Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Taking Risks
     … He starts out by saying, “Try to avoid acting on unskillful intentions.” How do you know if an intention is skillful? If there’s obviously any greed or anger or delusion in there, you don’t act on it. If you expect that it will cause harm, you don’t act on it. But many times you don’t see. Especially if it’s … 
  3. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … You’re trying to master a skill in dealing with whatever problems come up and looking for practical solutions. I’m going over the transcript for the French retreat right now. I’m really struck by how many of the questions have to do with pains here, pains there, problems of getting the breath to be comfortable, and then, once it’s comfortable, maintaining … 
  4. Technique & Attitude
     … There are specific steps, specific techniques that you want to master, because it is a skill. And having a specific technique like this gives you a way of measuring the currents of the mind against each other. It gives you a firm point of reference. Once you know that you want to stay with the breath, any thought that pulls you away from the … 
  5. Question Your Perceptions
     … That perception is useful for some things, as when you’re working on a manual skill, but it’s also good to learn how to put perceptions aside when that helps the mind settle down to deeper and deeper levels. That allows you to question the perceptions that give rise to greed, aversion, and delusion, and the perceptions that serve the purposes of greed … 
  6. A Good-natured Attitude
     … That’s one of the skills that we seem to lack most here in the West: continuity. We have all sorts of conveniences so that things get done fast, fast, fast. And we’ve never learned how to commit ourselves to something that’s going to take a long time and may not be easy, that requires a lot of work. We have to … 
  7. Tranquility & Insight Together
     … If something’s not worth thinking about, what can you do to disperse those thoughts? Those are some of the skills you learn as you meditate. We’ve already got the tools, we’re already using them, so we might as well learn how to use them with knowledge, clearly, aware of what we’re doing, so that we can do the work well.
  8. Imagining Freedom
     … Why do I put up with* x?* Why do I look for my happiness in things that are going to die, grow ill, age, turn into something aside from happiness? Why do I allow myself to be governed by pain? Why do I allow myself to be governed by fear? Why don’t I look into which of my thoughts are skillful and which … 
  9. The Humble Way to Awakening
     … But the problem is that each of us suffers because of our own lack of skill in dealing with pain. If we’d be willing to learn from the pain, then each of us could take care of our problems and there wouldn’t be issues in life at all. So as you meditate, keep reminding yourself that you’re preparing yourself to deal … 
  10. Shelter
     … The desire has to be motivated by a sense of heedfulness and a sense of pride in your skill, a sense of appreciation—the quality they call “respect for concentration.” The Buddha had to emphasize that twice. In the passage we recite, he talks about having respect for the Triple Training, and goes back again and mentions respect for concentration. Concentration is already there … 
  11. Complaining Rights
     … We’re all very good at complaining, but it turns out that complaining is one of our skills that keeps us tied to suffering. So learn how to recognize that there’s suffering but don’t let the complaint get in the way of seeing the cause and letting go of the cause. These things happen very quickly, so the less baggage you carry … 
  12. Turning Points
     … Then the question was, why do people go so erratically through so many levels of being? He had a vision of the whole cosmos where people are dying and being reborn in line with their karma, in line with the intentions that they acted on, skillful or unskillful. That led him finally to his third knowledge, which was looking at his intentions in the … 
  13. Attachment to the Body
     … But if you can reduce their impact on the mind by seeing that they’re separate from the awareness, then you can handle aging, illness, and death a lot more calmly and with a lot more skill. So learn how to use these teachings properly. The Buddha’s very clear about what their real purpose is. We take them, though, and we push them … 
  14. Investing in Noble Wealth
     … Again, it’s an effort devoted to skillful qualities in the mind. This particular quality covers everything else. There’s a really nice sutta where the Buddha talks about the occasions for effort and the occasions for laziness. And it turns out that, in terms of external factors, they’re all the same occasion. You get only a little food today and you say … 
  15. Reading Your Meditation
     … Learn how to undo any unskillful narratives and work on developing skillful narratives that result in realizing the need to train the mind, to make it focused on the present moment, to find true happiness within. Then you realize: Here you are, ready to meditate. It’s like that story Ajaan Lee tells about, when he was a young monk, he was thinking of … 
  16. A Centered but Broad Awareness
     … You might try other alternative, more skillful perceptions. One is that the pain is just there. It’s not doing anything to you. It has no intention to hurt you. And two, the pain is extremely variable. Even though we may have a sense that it’s a solid block of discomfort, if you look at it, you notice that pain sensations arise and … 
  17. No One Size Fits All
     … You got lots of different people, none of whom had any great skill, who could all work together and create things very efficiently . The same attitude was brought to insight meditation. All you had to do was to reduce it to its simplest forms, make it a fool-proof method. Just tell people, okay, do this, this, this. Fold here, insert tab A into … 
  18. Your World to Practice In
     … Freedom is the ability to find true happiness, to choose to find true happiness, to choose to do what’s skillful. And the ultimate freedom, of course, is the ultimate happiness, free from suffering. But that ability to choose is what takes you there. So despite the emphasis on restraint, the ultimate message is freedom. As the Buddha said, just as th****e ocean … 
  19. The Mind Like Water
     … You keep working at developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones. You don’t shirk your duties. You don’t take time off and say, “Well, I was practicing for a while, but it’s difficult, so I need to rest.” When you’re just resting, you’re just creating more problems for yourself—when you rest from this kind of activity, the activity … 
  20. Putting Aside the World
     … And ardent means that you want to handle this well, you want to handle this with skill. You’re not just watching willy-nilly whatever comes up and letting yourself be victimized by whatever comes up. Think of the old Thai legend of Sri Thanonchai. When he was a little kid, he had a younger brother and was jealous of the younger brother. His … 
  21. Beneficial Thinking
     … We’re training the mind in how to use its thinking—in fact, to use all of its faculties—in a skillful way. We’re not trying to become zombies or people with frontal lobotomies, i.e., people who don’t think at all. We want to learn how to use our thinking so that it really is conducive to getting the mind to … 
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