Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 131
  2. Courage
     … For once, why don’t you choose the skillful side? The way to give energy to that courage is to remind yourself that these are tradeoffs: that even though some of the choices we have to make may be hard, may require putting ourselves out on a limb, still we do have the example of the Buddha who showed that he benefitted from sacrificing … 
  3. Minding Your Own Business
     … Make sure that your intentions are skillful. You can check them by looking at what you do and then looking at the results that come about. At the very least, make sure there’s as little greed, anger, and delusion as possible in your intentions. The impact of your actions will have to be a good impact. Whether you’ve worked out all the … 
  4. Something Good to Cling to
     … sticking with what you know is skillful, trying to let go of what’s not. Mindfulness: The Buddha singles this out as being one of the main refuges you can take. In other words, you learn lessons from your practice, you learn lessons from listening to the Dhamma and reading it, and you try to keep those lessons in mind as you practice. That … 
  5. Defilements
     … You want to take whatever skills you can manage, whatever sense of peace and well-being you can manage during your meditation, and see how long you can maintain them as you go into the day. Sometimes you may find that the temperature outside is pretty hot. In other words, you find yourself in difficult situations where it’s hard to maintain your sense … 
  6. Sticking with an Intention
     … Always to do what’s most skillful. Always choose what’s going to be the least harmful, the most beneficial course of action. And one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself is to learn how to stick with a very simple, good intention like this, like staying with the breath. As you get more and more reliable in staying here … 
  7. Being Your Own Teacher
     … You’re the one making the decisions, so you’re in the best position to watch what’s going on, to figure out what’s skillful, what’s not, and how to change it. The problem is that you tend to abdicate that position. And who knows who’s coming in to take it over? So you have to be very clear. You’re … 
  8. Samvega First
     … Even when people are inflicting pain on us, there’s a skill that can be mastered in the mind so you don’t have to suffer from the pain. It all starts right here, so bring things back as close as possible to right here. And remind yourself: Anything that would flow out from this to go to the past or the future is … 
  9. Choose Your Battles
     … And understand that there’s a skill in each case. When things are tough, where do you find the parts of your mind, where do you find a way of thinking that can make them not so tough? Look for the parts that can give you some support so that you’re not totally one-on-one with nothing but pain, one-on-one … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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.
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...