Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Purity
     … We’re learning a new skill here: the skill of staying.” So you do your best to make the breath interesting. In other words, you think about how the way the breath energy flows in the body will have an impact on the different organs in the body: your liver, your spleen, your kidneys, your digestive system, your lungs, the brain, all the muscles … 
  3. The Skillful Heart
     … In other words, he wanted to be able to have the strengths inside, the skills, the discernment, that would allow him to depend on himself. The skills here are not just intellectual skills. They’re skills of the heart. It’s a concept we don’t think too much about: the skillful heart. But that’s basically what the Buddha’s teaching, because you … 
  4. Where the Brightness Is
     … Cluttering up the mind with these questions of skillfulness and lack of skillfulness,” he said, “is actually getting in the way.” His girlfriend happened to be on the retreat. I saw the way they interacted, and if there was anyone on the retreat who really needed some lessons in being skillful, he was the one. You don’t see the unconditioned just by relaxing … 
  5. The Path of Action
     … What’s the most skillful thing to do in this situation? What’s the most skillful thing to think? What’s the most skillful thing to say? And instead of getting upset with yourself or depressed or upset at the situation when things don’t turn out the way you expected them to, just learn from it, chalk it up to experience. Next time … 
  6. From Dependence to Independence
     … that is, if you do skillful things, if you act on skillful intentions, the results will be good; if you act on unskillful intentions, the results are going to be bad. That sounds simple. But again, because your actions have results that happen in the present moment, and then they have results that happen over a little bit of time, and results that happen … 
  7. Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself
     … Nothing about giving priority to what’s skillful or putting aside what’s unskillful. The same with alertness: You’re alert to what you’re doing. It could be skillful, it could be not skillful, but you’re alert to it regardless. The question of skillfulness comes in with the ardency, realizing that if you act on unskillful intentions, there’s going to be … 
  8. Start the Year Right Here
     … They can be developed and made more skillful. When we realize that the source of happiness is a skill of the mind, that develops the second quality that brings power to the mind, which is persistence. Persistence is the effort to keep with the path, to try to keep trying to be more skillful, finding out what’s the most skillful thing to do … 
  9. Organizing Your Inner Committee
     … But going off alone, spending some time alone here at the monastery, requires that you learn how to manage yourself, how to dis-identify with your bad moods, and how to, for the time being, side with your good moods, your wiser moods, your more skillful moods. Learn the tricks of the unskillful sides. It’s not that they’re totally lacking in skill … 
  10. Rooted in Desire
     … the desire to abandon skillful qualities that have already arisen and to prevent unskillful qualities that haven’t arisen yet from arising. You also generate the desire to give rise to skillful qualities and then to maintain them. So, you need desire in order to practice the path. Sometimes they say there’s a path of no desire, but just sitting where you are … 
  11. The No Common Sense Zone
    The No Common Sense Zone January 28, 2014 Those instructions that the Buddha gave to Rahula, at the very beginning of his time as a monk, are basically instructions on approaching the practice as a skill. You make up your mind that you’re going to try to act skillfully. Then you figure out what to do, try to do it, watch for the … 
  12. Respect
     … The qualities are there in potential form; we all have skillful qualities. It’s simply a difference in the extent to which we develop them, the extent to which we put them to use. The meditation we’re doing right now: That’s a skill. Use the same principles in developing it as you would in any skill. Encourage yourself in doing it, stick … 
  13. Imagine
    Imagine April 20, 2003 Psychologists have done studies of people who’ve mastered skills, trying to figure out why some people are simply very good at a particular skill while other people really master it. One of their discoveries is that for people to really master a skill, it has to capture their imagination. They like to think about it. They like to try … 
  14. Intent
     … So the skills you develop here in the present moment are a form of wealth. This is why you have to be intent on mastering them well. The Buddha mentions skills five altogether that, when you apply them in the present moment, can keep you from suffering from the results of past kamma. The first is training the mind so that it’s not … 
  15. Taking Apart Suffering
     … You’ve got to learn how to analyze things if you want the mind to settle down with any skill. Some people find it easier to just clamp down on the mind and force it to be still. That may work sometimes, but as far as mastering a skill, you find that even if you have that ability to clamp things down or to … 
  16. Self-Control
     … You want to make sure that your intentions are based on skillful desires, skillful motivations: no greed, no anger, no delusion. That requires a lot of strength. Most people live their lives in line with what the texts call yatha kamma, which means in line with your past actions. Your past actions push you in particular way and you just keep going along with … 
  17. Craving & Desire on the Path
     … Each of those duties is going to involve skill. Nobody else can make us skillful. They can point out the way, as the Buddha did. They can show us how things are done, but they can’t take their skill and put it in our hands or in our hearts. That’s something we have to do, and we have to cultivate the desire … 
  18. Right View
     … If you combine that sensitivity with some ingenuity and your powers of analysis, you can figure out, if it’s not skillful enough, “What can I do to make it more skillful?” The important thing is that you keep those questions of skillfulness and unskillfulness uppermost in your mind. That’s really what right view comes down to, the issue of, “What are the … 
  19. Exercising the Mind
     … Yet do you know when the breath is comfortable? Do you know when it is as comfortable as it could be? If you can’t know your own breath, if you can’t have a sense of what’s a skillful way of breathing and what’s not, how are you going to be skillful in other areas? So even though it may not … 
  20. The Airplane Mechanic
     … That’s the kind of skill you want to develop as you’re meditating and dealing with thoughts, however strong and important they may seem. For the time being, you put them aside, telling yourself that the skill you need right now is the skill of getting out. And to help further that skill, you need this sense of well-being in the body … 
  21. Meditation as a Skill
    The Buddha compares a skilled meditator to a skilled cook. The cook knows how to observe his master, in this case a king. He places many different kinds of food in front of the king and then notices: What kind of food does the king reach for? What kind of food does he praise? What does he eat a lot of? Then the next … 
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