Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 129
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Weathering Karma Storms
     … Remind yourself, “These are the thoughts that are the result of past bad karma, and this is what bad karma looks like as it gives its results.” Do you want more of that? No. Then do what you can to be skillful right now in the present in how you approach these things. As you remind yourself that this is past karma, you’re … 
  10. The Escape of Discipline
     … Heedfulness is the source of what’s skillful. Carelessness and complacency: That’s not the path at all. Heedfulness sounds strenuous but it’s got a lot of friends. Virtue comes as one of its friends, concentration, discernment, release—all of which give great happiness as you follow the path and even more so as you reach the goal.
  11. Focal Points
     … As we were saying last night, the goodness of the energy depends an awful lot on the stillness of your awareness, the steadiness of your awareness, the inquisitive interest that you have in trying to be as skillful as possible, as sensitive as possible to what’s going on. Try to develop that attitude in mind and then bring it in around your most … 
  12. Tuning Your Lute
     … It teaches a lot of good lessons about the process of mastering any skill. One of them is that on the days when you don’t have much time to practice, you put a lot of emphasis on at least getting your form right. It’s the same when you’re sitting and meditating and you only have a short period of time. You … 
  13. The Arrows of Emotion
     … We have to remember as we’re meditating that we’re here to learn about the mind in hopes that someday our knowledge will enable us to develop more and more skillful habits. But sometimes you have to watch yourself doing something really stupid over and over again before you can catch sight of why you’re doing it. That’s where patience comes … 
  14. De-domesticated
     … You’ve developed habits and skills to negotiate the world as you know it. And there’s a general preference for the world to stay pretty much the same so that you know how to negotiate it, learn how to deal with it, get what you want out of it. As you meditate, there’s a new you. And here in the monastery, we … 
  15. Take an Interest
     … This is a very useful skill to have when your mind is telling you all kinds of things that could make you suffer. You realize the process leading to those thoughts that would induce suffering is not all that reliable, so why would you allow yourself to suffer from things you can’t trust? Why do you believe them? Watching the processes allows you … 
  16. What Are You Doing?
     … And try to replace those perceptions with other perceptions, more skillful ones: the perception of the pain as just points, or that it’s a different level of energy from the body. It seems to be in the same place, but just as radio waves from different stations can be in the same place, carrying different messages on a different frequency, the pain is … 
  17. The Core of Experience
     … Those are the skills you need to develop to get to release. After all, you can’t use release to get to release. You have to use what you’ve got. And the things you’ve got—form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness, what the Buddha calls the five aggregates—are things that if you simply cling to them, are going to cause problems … 
  18. Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One
     … that it doesn’t feel threatened by the things it doesn’t like, and it’s not so attached to things that it does like—but that are not quite as skillful as you may have thought. It’s easier to accept the things that are unpleasant about your own mind if you have a sense of well-being right here. It’s like … 
  19. Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe
     … This is a skill we should keep in mind. As Ajaan Lee says, we have lots of potentials in the body, lots of potentials in the mind that we hardly use. They’re very elemental, which is one of the reasons why we overlook them. We have space as well. You can hold a perception of space in mind when the body gets tight … 
  20. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … And this faculty of right effort, which includes skillful desire, underlies right mindfulness—like we’re practicing right now, trying to get the mind into concentration by being very mindful of the breath in and of itself. You have to want to focus on the breath and to put aside any thoughts that would pull you away. The Buddha recommends three qualities to help … 
  21. Strength of Concentration
     … But you also learn the skill of learning how to put them down. Let them go—so that even though there are burdens you sometimes have to carry in the world, you don’t have to be bent over all the time.
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