Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Doing the Right Thing… The lesson here, of course, is that if your idea of yourself gets in the way of doing something skillful, you’re making things needlessly complicated. That’s so much of what the Buddha’s teachings are about: learning to develop skillful qualities in the mind—which means learning to do skillful things in your thoughts, words and deeds, and learning how to abandon …
- Goodwill for the Whole Committee… This is why we read things that inspire us to believe in the principle of action, the principle of skillful action, and give us some ideas of what skillful approaches might be. This is where it’s useful to study, to read, to listen, to enlarge the range of your imagination and the range of your skills. The real skill, though, comes in learning …
- Fear & Uncertainty… The way you starve the hindrance of uncertainty is to look in the mind and see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful there inside. And as it so happens, that’s the same way you provide food for analysis of qualities as a factor for awakening, which is the discernment factor. So you’re developing your discernment as a way of overcoming …
- The Karma of Self… You can develop skillful qualities. You can act in skillful ways, speak in skillful ways, think in skillful ways. You can develop these habits. That sense of self is useful. It keeps you encouraged on the path. In some places, they say you need to assume that you have Buddha nature so that you can do this, but the Buddha doesn’t ask you …
- Inner Negotiating Skills… So again, we have a skillful quality—compassion—that’s rooted in heedfulness. This, too, is one of your skills as a negotiator, reminding the voices in the mind—the short-sighted ones—that if you just do what you want without thought for other people, it’s going to lead to suffering down the line. The third skill is suppression—your ability to …
- Decisions… So what you focus on in the present moment is doing the most skillful thing you can do right now. That’s your focus. That’s your goal. If you sense the mind wandering away from the breath, remember that that’s not what’s wanted right now. Any thinking that helps you keep with the breath is actually skillful thinking. So we’re …
- Insights… But for the most part, the kind of insights we’re trying to develop are actually skills, because the skills will then produce insights as they’re needed for a particular problems as they arise. And you can tell through your concentration that you’re in a better position to evaluate: Did that insight really do a good job of letting go of the …
- Addictive Thinking… If the mind is in a good state, it’s much more likely to do skillful things, to say skillful things, think skillful things. In the beginning, you may not have all the evidence you want. But as a general principle, we all know that taking responsibility for your actions tends to have better results than hoping that somebody else will do things for …
- Independent Values… But as with any skill, it takes time. But also as with any skill, the wider your range of skills, the more options you have. One of our problems as we grow up as human beings is that we have a very limited range of skills for dealing with pain, for dealing with disappointment, for dealing with change outside. We keep running to the …
- Analyzing Results… The qualities here specifically are skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. To see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful in your mind, you have to notice what kind of results you get from fostering those qualities. So it’s good at the end of each meditation to notice how it went. When the mind was able to settle down, try to …
- Control from Within… They’ve done studies of people who are very skillful in different fields, and in every case, the skill develops from realizing two things: on the one hand, the dangers that come from not being skillful, not being scrupulous, not being careful, not really mastering the skill, the problems that can come when you slip up; and then on the other hand the rewards …
- Karma & Not-self… You create a more and more skillful sense of self by not identifying with the unskillful alternatives that come up in the mind. So the two strategies, self and not-self, go together. The important point is the element of choice, reflecting on both as strategies and seeing which ones are really skillful, and which ones are not, and being more and more consistent …
- Using Right View Rightly… In other words, you don’t simply notice skillful and unskillful qualities, but you realize the wise thing to do with the skillful qualities is to develop them. The wise thing to do with the unskillful qualities is to abandon them. Or if you can get some skillful use out of unskillful qualities, that’s wise as well—as when using thoughts of spite …
- The Gift of Meditation… In other words, you analyze what’s going on in the mind to see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. If you see that something is skillful, you try to encourage it; if it’s not, you try to discourage it. This means, on the one hand, if something unskillful has arisen in the mind already, you do what you can to …
- Seclusion… But ultimately the problem is our own lack of skill. This applies to each person: Everyone is unskillful in approaching happiness. There’s no way that you can make other people skillful. Think of a music teacher. The teacher can’t make your fingers more nimble, can’t do the practicing for you, can’t give you new ears to listen to the music …
- Treasures Beyond Death… It’s through our own lack of skill that there’s so much suffering in the world. You can’t make other people skillful, but you can work on your own skills: developing qualities of mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment. As you learn how to master the duties of the path as skills—comprehending the suffering until you understand it; when you see what’s …
- Purity… We’re learning a new skill here: the skill of staying.” So you do your best to make the breath interesting. In other words, you think about how the way the breath energy flows in the body will have an impact on the different organs in the body: your liver, your spleen, your kidneys, your digestive system, your lungs, the brain, all the muscles …
- The Skillful Heart… In other words, he wanted to be able to have the strengths inside, the skills, the discernment, that would allow him to depend on himself. The skills here are not just intellectual skills. They’re skills of the heart. It’s a concept we don’t think too much about: the skillful heart. But that’s basically what the Buddha’s teaching, because you …
- Where the Brightness Is… Cluttering up the mind with these questions of skillfulness and lack of skillfulness,” he said, “is actually getting in the way.” His girlfriend happened to be on the retreat. I saw the way they interacted, and if there was anyone on the retreat who really needed some lessons in being skillful, he was the one. You don’t see the unconditioned just by relaxing …
- The Path of Action… What’s the most skillful thing to do in this situation? What’s the most skillful thing to think? What’s the most skillful thing to say? And instead of getting upset with yourself or depressed or upset at the situation when things don’t turn out the way you expected them to, just learn from it, chalk it up to experience. Next time …
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