Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Compunction
     … That, the Buddha said, is the most skillful way to look for your happiness. In this case, you train the mind to be with one object and you look after the conversation that’s going on in the mind. Whatever it’s saying that might pull you away from the breath, learn how to put that aside. Whatever complaints it has, this is where … 
  3. “May I Be Happy”
     … You notice that certain ways of thinking are skillful. They take burdens off the mind. They help nourish the mind. So encourage those ways of thinking, because if you don’t, you’ll develop other habits in the mind. It may seem artificial to focus on these habits, but then the construction of the present moment is always something artificial. There’s a large … 
  4. Think Outside the Ruts
     … Learn how to use the teaching on kamma, learn how to use the teaching on rebirth in a skillful way, so that you can come up with new narratives—new patterns of thinking that don’t cause you to suffer. So, think outside the ruts. Turn at sharp angles from them. It takes effort because you have to figure out exactly where the ruts … 
  5. At Home with the Breath
     … And you learn the skill of coming back without a lot of self-recrimination, without a lot of discouragement. You have to be businesslike about it. The mind slipped off? Okay, bring it back. Slipped off again? Bring it back again. The mind’s habit for a long time has been to wander around—who knows for how long?—and when you suddenly make … 
  6. Abandoning Craving
     … After all, the desire to abandon unskillful qualities, the desire to develop skillful qualities, is part of the path. Sometimes you hear that the cause of suffering is the craving for things to be other than they are, the idea being that if you’d simply accept things as they are, you’d be okay. But craving is based on our experience that the … 
  7. On Denying Defilement
     … As the Buddha said, if people couldn’t change their actions, if they couldn’t abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful qualities, there’d be no point in his teaching. But it’s something we can do. So it’s healthy to resist the teaching that says you need self-esteem above all else. If you’re going to have genuine self-esteem, your … 
  8. The Source of Goodness
     … You can use the skills we’ve been talking about: learning to breathe through the tension, finding the parts that are the comfortable, letting that comfortable sensation spread. This gives you a sense of nourishment throughout the day, a sense of strength. This is one of the ways in which, by your maintaining a sense of balance, you help other people maintain their sense … 
  9. The Regularity of the Dhamma
     … Do the narratives get in the way of your seeing things in terms of skillful and unskillful intentions? Or do they actually help? You should approach each situation with these thoughts in mind: Where is the stress here? What can you do to at least minimize the stress, the harm, the disturbance, whatever is a burden for you or the people around you? This … 
  10. What It All Comes From
     … Based on that, you start acting in skillful ways. There’s joy as a result. Based on the joy, there’s concentration. Concentration leads to discernment. And discernment, in turn, leads to release. So, you have to have the proper response to your suffering, which is that you’re confident there’s a way out—and that you, as a conscious agent, can succeed … 
  11. A Dhamma Bucket List
     … Ardency, of course, is being able to look at your mind to see what skillful and unskillful qualities are there, with the idea that if something unskillful is coming up in the mind, you try to get rid of it right away. The Buddha’s image is of a person with his hair on fire. Sensual desire comes up, anger comes up, greed comes … 
  12. An Inside Job
     … Develop a skillful way of interacting with it. As you get to know the breath in the different parts of the body, you learn how to, as the Buddha says, calm bodily fabrication. That allows you to work more and more directly with the mind. It’s like tuning a radio into a station. If there’s a lot of static, you can’t … 
  13. The Six Properties
     … As with all of the Buddha’s teachings, the importance of the teaching is what you do with it, and what it does for you in helping to gain insight into how stress and suffering are created in the present moment — and how you don’t have to create them, if you pay attention, if you work at these skills.
  14. Protect Your Inner Center
     … You can’t take the avocado trees, you can’t take the scenery around you, but you can take this skill of learning how to protect this sense of center in the body and allow it to feel healthy. That you can carry with you into the world. And you find that you’re much better off because of it.
  15. The Buddha’s Medicine
     … The combination of your own developing skill and the lessons you can learn from outside: These’ll help you to be a good doctor. So even though the body may still have diseases, the mind doesn’t have to be diseased. That, as the Buddha pointed out, is true health.
  16. Equanimity & Action
     … We’ve done unskillful actions, but we have the opportunity right now to do something more skillful. We can learn. So equanimity is not just acceptance and it’s not just passivity. It’s directly related to appropriate attention. If there’s something wrong, look at your intentions. If there’s something wrong, look at what you’re doing. Your intentions may be good … 
  17. Testing Insights
     … Then, once you really are settled in there—you’ve gotten to the point where you’re skilled at getting the mind into that state, getting it to stay there, getting it settled in—then see if you can keep it there as long as you like, while you’re sitting in meditation. Then the next step is to keep it in that state … 
  18. Rooted in Desire
     … We’re remembering to give rise to skillful qualities and we’re remembering to try to abandon unskillful ones. Right mindfulness then forms the theme around which right concentration develops. So this desire to put an end to suffering leads to mindfulness, and from there it leads to getting the mind to settle down and be really still in concentration with a sense of … 
  19. A Well-thatched Roof
     … So how do you develop the mind? You do it by trying to get it into right concentration, because you develop a lot of skills in the process of getting your concentration right. The Buddha also talks about the well-developed mind as one that’s resistant to pain. In other words, pain comes and you’re not overwhelmed by it. That’s paired … 
  20. There is This
     … But as with any activity, you’ve got to see when it’s skillful and when it’s not. And particularly if you find yourself shooting your heart with arrows, you’ve got a problem. To indicate the solution, the Buddha compares the case of that meditator placing the words “I am this” around his meditative experiences, with someone else who simply says, “There … 
  21. Own Your Actions
     … And this is what it can do.” It can create or it can develop a level of skill that goes way beyond what you might imagine if you just sat around thinking and talking. And it can have a huge impact on the extent to which you’re going to keep on suffering or not. Now that’s a really useful question, a really … 
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