Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Understanding Aggregates… But, you’ve learned skills in how to cook them, how to put them together, how to treat them so that you *can *eat them. Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. So, if you want to understand the aggregates, think about how they relate to feeding, and the Buddha’s way of dividing things up becomes very clear. It …
- Encourage Yourself… A good part of meditation is skillful thinking: how to think when you’re angry to get past the anger. How to think when you’re feeling lust to get past the lust. How to think when you’re feeling discouraged so that you can get past the discouragement or depression or whatever. Before we can give up thinking, we have to learn how …
- Training for Happiness… That’s why the mind, when it’s trained, brings happiness—because only when it’s trained can you catch it in time, direct it in time, so that it keeps on choosing to do the skillful thing, the thing that leads to happiness both for yourself and the people around you. Without that training, happiness is pretty much hit-or-miss. With that …
- Second Wind… Make that part of your skill set as the identity you’re taking on here. When you come to the body, the breath, and the mind with these questions, you find that you can go for a long distance, much longer than if you just want to rest for a bit. Then when you have a sense that you’ve had enough rest, you …
- Generosity of Spirit… It’s good to develop the skill where you can minimize them. Think of that image in the Canon: the sound making contact at the ear and then stopping right there. But we’re like a gong. Once you hit the gong, it keeps on ringing inside. Actually, you can let the unkind words, stupid words, whatever other people say to you, just stop …
- To Comprehend Pain… Use one way of thinking, one way of perceiving, to drive out a coarser one, a less skillful one. In doing so, you’re beginning to comprehend what’s going on. So the desire to put an end to the suffering of the mind doesn’t *have *to conflict with the desire to comprehend the pain. In fact, when you do things right, they …
- Think Like a Thief… All the things we do around the monastery are opportunities to learn how to be skillful, to learn how to be observant—even simple things like putting things away. Where is the best place to put away plastic so that it’s not out in the sun? What is the best way to arrange things? Well, you look around, see how things are well …
- In the Context of the Path… that you should abandon or avoid unskillful actions in thought, word, and deed, and you should try to develop skillful actions in thought, word, and deed. That’s it. Those are the only teachings the Buddha said are true and beneficial across the board. The three characteristics, or the three perceptions, he said, are always true but they’re not always beneficial. As we …
- Mission Possible… You either can replace the unskillful thoughts with more skillful thoughts, or you can reflect for a while on the drawbacks of that unskillful thinking, to realize, stepping aside from it and watching it from the outside, that it really isn’t good for you. Or you can simply decide not to pay any attention to it at all. Let it chatter away in …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… You’ve got to keep your mind at peace, realizing that even though you may wish for the well-being of all beings, there are a lot of beings who are not interested in being very skillful at all. And no matter how much you want their happiness, they’re free to not go in that direction. All the qualities that go into determination …
- In the Context of the Deathless… And if you learn how to take delight, as the Buddha says, in abandoning your unskilled qualities and developing skillful ones—in other words, if you find the challenge exhilarating, find the challenge really worthwhile—then you’re going to get to the end of the path. He says you have to delight in these things, in the same way as when you delight …
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… to do what’s skillful. That’s the best use of your freedom. If we’re free simply to follow our greed, aversion, and delusion, that’s a kind of slavery. But the freedom that comes when you realize, “Okay, I can choose my actions based on what the long-term results are going to be, and I have the inner strength I need …
- Step by Step… In the same way, each step in your quest for whatever your goal may be—if it’s a good goal, if it’s a skillful goal—each step is what’s going to guarantee that the goal is going to happen, is going to be attained. Don’t focus so much attention on the goal that you misstep. Dogen the Zen master has …
- Ingenuity… As a meditator, you want to develop a repertoire of skills so that on the days when the mind is frazzled, you have the right way of breathing for a frazzled mind. On days when it’s tired, you have the right way of breathing for a tired mind. On days when it’s scattered about, what way of breathing is best for a …
- Potentials for Good… When you see somebody suffering, you focus on the potentials they have to become skillful, so that they don’t have to suffer from their bad karma. Then you learn how to look the same way at yourself. Of course, the more you look at yourself this way, the easier it is to look at other people in this way. So karma’s not …
- The Focus on Suffering… Try to be more and more skillful at those things. That fosters right view. Listen and learn, read. That’s another factor. Discuss what you’ve learned to make sure your understanding’s right. And then there are the two factors of tranquility and insight. As you develop these factors, you bring the mind to concentration. As the mind gets into good deep concentration …
- Perception… When you can use these perceptions to let go of the aggregates—including even skillful perceptions—then you open to something that’s even greater than you can imagine, in which there’s no perception, but there is the greatest happiness possible. So perception plays a huge role in the practice, both in identifying what’s what, and learning to retrain your perceptions of …
- The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal… Each breath is something to be pursued as something valuable, as a source of knowledge, as a guide in how to let go of unskillful mental qualities, and to develop skillful ones. So give each breath its due respect because as you respect the path, the goal will appear not anywhere else but right here. As the Buddha said, you touch awakening with the …
- Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t… but this is a skill I really want to learn.” When you bring that attitude toward being right here, that’s the proper narrative you should have. So many people approach meditation simply as a way to step out of their day-to-day narrative, rest for a while, but then when they step back into their daily life, they step back into the …
- Persistence… Try to stitch everything skillful together with your mindfulness. Keep remembering where you are, what you’re supposed to be doing. One of the roles of mindfulness is to notice what good things have not yet arisen so that you give rise to them; and if they have arisen, you maintain them. That’s mindfulness working together with right effort. So what do you …
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