Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Kind & Happy
     … As with any skill, the more you pay attention to what you’re doing, then the better you do it, and the better results you get. What you’re doing here is developing a little island of well-being inside, nurturing it, nourishing it, allowing it to grow. This is one of the basic principles in the Buddha’s practice. If you’re going … 
  3. Against the Grain
     … Right concentration is a skill showing that there is a way to find happiness that doesn’t require sensuality. When the Buddha talks about the Middle Way, he’s not saying it’s just a feeling halfway between pleasure and pain. It’s a different kind of devotion to pleasure. He says the devotion to sensual pleasure is one extreme and the devotion to … 
  4. The Anatomy of the Present
     … Which desires are skillful and which ones are not? That’s where the work is done. That’s our work in the present moment: to look at our desires and ask, “Are they really leading us in the direction we want?” We all want happiness. Are our desires working in line with that overarching desire? Or are they working at cross-purposes? The Buddha … 
  5. The Roles of Equanimity
     … As for skillful qualities, you do your best to give rise to them. Once the mind is concentrated, then you try to maintain it. That’s taking it out and blowing on it, letting things rest and cool downfor a while, trying to gain a sense of energy that comes from the pleasure, the ease, the feelings of fullness that you can get as … 
  6. Three Parts of Right View
     … But the desire to give rise to skillful things and the desire to abandon unskillful in the mind: Those desires are actually part of the path. Now, the cessation of suffering is the point where there’s nothing further that needs to be developed. You can’t clone it by just sitting around and not developing things or abandoning things. You’ve got to … 
  7. The Best Work Around
     … It requires a lot of care, a lot of skill, a lot of dedication, but think of the alternative—an unstable mind, an unbalanced mind, a mind with no foundation. Is that what you want? There’s only one way you can gain a stable mind, and that’s by doing the work, by being willing to train the mind. The training here isn … 
  8. Wise about Pain
     … You have to try to be sensitive to what you’re doing in order to distinguish, using your own powers of observation, what’s skillful and what’s not. This is one of the reasons why we meditate. The three qualities the Buddha says should be brought to mindfulness and concentration practice are mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Mindfulness means keeping something in mind. In … 
  9. Alert
     … He was looking for the deathless, but he also said he was looking for what was skillful. He seems to have begun his search with the assumption, “There must be a path to practice. There must be things you can do that would lead to the end of suffering, that would take you to the deathless.” The question was, “What?” He tried lots of … 
  10. Meticulousness
     … Your ability to catch a little bit of craving or a little bit of clinging before it gets large and obvious will be one of the most important skills you can develop as a meditator. If you develop good habits outside, they’ll translate inside. This is why the training is not just a matter of sitting around and talking about Dhamma. It’s … 
  11. What Is One
     … As the Buddha said, even just a finger-snap of the desire to be skillful is, in and of itself, meritorious. Sometimes we’re even afraid to want the path, because we’re afraid that we’d be committed to more than we can handle, and the part of the mind that’s not ready to be committed keeps pulling you back. But you … 
  12. High Level Metta
     … What are you doing right now? How are you breathing? What are you thinking about? What are the perceptions that shape both how you breathe and how you think? What can you do to make them more skillful? These are some of the questions that come from looking at these three types of fabrication in a way that has an immediate impact.
  13. Lessons of Distraction
     … As long as you’re not frustrated, you can absorb those lessons and get better and better, more and more skilled at avoiding these things—noticing when the first stages are happening, what little agreements go on in the mind that say, “Okay, just a few seconds. The next time you’re a little bit more mindless, a little less alert. Okay, then we … 
  14. Imagine Your Breath
     … In fact, one of the most important skills in working with the breath is the adjusting. Ajaan Lee tells the story of an old monk who’d been doing breath meditation 40 years, ever since the time of Ajaan Mun, and he said that he didn’t see it go anywhere. Ajaan Lee’s analysis of the problem was that the monk hadn’t … 
  15. Wilderness Wealth
     … But if your investment is in the skills of the mind, then no matter what the situation, you’re secure. There’s a sutta where the Buddha talks about the sense of lightness—he calls it the emptiness—that comes from going out in wilderness and just having the perception of wilderness, dropping all your everyday concerns, the concerns of your family and society … 
  16. Things as They Function
     … So he has us engage in some skillful becoming, which means there will be some craving in the practice. Sometimes you hear it said that you have to practice without any desire. But how can you do that? As the Buddha said, everything is rooted in desire. The basis for success in the practice starts with desire. So the Buddha’s strategy is to … 
  17. All Dhamma, All the Time
     … remembering what’s skillful, remembering what’s not, remembering the lessons you’ve learned. It helps to keep the mind still in order to be able to remember. Because if you’re running around, not paying attention to things, or running around paying attention to things to the exclusion of what’s actually going on, you’re not going to be able to remember … 
  18. Stepping Back
     … No matter how fleeting your stepping out may seem as you’re practicing, each time you do it you’re strengthening the skillful habit in the mind, the habit that’s actually your path. Ajaan Maha Boowa tells of how when Ajaan Mun passed away, he was really hit with a sense of despair: What was he going to do with his life now … 
  19. Reading & Meditating
     … So, learning from your reading is a skill. It’s not something you can just force on things. As with all aspects of the practice, you have to see what works and what doesn’t work. Gain a sense of time and place, and then you’ll find that what you’ve read can be a great help.
  20. Noble Right Concentration
     … And you also learn about yourself, in terms of your own ingenuity, your own precision in developing a skill, your powers of observation. You see what your input into the eggs does to those eggs. Here’s where the analogy breaks down, because what you’re trying to do is see that the things that the mind does have their drawbacks. And you’d … 
  21. Pain & Distraction
     … When you have a sense of your own center of the observer being separate from what it’s observing, that’s an important skill. That can take you through a lot. Even if you haven’t attained awakening, it puts you in a position where, when really strong pain arises, you can be in the midst of the pain but not get sucked into … 
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