Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Truth
    Truth April 21, 2011 Ajaan Lee often made the point that our practice is a skill. The Dhamma is all about skill. The words are there to help us master the skill, to understand the problems we face in mastering the skill, and understand the various approaches we might take to solve those problems. But the words are not the Dhamma; the words point … 
  3. Bare vs. Appropriate Attention
     … As we’re practicing, we’re turning that duty into a skill. We’re getting skillful at comprehending stress and pain, skillful in abandoning the cause, skillful at developing the path. So there are different things we could be doing right here, right now. We’re not just watching or using just one approach. We have the four categories because they’re four alternatives … 
  4. Three Levels of Effort
     … The Buddha talks about three levels of skillful effort. The first level is just this: giving rise to skillful qualities in the mind and learning how to let go of anything else that pulls you away. At the moment, “skillful” means just this: Whatever helps keep you stay here is a skillful thought, a skillful intention. Whatever pulls you away is not skillful. Just … 
  5. Preparing for Death
     … To die with skill. To get prepared beforehand. To know where to focus our attention, what to hold on to, if we have to hold on. Where we can let go. That way, we’re not so desperate. In other words, we go into death without trying to run away. The importance of this skill is obvious, especially now with death all around us … 
  6. Lessons in Fabrication
     … You can’t say, “Well, I want to be skillful,” and tomorrow, “Boop!” there you are, skillful. As with any skill, it’s going to take time. It requires patience, but at least you can keep that question in the mind, “What would be the skillful thing to do right now?” In his teachings to his son Rahula, he said to make it your … 
  7. Body as Path
     … In this way, you get good use of the body, because it helps create a state of mind that’s totally blameless, that can act as a foundation for skillful qualities, skillful actions, skillful words. After all, when you’re coming from this position of strength, why would you want to stoop to saying nasty things or backhanded things or petty things? Why would … 
  8. Questioning Your Way to Certainty
     … Try to look at what in your mind is skillful and what’s unskillful, try to notice the qualities that lead to skillful action and unskillful action. You can start by asking those questions about your breath: What way of breathing feels good? What way of breathing doesn’t feel good? Pose that question in your mind and then experiment with different kinds of … 
  9. Less is More
     … To formulate intentions that really do lead to happiness is a skill. And because it’s a skill, nobody else can master the skill for you; you can’t master the skill for anyone else. You can give other people advice, you can show them to some extent how to do things, but for them to find happiness requires that they take the issue … 
  10. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … That latter skill is the skill the Buddha’s asking you to develop. It means you focus on how you’re processing things. How are you processing the breath right now? As soon as you turn your attention to the breath, the breath is going to change—based on your perception of the breath, your intentions around the breath—which means the breath is … 
  11. The Need for Agency
     … Pursue this as a skill because it’s through pursuing these skills—the skills of mindfulness, the skills of concentration—that you really get to know the principle of kamma. After all, we’re working on a type of kamma here that’s really special. The Buddha says there’s bright kamma, there’s dark kamma, there’s a mixture of the two, and … 
  12. Training the Mind to Train the Mind
     … Its direction is to remind you of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and of what lessons you’ve learned from the past in dealing with skillful and unskillful things that you can remember that helped you get past some unskillful thoughts that were threatening to take over your mind, but you learned how to say No. Effectively. You also remember times … 
  13. How to Listen
     … That’s what appropriate attention is all about—learning the right standards, what counts as skillful and what doesn’t count as skillful, and seeing that the issue of what is skillful and not skillful is the important question. At first, of course, what’s skillful is what inclines the mind to concentration. Then you can perfect that skill: You incline it to deeper … 
  14. Five Strengths
     … We’re training the mind to deal with the issues of life and death in a much more skillful way. The strength of your mind lies its conviction in the importance of its own actions, its ability to stick with what it knows is skillful; its qualities of mindfulness, concentration and discernment. These are the qualities of mind that determine how you’re going … 
  15. When You Care
     … As with any skill, you’re motivated sometimes by a sense of the dangers that come when you don’t master the skill and sometimes by a sense of the good things that come when you do master the skill. So allow yourself to be motivated from both sides. There are people who say, “I don’t want to be motivated by fear. I … 
  16. Why Train the Mind
     … You can master all the tricks of your mind if you work on the skills. The first skill is to learn how to set a good intention in mind. We’d like, when the meditation starts, to think that the mind will settle down and there will be nice states of bliss and light, or whatever. To think that way is setting yourself up … 
  17. The Importance of Being Focused
     … not focusing on the difficult things you have to endure, but focusing instead on your sources of strength, on the skills you have to maximize your strength. As death approaches, this is going to be an extremely important skill. I was talking a while back to a man who had to be admitted to the ER. His heart was racing; his blood pressure was … 
  18. When You’re Discouraged
     … That’s the attitude you’ve got to have when you’re trying to master a skill that you’re not automatically good at. There are two kinds of skills in the world: There are skills that, if you don’t master them, you can find someone else to do them for you. But then there are the skills that nobody else can do … 
  19. The Kamma of Concentration
     … Your goodwill for them expresses itself that way: “May they understand the causes for true happiness, and have the strength and willingness to act on them.” But the important principle is that you’re working on developing skills: learning how to be more skillful in how you do things, more skillful in how you say things, more skillful in how you think, how you … 
  20. All of a Piece
     … So it’s something you develop where it’s skillful, and then you try to make it more and more skillful until you finally get to the point where you don’t need it anymore. Then you can drop it. As with concentration, trying to get the mind to stay with its object: There is an intention there, there’s an activity there, there … 
  21. Our Sense of Self
     … It’s a very important set of skills that you can add to your self skills—to replace them, in many cases, with better skills—until eventually you attain release. There’s freedom lurking here in this practice that we’re following. And whether it takes a lot of effort or little effort, it’s worth every bit of effort that goes into it.
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