Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 141
  2. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … It’s stopping and asking yourself, “Do I understand this properly?” They’ve done studies about people who’ve developed skills. They may not necessarily be especially intelligent, but they do have ability to plan out and to understand what they’re doing. In some cases, this involves visualizing, in some cases it’s simply having a correct understanding of what are the good … 
  3. No Running Away
     … insights here and there, greater skill developing incrementally here and there. But it’s the only process that works.
  4. Breath Energies
     … So there is a skill here that requires a light touch. And it’s useful, both because it allows you to get interested in the present moment and because it creates a better place for you to stay. It’s more comfortable. At the same time, you learn a lot about this process of fabrication: how the in-and-out breathing has an effect … 
  5. Breathing through Daily Life
     … The breath becomes the foundation that underlies them all — the solid floor on which you stand so can you can juggle your activities with skill. And with a continuous foundation like this, your life isn’t chopped up into little bits: a little time for this, a little for that. It all becomes time to be with the breath, and then to work from … 
  6. Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship
     … As you do this, you begin to develop skill, to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t work. The instructions in the meditation guides are general principles, but a large part of the practice lies in learning how to apply the general principles to your specific problems, and see what results you get. It’s there that the learning really happens … 
  7. Three More Recollections
     … For that knowledge to be penetrative, you have to see what causes things to arise, what causes them to pass away, and which things, when they arise, are worth continuing with, i.e., skillful, and which things, when they arise, are not, i.e., unskillful? You develop that knowledge or that discernment first with your outside actions, and then it goes into your inside … 
  8. The Whole Elephant
     … See which ones are skillful so you that can keep doing and developing them until they’ve done the work. As we keep following this path, the Buddha said, eventually it will take us to a place that we haven’t seen before—to see the as-yet-unseen. It’s unseen not because it’s unseeable, but simply because we haven’t looked … 
  9. Make the Most of What You’ve Got
     … And you look at how skillful you are at dealing with the breath and settling down with the breath. That much you learn how to accept. But you don’t accept it to stop there; you accept it so you can figure out what to do with it. Again, it’s like being a carpenter. If you’re working with cherry, there are certain … 
  10. Directing the Flow
     … So you have to learn skill in holding by that promise. If you simply feel bottled up by the precepts, there will come a point where you’ll explode. You have to use wisdom, you have to use discernment in sticking with the precepts. When there’s a desire inside that comes up against a precept, that wants to say something that the precepts … 
  11. Not Getting What You Want
     … And if the situation outside really is bad, you’ll be in a much better position to do something skillful about it because you’re not coming out of anger. You’re not coming out of clinging to the idea that it has to be this way; it has to be that way. You can look and actually think more outside of the box … 
  12. Cook Your Mind
     … You get hands-on practice in using those aggregates to develop skillful thoughts, to calm the mind down, to create a state of concentration. Then when the mind is in concentration, you begin to see the aggregates even more clearly—and you can see that they really are stressful. They really are not worth holding on to, as long as you keep in mind … 
  13. Admirable Friendship
     … It’s more like a skill. The Buddha was a master craftsperson. He discovered this is how you put an end to suffering. This is how it works. And we want to give his teachings a fair try. Which means trying to maintain them as they are and follow them as they are. Because that’s the only way you can give them a … 
  14. The Elephant in the Clearing
     … there. When you follow this particular mental quality, what happens? When you follow that one, what happens? You see that unskillful qualities like greed, aversion, and delusion do lead to suffering. Skillful qualities lift you from that suffering. But you have to be a reliable witness, which means you have to learn how to be honest and observant. That’s what the Buddha said … 
  15. Modest in Manner, but Not in Goals
     … So develop that skill. It requires some effort and dedication, but after all it is a question of your true happiness, developing the foundation for a genuine happiness that harms nobody. It doesn’t harm you, it doesn’t harm anybody else. It’s a happiness that will not let you down. And it’s something we can all do. The practice doesn’t … 
  16. No Extra Arrows
     … That’s the skill we’re trying to develop. When the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, it’s the clinging to the aggregates. Clinging, he says, is desire and passion. It’s focused on form — the form of the body — feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness. And it comes from craving. Craving, too, is desire and passion. The relationship … 
  17. Keeping Your Values Alive
     … So the practice is a matter of learning how to develop these forms of right resolve and, at the same time, not feel taxed, overburdened, or strung out by trying to do the skillful thing. One of the whole purposes of right concentration is to give you strength. The Buddha’s image is of the food in a fortress. The soldiers in the fortress … 
  18. Lessons in Happiness
     … You sensitize yourself to the fabrication that’s going on, and then you find ways of finding happiness within that sensitivity by fabricating with skill. You expand your awareness rather than curling up and trying to hide. You let go, not out of aversion, but out of a full understanding, having learned the lessons of happiness, learned the lessons of pleasure that you can … 
  19. Past Intentions, Present Intentions
     … They very rarely have any skills because they’re not required to. I learned recently of a couple where the woman was raised in a very wealthy family, and she and her husband built a new house. She had to have a separate bathroom for herself, simply because she had never learned how to pick up after herself and she was not about to … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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