Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Pissing on Palaces
     … So what skills sets have you been collecting? Focus in on that, listen to that question, keep that question in mind because that’s what enables you to hear the Dhamma in the other things you notice around you. You see other people and some of them are working on good skill sets, while others are working on who knows what: the skills of … 
  3. Joy in Getting It Right
     … So you’re not just good, but you’re also inquisitive as to what it means to be really good, to be skillful, to act on good intentions so that they give the best possible results. Skill in generosity goes beyond the simple impulse to be generous. You’re trying to develop the right attitude toward the act of giving a gift. You’re … 
  4. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … They did survive, but at a huge cost, the cost of the skillful roots in the mind. It’s by nourishing the skillful roots that the health of the mind survives. Even if we have to leave this particular body, at least the mind has the potential for sending out skillful roots wherever it finds itself the next time around. It’s nourished with … 
  5. Mindful, Alert, & Ardent
     … It feels more awake, more alive, more interested in doing skillful things, because as the mind gets stronger, you find that not only as you’re sitting here meditating, but also as you go through daily life, you have more energy for choosing the skillful alternative. A lot of times in day-to-day life, we know what would be skillful or unskillful, but … 
  6. Doing
     … Of course, the question of control has a lot to do with the question of skill. This is why the Buddha focuses so much attention on the issue of skillful and unskillful action. He wants you to explore how much control you actually ga as you try to develop more and more skill. He doesn’t tell you at the very beginning, “Well, just … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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