Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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.
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Five Reflections
     … Persistence, based on that conviction, to do what is skillful. Mindfulness, concentration, discernment — qualities that develop from that persistence. These are the strengths you’ll need, strengths that you can hold on to, when the body begins to decay. So work on developing them. Ask yourself which one is weak in you, and focus on developing that. If it’s mindfulness, learn how to … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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