Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Conviction & Confidence
     … You’re trying to figure out a skill, sensitize yourself to a certain area of your experience: either the body or your feelings or the state of your mind. Notice where there’s stress and then figure out how you can calm that stress. In other words, these are things you do. You don’t just sit there. You don’t give up trying … 
  3. A Recipe for Jhana
     … And you have the power to participate in a more skillful way, a way that gives rise to a greater sense of ease, lightness, fullness, without your having to read the restaurant reviews and try to make it lighter with an air compressor, or make it full by stuffing in food. Your sense of the body just grows that way as you get more … 
  4. The Ennobling Path
     … If you maintain it with skill, adjusting things so that it’s a good place to stay, then the mind can settle down. Once it settles down, then allow it to stay there. Maintaining it is a difficult part of the practice. Anyone can look at the breath for a little while, but looking at it for long extended periods of time is what … 
  5. Practicing for Dispassion
     … If they respected people who didn’t believe in the principle of karma, didn’t believe that doing unskillful things would create problems, or that doing skillful things would have benefits, then they were going to suffer. They’d become low-levels beings and living in low-level worlds. But of they listened to the noble ones with respect and believed in the principle … 
  6. Balancing Tranquility & Insight
     … And as your skill develops in developing both tranquility and insight, the whole path comes together. Even for people for whom insight practice and tranquility practice are two radically separate things, they find that as the path begins to reach fruition, everything comes together. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about how at that point, it’s hard to draw a line between insight practice and … 
  7. Stop Squirming
     … This is why learning how to face pain is such an important skill. And why it’s important to develop the powers of endurance and patience that enable you to watch, watch, watch what’s going on. We’re not here just to endure. As one of the forest ajaans said, if it were simply a matter of endurance, chickens would have been awakened … 
  8. The Fourth Noble Truth
     … If anything skillful arises, you maintain it. You don’t just let everything come and go. As for right mindfulness, the word “mindfulness” means keeping something in mind. In this case, you’re keeping your breath in mind. You’re also keeping in mind the need to protect your concentration on the breath. It’s in this way that everything converges into right concentration … 
  9. Path & Raft
     … This is why it’s important when you think about the path to think about the skills you’ve developed the past—the ones where you had to be very patient about getting good at this step, getting good at the next step, and gradually seeing it all come together. Even though at the beginning it may have seemed hopeless, you begin to realize … 
  10. When it’s Hard to Settle Down
     … Learning how to re-think your issues is an important skill in the meditation. You look at the values you’ve picked up from society and you realize that a lot of them are not designed to help relieve suffering. They actually pour more suffering on. This is why it’s in your own best interest to learn to re-think things, re-cast … 
  11. A Good Foundation
     … One is the principal that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful actions should be abandoned. The other is the four noble truths, because the duties of the truths hold across the board. A lot of other teachings have their time and place. The three characteristics, for instance: There are times when you use those perceptions, and other times when you shouldn’t. They … 
  12. Food for Consciousness
     … That’s a skill that’s really worth developing because it lessens your suffering—and we’re doing it as we’re meditating here. You see the process of distraction and you can pull out. You can see the mind going for something and decide, “I don’t want to go there,” and you can drop it. You get to step back from all … 
  13. Open Are the Doors to the Deathless
     … What kind of mind states are skillful, devoid of passion, aversion, delusion? How are you going to find them? Well, through this middle way. The other role for pain, of course, is that it’s part of the first noble truth of pain in the mind. That’s the problem the Buddha’s going to solve. That’s what the four noble truths are … 
  14. How to Straighten Out the World
     … In fact, remorse saps your energy in the present moment, which means you’re less likely to do what’s skillful in the present moment. So it’s really not a helpful emotion at all. If you remember some stupid mistake or some horrible thing you did in the past, just remind yourself, “I don’t need to do that again. I don’t … 
  15. The Karma that Ends Karma
     … This is going to require all your ingenuity, all your attention, but it’s one of the few skills in life that’s really worth all the effort it requires, that more than repays all the effort put into it. It’ll see you all the way through every possible type of suffering, because its rewards are more than you can intend. You can … 
  16. Laying the Infrastructure
     … As Ajaan Fuang once said, “This is the basis for all of our skills.” Don’t abandon the basis. If the energy gets too strong, just think of it going out the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet. Don’t try to hold it in. That way you find it easier actually to stay with the breath and to get to … 
  17. Broad, Tall, & Deep
     … These are some of the key concepts in the practice, the key concepts in the skills you need to get the mind past suffering.
  18. Why We Meditate
     … It’s how the mind talks to itself, how it focuses on things, how it observes things, what it learns, the skills it has in dealing with itself and with events around it. That’s where the secret to happiness lies. This is why we meditate, and it’s good to keep this in mind at all times, because there will be a tendency … 
  19. A Wilderness Mind at Home
     … You want to try to figure out a skillful way to stop the harm without getting tied up in anger. When the Buddha talks about dealing with hateful people, he gives the image of someone walking through the desert, tired, hot, and thirsty: That’s you living in a world of people you dislike. Because if you’re surrounded by bad people, and all … 
  20. Cleaning up Your Personal Environment
     … So your identity as a meditator can be improved greatly by acting in skillful ways that create a better world for yourself. It’s one of the good features of the practice that you create a better world for yourself through meditating, and you’re also creating a better world for the people around you. So try to keep these principles in mind: observing … 
  21. How Much Concentration Is Enough?
     … We tend to feed off these activities in unskillful ways, but when you’re doing concentration, you’re learning how to feed off them in ways that are really skillful and nourishing for the mind. At the same time, you’re putting yourself in a good position to observe the mind in action. Look at what you’re doing while you’re doing it … 
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