Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Letting Go
     … You also find that you can apply these same skills to other areas of your life as well. If you’ve got a job that requires focused, continued awareness, they help you stay focused. If you’ve got big issues in life, heavy responsibilities, then having these skills allows you to put those responsibilities down, so that you’re not carrying them around all … 
  3. Appropriate Attention Always
     … One is the principle that skillful actions should be developed, unskillful actions should be abandoned. The Buddha gives a list of what counts as skillful and what counts as unskillful, and you can take that as a framework for approaching every present moment. A lot of the principles of what’s skillful and what’s unskillful relate to the precepts. Which means the precepts … 
  4. Feeding Off the Future
     … Even though there may be limitations on what you can do, you always have the opportunity to do the skillful thing, say the skillful thing, think something skillful. And that will be your food down the line. Even though the refreshment and the nourishment and the rapture may not be coming immediately, the simple fact that you’re convinced that there will be something … 
  5. Choosing Not to Suffer
     … It is possible to stop creating that suffering, to stop creating that stress, by cultivating skillful potentials in the mind and cultivating useful potentials in your body. You’ve got the breath coming in and going out. Left to its own devices, all it does is to keep you alive. But if you pay attention to it, you begin to see that it can … 
  6. A Refuge in Quiescence
     … There’s persistence, where you actually try to act on your knowledge about the possibilities of skillful and unskillful action. If any unskillful qualities come up in the mind, you try to get rid of them, and then you try to prevent them from coming back. As for skillful qualities, you try to give rise to them; once they’re there, you try to … 
  7. Identifying Weeds
     … You’re doing it because developing skillful qualities in the mind is important. That’s the big distinction that lies at the base of all the Buddha’s teachings, at the base of right view: seeing what’s skillful, seeing what’s not skillful, learning to uproot what’s unskillful, and learning to nourish what is skillful. That kind of preference is part of … 
  8. Determined to Make a Difference
    All skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness. Heedfulness is the realization that there are dangers in life but those dangers can be avoided through your actions. If you act wisely, act skillfully, you can actually find safety, you can find true well-being. Our problem is that our desires and our intentions are scattered all over the place. One of the chants we had … 
  9. Collecting Your Tools
     … It’s a skill you’re working on. As you get more and more skillful at staying in the present moment, it becomes more and more second-nature, easier and easier all the time. And don’t worry about getting stuck on concentration. That’s the kind of thing you can get unstuck from pretty easily. It’s a lot harder to get unstuck … 
  10. Stay
     … Even though it seems to be skillful in its aims, it’s not skillful right now. It’s not right for this time and place. What’s right for right now is figuring out how to get the mind into balance and then keep it there. Try to find a spot in the body where you feel most easily able to stay focused. Then … 
  11. Beyond Sound-bitten Dhamma
     … skillful compassion, skillful shame, skillful pride, skillful modesty. All these qualities of the heart: You want to learn how to master them as skills. That requires having a good, strong sense of time and place and what your heart and mind need right now. So learn how to read your mind. Read your heart. And have a sense of the different options that are … 
  12. The Breathing Game
     … We’re working on a skill. The skill is to make us more mindful, more alert, more concentrated and discerning. As with any skill, it’s important, one, that you start out with something fairly simple and, two, that you treat it like a game. If you get too serious and too emotional about it from the very beginning, you tie yourself up in … 
  13. Focus on Your Skill
    We’re here to work on a skill. It was by focusing on this skill that the Buddha was able to avoid a lot of issues that would pull the mind off into wrong view no matter which side you took. There were a lot of questions that he wouldn’t answer. “Is the world a oneness?” “Well, no,” he said. “A multiplicity?” “Well … 
  14. Meditation Prep
     … In each of these cases, you want to be skilled at giving rise to skillful attitudes when you need them so that you don’t just sit there stewing in aversion. Then the Buddha taught two meditations for counteracting other sorts of unskillful qualities. For lust, he said to try to develop the perception of the foulness of the human body. Now this is … 
  15. Warrior Knowledge
     … the things we inflict on ourselves through our own lack of skill in managing our minds. That’s something we can work on in the meditation, learning how to deal more skillfully with issues as they arise, recognizing which patterns of thought are skillful and don’t lead to suffering, which ones are unskillful and do lead to suffering, learning how to stop acting … 
  16. Desert Island Meditation
     … He had no choice in the matter, and all he had was his skill-set. But fortunately he had some good skills. He could read, he was fluent., he knew how to charm people with his words, and he knew how to keep his mind buoyant. When you read the story, this is one of the characteristics that you see as most striking. Even … 
  17. Equanimity & Karma
     … No matter how unskillful you’ve been in the past, no matter how much bad karma you have in the past, you are free to choose the skillful course of action right now. And it turns out that if you can do that with skill, you don’t have to suffer, because the suffering that weighs down the mind is not what comes from … 
  18. Elemental Normalcy
     … The reason we meditate in quiet like this, where things are still, is so that you can get good at this skill by giving it your full attention. But you don’t want to use this skill only when things are quiet and when you’re meditating. These are skills you can carry into the rest of your life. For example, today, we were … 
  19. Right Effort
     … You want to arouse the skillful desire to be mindful. To develop concentration, arouse a skillful desire to be concentrated. The term “skillful” here is important. Look at the meditation as a skill, not as something you’re just going to push yourself through with blind effort. But notice what skills are required to get the mind to stay still. Once it’s still … 
  20. Break Things Down
     … As he said, if skillful mental qualities couldn’t be developed, he wouldn’t have taught people to develop skillful qualities. And if developing skillful mental qualities led to suffering, he wouldn’t have taught them to do that, either. The same with unskillful mental qualities: If it were impossible for us to get rid of unskillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught us … 
  21. Basic Meditation Instructions
     … It’s being in the present moment and recognizing what you’re doing that’s skillful and what you’re doing that’s not. Then you want to shape the mind or direct the mind in a skillful direction. This requires another quality, alertness, which means actually seeing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. ] Then there’s a third quality, which … 
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