Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Thinking About Rebirth
     … So there’s a very strong teaching here on skillful selfing. There’s important teaching on not-skillful selfing as well. The important teaching about skillful not-selfing would be to realize: This is yours for only the time being. It’s not really yours. What good use can you get out of it while you have it? You have youth, you have health … 
  3. You Are Not a Textbook
     … And the second is making yourself want to do what’s skillful. This applies inside the meditation and it applies outside the meditation as well. In a situation when people are making strong demands on you and you’re tired and you’re not focused, what do you draw on inside to say the skillful thing and do the skillful thing? And to figure … 
  4. Goodwill
     … The reason we’re tied up in this world of wandering on is because of our own lack of skillfulness. The same holds true for others: They’re tied up by their lack of skillfulness, too. We can learn to be skillful but we can’t make other people skillful. You can teach them how, but it’s up to them to want to … 
  5. Doubts
    One of the purposes of the practice is to develop the skill to think the thoughts you want to think, and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. And as we all know, a lot of the meditation is about not thinking thoughts. If any thoughts do come up as you’re trying to focus on the breath, if they’re … 
  6. Exercising Discernment
    As we meditate, we’re working on a skill. And it’s important to reflect on what you need to bring to an activity to turn it into a skill. The Buddha offers a number of ways to reflect on that. One is his description of the qualities of mind you have to bring to mindfulness practice. As we were saying earlier today, the … 
  7. A Sense of Yourself
     … If they have all the power, if they have all the selves and you have no self, then who’s going to do battle? Who’s going to have the techniques? Who’s going to have the skills? Who’s going to be able to work on the skills that are needed? You’ve got to develop a skillful sense of self. This is … 
  8. Self-Healing
     … So learn your skills: Learn how to breathe in a skillful way; learn how to talk to yourself in a skillful way; hold skillful perceptions in mind; focus on your feelings in a way that gives you strength. In this way, you’re taking care of what you have to be responsible for, you don’t make yourself sick, and you don’t place … 
  9. One Person
     … A lot of the skill in the practice is knowing when to use which: when not-self is skillful and when self is skillful—and what kinds of not-self can be unskillful, as well as which kinds of self can be skillful. But for the time being, let those questions settle back in the background. You want to maintain this sense of stillness … 
  10. Protection, Inside & Out
     … And then you’re ardent, trying to get rid of unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. That ardency is based on a quality called appropriate attention. That, too, is one of your inner refuges. It’s what lies at the beginning of right view. That’s something you have to remember as well. Appropriate attention focuses attention on questions of: What is skillful? What … 
  11. Change
     … As he said, “Skillful qualities can be developed. Unskillful ones can be abandoned.” If skillful qualities couldn’t be developed, there’d be no point in his teaching. If unskillful qualities couldn’t be abandoned, there’d be no point in his teaching. So those kinds of change are actually good. But then again, he didn’t say that all change was good. There … 
  12. Skills for Dying Well
     … These are the skills you’re going to need. And these are the skills you’re working on right now. The ajaans like to talk about this. They say that meditation is preparing yourself to die well. There’s a skill there. A lot of people, when death comes, just surrender. Or else they go down kicking, but without really realizing what they’re … 
  13. Unskillful Voices
     … Then one of the results of making skillful choices is that it also makes skillful choices easier to make. You’re coming from a position of strength. You’re coming from a position not of poverty, but of wealth. You’ve got this food and water for the mind. Ultimately that leads to the strength of discernment, when you begin to see through all … 
  14. Your Higher Power
     … So learn to work on these skills: the skills of getting focused, the skills of allowing the comfortable breath energy to spread through the body. And also work on skillful ways of thinking about what’s going on in the mind, remembering that you’re not alone when you’re suddenly faced with a very strong desire. You’ve got your skills. And you … 
  15. Not Getting What You Want
     … You’re developing new skills. The word for ignorance, avijjā, means not only not knowing, but also lack of skill. The discernment that comes with mastering these skills is what enables you to see these things for yourself. You’re not just cutting out the Buddha’s brilliant ideas and concepts and pasting them on your mind or on your experience. You’re actually … 
  16. Skillful Judgment
     … The men in prison were willing to accept the teaching that there are skillful ways of behaving and unskillful ways of behaving, and that you’ve really got to do your best to work on developing the skillful ones. The men in the men’s group, though, didn’t like the idea of being judged as skillful or unskillful. One of them had heard … 
  17. Conviction & Focus
     … Your conviction that you’ll need these skills will help keep you motivated to exert right persistence; developing what’s skillful, abandoning what’s not, and to use your discernment as to what’s really important in life: trying to get a handle on this problem of why the mind keeps doing things that are going to cause itself suffering. From there, you can … 
  18. The Best Use of Your Time
     … And you find that you benefit, because the skill of a trained mind underlies all the other skills you might develop, whether they’re physical skills or mental skills. The discipline that’s required to keep the mind on one object and to be very observant: These skills can be applied to every activity in life that you might want to pursue. So the … 
  19. Motivation
     … And if you don’t work on the skills, there’s going to be a lot of suffering. If you do work on the skills, you can avoid the suffering. Heedfulness means you have a choice. It’s not just a matter seeing dangers and getting all upset and scared. It’s the heedfulness that allows you to develop skill because you know there … 
  20. Cooking the Present Moment
     … So instead of looking for the intensity of a pleasure—nice things happening to you—learn to take pleasure in your skills, the skills that you develop as a meditator: the skills in virtue, concentration, discernment, learning how to deal with pleasure, learning how to deal with pain, and developing that unlimited state of mind that goes with the brahmaviharas. Those are the skills … 
  21. Strength of Discernment
     … When something comes into mind, you have to ask yourself: “Why is it there?” And then you look in terms of what the Buddha calls its diversity: “Is this skillful? Is this not? How skillful is it?” And if it’s not skillful, you’ve got to get rid of it. You have to figure out what the cause was so that you can … 
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