Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 139
  2. Sensuality
     … But if you can think that way now, realizing that you’ve got to find a better, more solid source for pleasure, you can focus on the skills of meditation and be better prepared when the time comes. One of the issues, of course, is that people think that, in denying sensual pleasure, denying that it’s a good thing, we’re going to … 
  3. One Thing Clear Through
     … It requires a different set of skills. So if you can give up your general narrative of the gradual glide into a little bit of stillness at the end of the session, and try a new narrative where you’re right here, so you might as well just stay right here, then all the different voices that got to chatter away during the glide … 
  4. Modest, Unentangled, Unburdensome
     … The skills you develop in terms of concentration, insight: They’re their own reward. Nobody else has to know. The second quality that affects other people is being unentangled. If you’ve spent a lot of your time involved in the issues of other people, you don’t have much time to practice. This is directly related to the internal quality of persistence, because … 
  5. Battling the Hindrances
     … One thing that all desires have in common, whether they’re skillful or unskillful, is that they’re aiming at happiness. They just have different ideas of what happiness would be and how you can find it. So if you have a sense of ease and well-being that you can point to in the present moment—it’s right here, feels good breathing … 
  6. Don’t Underestimate Merit
     … As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was, one, not being willing to give up his effort, and two, not being content with skillful qualities. Listen to that. Things are good but they could be better. That was the motto that kept him going. It took him all the way. Otherwise, when you’re content with whatever little concentration you have or … 
  7. Observing the Mind at the Breath
     … Once the mind settles down with the breath, what do you do next? Well, you stay there—and learn that this is a skill that needs to be developed. All too often we think, “Well, I’ve got a little bit of stillness and now I can go for insight.” But the insight doesn’t come any place else but in your efforts to … 
  8. A Heart & Mind of Goodwill
     … Of course, the Buddha did have the skills of his meditation to help as well, so that the pain in his foot was not the only sensation he had to focus on in his body. He could focus on the well-being of being with his breath. So learning how to create this sense of well-being is not a selfish pursuit of happiness … 
  9. Games the Mind Plays
     … But you can train it to talk to itself in skillful ways. Learn how to improve the quality of the dialogue in your committee. Try to get the mind still so that it’s in a position where it can let everybody have their say, and then sort things out, not believing everything the mind tells itself. So when the mind gets still, things … 
  10. Passion for Dispassion
     … He’s basically saying to focus your passion someplace else, focus your passion in a way that’s actually skillful, actually helpful, actually leads to a genuine happiness. And he points out the possibility of a happiness that lies beyond most of our imagination. We’ve heard the four noble truths so many times that it’s good to stop and reflect that they … 
  11. Step Outside the World
     … And as I said, the qualities that establish mindfulness include not only mindfulness itself but also alertness—knowing what you’re doing, knowing the results of what you’re doing—together with ardency, the ability to stick with it, to put effort into the practice to be skillful, the effort to be sensitive, the effort to be focused. When these are all working together … 
  12. A Mind like Wind
     … Then you can carry this skill out into other activities as well, as you’re walking around the monastery, as you’re doing chores or interacting with other people. Try to stay with the body as your frame of reference—how it feels to be in the body when you’re talking, when you’re walking, when other people say things that you react … 
  13. Caught in a Thorn Bush
     … It requires a combination of skills and the ability to balance those bases of success. As the Buddha said, you want your desire—which is the first of the bases for success—not to be too active and not to be too lax. One way of guaranteeing that is to focus it on causes. If you simply sit here saying, “I wish my mind … 
  14. Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath
     … So you try to abandon any unskillful qualities that might come up in the mind and you direct your thoughts and evaluate just one thing that’s skillful, that has nothing to do with sensuality; nothing to do with anger or any of the defilements. And you just keep at it. The problem is, you might say, “Gee that’s not very quiet yet … 
  15. Perceptions & Potentials
     … But if you can develop skill in the present moment, you can make good things of whatever is coming in. It’s like a good carpenter who can make something good out of scraps as well as good pieces of wood. Or a cook who can make good food out of whatever is in the kitchen, good or bad. You begin to gain a … 
  16. The Ivory Intersection
     … In other words, not just being here, but also learning how to develop what’s skillful—and then trying to fend off the floodwaters. If you do have to get out and row your boat around in the flood, you realize you can’t stay out in the flood forever. You’ve got to come back here. But at least you have a place … 
  17. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … This is also why he has you develop a sense of samvega, because people have gone through lives—*many *lives—holding on to their worldviews, sometimes fairly skillful, sometimes not, and they go nowhere but around and around. We hold to our worldviews because we figure we can arrive at some well-being by making certain assumptions, and whatever stress is involved is a … 
  18. Mature Happiness
     … Or even if you’ve developed some skill in learning how to take charge of your happiness, if you haven’t gone to the very end, he keeps saying not to be content with where you are. There’s better. Things can get really good. So this idea that just making yourself content will be enough to make you happy: The Buddha would have … 
  19. Approaching the four noble truths
     … What is it doing? And is it skillful? If you really want to see it, you have to get it as quiet as possible. Otherwise, we stir around. That’s a pun in Thai. The word for a person is khon. The word for stirring is khon. A lot of people are constantly stirred, like a jar of water that has some mud at … 
  20. Wisdom as a Tool
     … The skillful question is: Is the lesson they’re teaching a good Dhamma lesson? That’s always what you should be looking for: What kind of Dhamma lesson could you gain from this? It doesn’t matter who you see in the vision. What matters is the quality of what they tell you. And this applies to books as well. A particular Dhamma lesson … 
  21. Unentangled Compassion
     … This is why he said that all the skillful qualities of the mind depend on a sense of heedfulness, a strong sense that what you do really does make a difference and so you have to be careful about what you do. Because the mind does have this tendency to wander off into areas that are detrimental for itself and for people around you … 
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