskillful intentions come from? Have you really looked into them? Sometimes they come from some very basic flaws in our character … 
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