Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Circumspection
     … Ajaan Lee approached the practice as a skill—a vijja. Ajaan Lee himself would often draw parallels between the practice and manual skills. Meditating is like making clay tiles, he said. Meditating is like being a good cook. Meditating is like taking silver and learning what you can do with the silver. It’s like learning how to sew a pair of pants, weave … 
  3. A Special Time
     … Often it’s useful to think about skills you’ve developed, especially manual skills like cooking or carpentry or any kind of sport. Think about the attitude you brought to developing the skill, which attitudes worked and which ones didn’t. For instance, there’s got to be the desire to do this, but also you can’t let the desire to get so … 
  4. Stand Your Ground
     … We take the skills that they’ve mastered and we try to master them ourselves. We start with the skills dealing with the breath, the skills in developing mindfulness and concentration, trying to develop a spot in the breath energy in the body where the breath feels good going in, feels good going out. The quality of the breath energy in the body feels … 
  5. Protection for the Holidays
     … You have to figure out what kind of pleasure is going to be skillful. Remember the Buddha’s teachings to Sakka, the deva king. There are some forms of joy that are skillful and should be pursued and other forms of joy that are not. Some pains should be pursued and others should not. Some forms of equanimity should be pursued and others should … 
  6. The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle
     … We have a perception of self, an assumption of self, and the question then becomes, *When is that a skillful action, and when is it an unskillful action? * There are stages in the path where the perception of self is skillful. There are versions of your self that are skillful. There’s the self that’s the governing principle. When you’ve been practicing … 
  7. Skillful Effort
     … It’s the kind of knowledge that comes from developing a skill. This is why it’s useful. when you meditate, to reflect back on the skills you’ve mastered in the past, things that you’ve enjoyed doing that you’ve learned how to do well, where you’ve enjoyed the process of learning how to do well, whether it’s cooking or … 
  8. Respecting Death
    Meditation is a skill. You can do it well; you can do it poorly. Most people don’t like to hear about that. Sometimes you’re told that there’s no such thing as a good meditation or bad meditation, that it’s all good, but that’s not true. The issue is how you judge what’s good and what’s not good … 
  9. A Decent Education
     … The skills for dealing with them are the most important skills people can develop in life. But one of the problems with our society is that everything is geared toward the economy. Laws are struck down because they’re not good for the economy — at least for this quarter’s profit margin. Educational systems are designed to fit us each into our slot in … 
  10. Playing Your Lute
     … I don’t know about you, but if the Buddha appeared in front of me while I was thinking something that was not very skillful, I’d be very embarrassed. And immediately the Buddha asked him, “Were you thinking of disrobing?” The monk said, “Yes.” And then the Buddha asked him, “When you were a lay person, were you skilled at playing the lute … 
  11. Stop Weaving
     … First there’s the action, which can be skillful or unskillful. Then there’s the result, which depends on the skillfulness of the action. If the action was unskillful, you develop a dislike for the result. If the action was skillful, you often get attached to the result. You want it to keep on going. Either way, you give rise to defilements in the … 
  12. The Wisdom of Merit
     … As he explains it, you have to develop skillful qualities, let go of unskillful qualities, and only when the skillful qualities are mature can you let go of those as well. Or as a modern Buddhist psychologist once said, you have to develop a healthy sense of self before you can let go of self. And the practice of generosity and virtue develops precisely … 
  13. Memory & Motivation
     … What’s skillful to do right now?—“skillful” being defined as what doesn’t lead to harm or suffering and actually leads away from suffering or stress. Some skillful things you’ve learned from others and some you’ve learned from your own experience. Not everything that looks good in the present moment is going to have good results. We’re not here just … 
  14. Succeeding at Happiness
    One of the first things that drew me to the Buddha’s teaching was that it approaches happiness as a skill. It’s not something hit or miss, not something that a God can give or take away at will at his or her pleasure. It’s something you can create. As with any skill it requires two things, as the Buddha said: commitment … 
  15. Different Minds, Different Bodies
     … That means your skill is more all-around. The same with your meditation: You want to make it all-around. You want to learn the skill so that it’s not something you do just while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed under very quiet conditions. You want to take it out into all sorts of conditions so that you can keep … 
  16. Patience Is a Skill
     … Your ability to make things minor—in other words, to see a setback as not such a big deal—is an important mental skill. Patience is a skill in learning how to talk to yourself, learning how to give yourself encouragement, to remind yourself that what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of past habits and present habits, present actions. The past … 
  17. Elemental Energy
     … So being with the breath has lots of uses, from everyday uses to deeper uses, just like a person who’s a skilled carpenter and can use his skills just to bang together something simple in a few minutes, or work on long-term projects that require lots of skill. It’s not that you work only on the big projects. Whatever needs to … 
  18. Acceptance Isn’t the Issue
     … Look for people you can emulate, people you can learn from, especially concerning what’s skillful and what’s not skillful: how to have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, how to be generous, how to be virtuous, how to develop your discernment. These are things we can learn from one another. The people who embody these qualities are the people we should search … 
  19. An Island in the Flood
     … I’m going to set myself up as a teacher.” But the Buddha’s question was, “What’s the most skillful use of this knowledge?" The most skillful use, he realized, was seeing that his lives in the past didn’t go up a stairway from low to high, and then higher, higher, and higher. They would go up and down. They would go … 
  20. The Psychology of Harmlessness
     … how to understand the mind so that it can become skillful. Very skillful. All the Buddha’s analysis of mental functions is pointed to that purpose. This is why when someone was asked one time if the Buddha taught whether the world was eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite, going down the whole list of the hot issues of the day— it was … 
  21. Slings and Arrows of Ordinary Fortunes
     … So the teachings are all here—the skills of concentration, the skills of mindfulness, the skills of discernment—for helping us master this skill of knowing how not to suffer, how not to shoot ourselves with those extra arrows. It’s something we can do. We can catch ourselves in the midst of doing it and ask ourselves why. That ability to ask yourself … 
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