Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 126
  2. Endurance & Equanimity
     … When you’ve seen that, you’ve mastered a really good skill. And you’ve developed a whole pile of perfections, because this requires discernment along with determination. You’ve also got the perfection of endurance and patience and the perfection of equanimity. That’s four perfections right there. If you can manage that many in a single day, you’re doing well.
  3. The Larger Picture
     … that we have the potential to learn from each little mistake we make, the potential to pick ourselves up and then move on, and to develop skill step by step by step. As for our desire for how quickly we want it to be done, again that’s referring to the past and the future when you want to focus in on the present … 
  4. Not Pained by Pain
     … That’s what the Buddha’s skill is all about: learning to live with pain without being pained by it. After all, the great ajaans lived in the same human world that we live in—the same world, with the same problems, but they didn’t carry the pains around. As in that question that Ajaan Suwat once posed: He pointed over to Mount … 
  5. Concentration Isn’t Dumb
     … You’re thinking about actions and trying to act in a way that’s skilled. That, too, is a kind of intelligence. So is knowing how to read the mind so that it can settle down and stay there. To keep it there, you have to protect it, because other thoughts will come up, and it’s so easy for the mind to jump … 
  6. Happiness Comes from Inner Strength
     … You realize that you can restrain your less skillful impulses. You can refrain from harming other people. You give them safety, and in giving them safety, as the Buddha says, you gain a share in that safety as well. You create a world around you in which there’s less harm being done. You create a world in which truthful words are being spoken … 
  7. Mindful All Day Long
     … But there’s a skill to doing every task in the course of the day. When you have the time, it’s good to try to think about that. Otherwise, if your work is really demanding, tell yourself, “I’m going to give 100% attention to my work while I’m doing it, and try to do my very best.” The habits you build … 
  8. Discernment in Concentration
     … But try to be very conscious about what you’re doing, very deliberate about what you’re doing—so that you begin to get a sense of skill in the meditation. This is the kind of concentration that leads naturally to discernment because there’s discernment in the concentration itself. The stillness of the mind requires that you think about it and observe: What … 
  9. Effort against the Hindrances
     … You replace it with something skillful, in other words, you just bring it back to the breath. And try to make the breath more comfortable than it was before. Get yourself interested in the breath again. Because that kind of thought can be cured simply by giving yourself something new to think about. It’s simply caused by a lack of mindfulness. Your mindfulness … 
  10. Nourishment from the Breath
     … The fourth basis for success is what turns the concentration into a skill. That’s discrimination. When you get clearer and clearer on what’s wrong and what’s right with the concentration, and you start getting ideas of how to fix what’s wrong and to maintain and augment what’s right, that’s the discernment element. In other words, you have to … 
  11. The Strength of Conviction
     … You can use these basic skills of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, along with the lessons you learn from them about perception, about feeling, fabrication—all the aggregates, all the components of your mind: It’s through learning these lessons that you can find your way out. This was one of the Buddha’s great insights: that these aggregates we carry around can be fashioned … 
  12. Speech for the Sake of Stillness
     … thoughts that led to skillful states of mind and thoughts that led to unskillful states of mind. With the unskillful ones, he said he’d hold them in check. He’d make sure that he wouldn’t go with thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of cruelty. These things are not beneficial to anybody. As for thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non … 
  13. Don’t Be Afraid of Jhana
     … You’ve got a gate-keeper at the gate, i.e., mindfulness, who knows how to recognize who should be allowed into the fortress and who shouldn’t—who knows, in other words, what skillful qualities should be encouraged in the mind and which unskillful qualities should be abandoned. Well, the soldiers and the gate-keeper need food, and that’s what concentration is … 
  14. Balanced Concentration
     … This is a skill that takes time. And it’s not just a matter of determination. It’s also a matter of understanding what’s going on, checking to see, when the mind leaves the present moment, where is it going, why is it going there, what are the things that trigger it to jump out and leave the body and go streaming outside … 
  15. Unlearning Helplessness
     … That’s the essence of developing meditation as a skill: that you explore. You take the basic principles and see what you can do with them. When you read in Method 2, the text says to breathe, starting with the breath coming in from the back of the neck, going down the spine. And it talks about other ways of thinking of the breath … 
  16. Single-minded Determination
     … But skillful action does pay off. That’s why heedfulness is so important. If you’re careful, if you’re circumspect, it’ll make a big difference. So we have to ask ourselves, What kind of happiness are we going to pursue in our lives? And we have to be single-minded in the practice, because it’s so easy to stray off in … 
  17. The Samsaric Mud Fight
     … One of the skills we need to develop as we meditate is to learn how to see these things as not hitting us. They just go right past, right past. The words go past. Even if the other person hits your body, the body’s not you. That’s one of the good uses of the not-self strategy. It’s just a body … 
  18. Do. Maintain. Use.
     … Use it as a basis for remembering what the Buddha’s values are, because as long as you associate the breath with the practice and all the skillful qualities of mind that you’ve been learning how to develop around the breath, it becomes your connection to those qualities even though nobody else around you may be thinking in those terms or holding onto … 
  19. The Path Has a Goal
     … The Buddha taught skills that get results. That, he said, is the test for any kind of practice: the results it leads to. When he taught the Kalamas, he told them that when you see for yourself that following a certain practice leads to a blameless happiness, follow that practice. If you see that a practice is praised by the wise, follow that practice … 
  20. The Positive Side of Heedfulness
     … As the Buddha said, all skillful qualities have their foundation in heedfulness. They’re rooted in heedfulness. And even the Buddha’s last words were to obtain completion through heedfulness. When we hear the word—appamada could also be translated as being uncomplacent—we tend to think of its negative side: a warning that there are dangers out there and in here, in the … 
  21. Lessons from the Breath
     … There are things you’ve got to do, things you’ve got to change, skills you’ve got to develop and master. When your head and your heart are on the same page like this, both of them can grow. They help each other along. It’s here at the breath that your head and your heart can come together. When they come together … 
  22. Load next page...