Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Undefeated Goodwill
     … Again, it’s not innately skillful. There are a lot of voices in the mind that want to get a quick and easy happiness, with no concern for the consequences. There was a book of positive psychology I read a while back when I was asked to review it for a Buddhist magazine. They asked me to provide a Buddhist take on positive psychology … 
  3. Doing, Maintaining, Using
     … The Buddha talks about three important skills in learning how to keep the mind centered. One is gladdening the mind, another is steadying the mind, and the third is liberating the mind. Whenever you find that a particular feeling has taken over, you learn how to pry the mind loose from that, from its grip, so that the mind is free even in the … 
  4. A Post-goodness World?
     … What is skillful, what is unskillful? What is blameworthy, what is blameless? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? And first-level answer to those questions is the three types of meritorious action: generosity, virtue, and the development of goodwill. As the Buddha … 
  5. Unattractive
    As Ajaan Fuang used to say, the breath is the basis of our skill here, and concentration focused on the breath is the safest of all the concentration practices. It’s the one where you can see most clearly the stages of jhana as the mind settles down. You can see the different kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, mental. Bodily, being the breath itself … 
  6. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … Here it’s good to think of that teaching, I think it’s from the third Chan patriarch: “The Great Way is not difficult for those with no preferences.” It’s not saying you shouldn’t prefer skillful actions to unskillful actions, or that you shouldn’t prefer the end of suffering to suffering. You should prefer these things, it’s simply that you … 
  7. The Thread of Mindfulness
     … So if you find yourself moving into an area where the breath is that refined and you can’t follow it, step back and allow the breath to be a little more blatant, a little more obvious, and work on this skill of just keeping the perception going, stitching one perception to another to another to another until that thread—stitching things together—gets … 
  8. Monastery Standard Time
     … As part of the practice you do want to side with the skillful tendencies in the mind, but when everything seems confusing, and you can’t tell quite what’s what, you need to be willing to step back and just watch for a while. You realize that sometimes the mind has these long rhythms and you just have to watch for a very … 
  9. Potentials for Rapture
     … We can change those unskillful actions into more skillful ones. Without that opportunity, meditation would be totally meaningless. So as you’re sitting here, remember, you’re sitting with potentials. And it’s up to you what you make of those potentials. Appropriate attention basically means seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. You can ask yourself, “Where is the pain?” Or … 
  10. Step Back
     … This doesn’t mean that every difficulty should be talked over, but you take what skills you’ve learned, what points of view you’ve learned, and try to apply them. When you find that you can’t get out of that particular state of mind, go over and talk it over, get somebody else’s perspective on it. Choose that person wisely, someone … 
  11. Breathe Easy
     … A lot of this skill has to do with perception. We perceive certain parts of the body as being unresponsive to the breath, parts that the breath can’t penetrate. Actually, the breath can penetrate everything. It’s an energy, a very refined energy. So that’s the first perception to hold in mind, that the breath is an energy that can penetrate anything … 
  12. Don’t Leak Out Your Ears & Eyes
     … Too many people learn skills on the meditation cushion and then just leave them there. You’ve got to realize that you carry these things with you. You’re learning these things because you need them throughout the day. When you wake up, you want to get in touch with your breath—first thing. Think of the breath energy being washed through the body … 
  13. Beginner’s Mind
     … They’ve done studies of people with really good manual skills, the one’s who really excel, say, in a sport or a musical instrument. And the ones that are a cut above good are the ones who use their imagination. They think up new ways of doing things. Yo Yo Ma tells of playing a cello in a concert and suddenly one of … 
  14. Seeing with the Body
     … You’re developing a skill and you see the results immediately. This new center of gravity then acts as the fulcrum from which you can pry loose your other attachments, the old ways of identifying yourself. They’ve done studies of people going through psychotherapy, trying to figure out which method — Jungian, Freudian, or whatever — works best. And they’ve discovered that the actual … 
  15. Put the Other Person’s Heart in Yours
     … And the other person will sense that you’re coming from a skillful place, too. If you come from ill will, a sense of being oppressed, the other person will pick that up, and that’ll block that other person from wanting to cooperate with you. So try to focus on things that you can endure and on your ability not to let yourself … 
  16. A Quality of the Character
     … You can’t storm it with a technique or with your reading and thinking skills. It’s something that has to be approached with virtue, with truthfulness, with circumspection because, as the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula show, you can’t just go in with an attitude that, “Well, I know what the books say about this,” or “I know what I think about … 
  17. Pay Careful Attention
     … If you take a teaching and put it into practice, does it lead to what’s skillful and harmless? Or does it lead to harm? That’s the most basic test. The Buddha went into more detail with his stepmother. After her ordination, she came and asked him, “Teach me the Dhamma in brief so I can take it and practice.” He taught her … 
  18. No Arrows, Nothing
     … If your present karma is skillful, then no matter how bad the situation in the body, the mind doesn’t have to suffer. The minds of arahants are totally free from suffering. They’re like the rest of us in that their bodies have pain and pleasure and neither-pleasure-nor-pain, but none of these things make inroads into the mind. So the … 
  19. A Refuge from Aging, Illness, & Death
     … As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he wouldn’t rest content with skillful qualities if they hadn’t taken him all the way. So on the one hand, you accept the fact that this is where you are. You don’t try to deny the situation, but you also accept the fact that it could be better. The Buddha … 
  20. The Buddha’s Program
     … You can’t change that fact, but you can change the fact of how you approach being riled up, and to what extent you develop skills to calm yourself down. Calming bodily fabrication, calming mental fabrication: These are steps in the breath meditation. They apply to the way you shape things coming in from the past as much as to things you’re doing … 
  21. On Your Own Two Feet
     … This is why the Buddha said that heedfulness is the most important quality, pne, to develop skillfulness in the mind, and two, to bring the practice to its consummation. To begin with, heedfulness keeps reminding us that this is why we’re here. If we don’t train the mind, we’re creating dangers for ourselves. That’s our basic motivation to practice and … 
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