Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 145
  2. Duties in the Present
     … As for skillful mental qualities, you don’t want to let go quite yet. You’ve got to hold on. You’re holding on to them as a path, as a tool, which is different from clinging. With clinging, you hold on to these things as ends in and of themselves. But here you try to turn everything into tools. You develop the path … 
  3. Reclaiming the Breath
     … Just keep being as skillful as you can with the parts of the breath energy that you can control and that you can gain a sensitivity for. The parts of the body that were closed off will, at some point, suddenly break open. So you’re reclaiming your body; reclaiming your breath. You’re getting more familiar with what this energy is that holds … 
  4. Clearing a Space
     … When you can bring it under control, you’ve developed a really important skill. Mindfulness takes on a whole new meaning. Concentration, heedfulness, discernment, these all take on a whole new meaning once you’ve learned to use them in this way. So you see as you get into the practice that it’s not like a textbook. You can learn all the words … 
  5. Four Determinations
     … people who are searching for something; people who are struggling, fighting in battles; people who are being trained in skills. All of these activities require an element of will. The term for will in Pali is adhiṭṭhāna—determination*—*and there are four determinations that are really helpful for the practice. It’s good to keep them in mind. The first, the Buddha says, is … 
  6. A Path Under the Trees
     … You find that as you get more and more skilled at these things, the activity of the effort gets more and more calm. But you will still want to be alert, because there’s still the potential for more craving and more clinging in the mind. It’s simply that they’re very quiet right now. But when everything is quiet like this, then … 
  7. The Particulars of Your Suffering
     … You isolate them as you get the mind into concentration in the same way that someone who has to develop a physical skill has to learn how to isolate different muscles. When you’re playing the piano, when you’re dancing, you have to be able to isolate the different muscles in your hands and arms and legs and back, in your torso in … 
  8. Training Your Selves
     … How you talk to yourself about what you’re doing is a really important skill. You can’t get past it by saying, well, “I just won’t have a sense of self as I meditate.” We’re creating a state of becoming as we get the mind to settle in, with a world and a sense of you in that world. The world … 
  9. As They’ve Come to Be
     … These are the skills needed for getting outside the state of becoming, to see how artificial it is, and how it’s really not worth all the effort that goes into it. This is how you take apart your craving that leads to becoming, and this, too, involves tranquility and insight. With breath meditation, we’re working with seeing things as fabricated and then … 
  10. Respect for Heedfulness
     … The whole teaching on causality—the fact that your experience of the present is a combination of past factors plus your present input—means that you can develop skill in this area. If everything were totally predetermined, everything would be like a machine and there’d be no reason for respect because you couldn’t learn anything useful about it, you’d just be … 
  11. What You’re Bringing
     … And the best way to do that is to consciously bring a skillful attitude to the present moment and then see what else comes up that gets in the way of your express intention for being here. It’s like trying to know the strength of a current in a river. The best way to do that is put a dam up in the … 
  12. A Well-Thatched Roof
     … When the mind is well fed with a skillful sense of wellbeing, it’s ready for what the Buddha said is the true task with regard to stress and pain, which is to comprehend it. If you’re afraid of pain, if you run away from it, if you try to push it away, you’re not going to comprehend it. Comprehending comes from … 
  13. Gifts of Noble Wealth
     … I made reference just now to the three skills of the archer that the Buddha used to compare with discernment. To fire shots in rapid succession: In other words, you’re quick. You see something and you can see right through it, particularly issues in your own mind. You shoot great distances: In other words, you see that if you do this or that … 
  14. Cutting the Fetters
     … It’s not that he taught the noble eightfold path to outsiders and then taught the skill of cutting the fetters to the insiders. And it’s striking how few times he actually mentions the fetters in the texts, whereas the path and the factors of the path are mentioned again and again. Those are the things you focus on. You do what needs … 
  15. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … In this way, you expand your repertoire as a meditator and develop a range of skills that you can apply to any situation, so that your proficiency in the meditation becomes more and more reliable and all-around.
  16. The Duties of Happiness
     … They’re able to stay in the shadows because they keep saying, “Well, I can’t be brought into the discussion because I’ll be immediately pushed out.” But if the discussion isn’t held in a skillful way, and some of the voices refuse to participate, nothing gets resolved. Here, though, we’re creating a safe space where these different voices in the … 
  17. Questioning & Conviction
     … Generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities, generate desire to abandon unskillful ones. In other words, the best way to do this is to get yourself to want to do it, so that it’s not just a mechanical process of following somebody’s orders. You have to find ways of encouraging yourself and inspiring yourself on the path. That’s how you … 
  18. The Path of Happiness
     … Its mindfulness is pure; its equanimity is pure; and it can see very clearly what’s going on—see what’s skillful, see what’s not. So the sense of pleasure is an important part of the path. As long as you see it as a means to a further end, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes you see in modern teachings … 
  19. Adbusting the Mind
     … This is how meditation becomes a skill. You see things through consistently from cause to effect, and then apply the lessons to the next cause, and then the next. As your attention span gets stronger like this—as you’re able to observe for longer periods of time and see the connections—it’s a lot harder for your defilements to come sneaking in … 
  20. Wide-open Awareness
     … Try to develop the skills you need to stay interested here and for the time being just drop your curiosity about everything else—the curiosity that wants to build a thought world out of this sensation, wants to associate that sound with some other sound. That kind of creativity can sound kind of nice—you can be very creative with your thoughts, you can … 
  21. Insight into Pain
     … It’s because of our own lack of skill that we suffer. This is why discernment is so important to see the distinctions between things that we otherwise glom together—glomming the pain onto the solid parts of the body, glomming the sense of “me” onto that pain in the solid parts of the body—so that it’s all a big sticky mess … 
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