Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. A Strong Sense of Self
     … thoughts that were skillful; thoughts that were unskillful. The unskillful ones came out of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness, and they would lead to unskillful actions. Whereas skillful thoughts came from renunciation, non-ill will, harmlessness. These led to skillful actions. In other words, he learned to look at his thoughts, not in terms of how much he liked them, but where they came … 
  3. Helping Others Is a Battle
     … May I understand what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and be willing to drop any unskillful behavior I’ve been doing.” When you can have goodwill for yourself in that way, bringing some more light into the processes in the mind by which different emotions take over—as we discussed today, looking at the way you breathe, looking at the way you … 
  4. You Can Do It
     … in other words, to master the skills. The path itself is a whole set of skills to be mastered. The Buddha himself was, as we chant, consummate in knowledge and conduct. I can’t remember all the qualities of the conduct and the knowledges, but they included knowledge of past lives, knowledge of beings dying and being reborn in line with their karma, and … 
  5. The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
     … You get more and more skillful at letting go, able to catch yourself in these various processes more and more quickly, and you gain a deeper understanding of why you go for these things. All of these skills are going to stand you in good stead. They’re good skills to invest in. So you need to make the time—the time isn’t … 
  6. Self-Bypassing
     … One of purposes of the practice is to see exactly where your sense of self as an action comes in—when it’s skillful, when it’s not—and how to train your unskillful self to be more skillful. Of course, the emphasis is not focused on the self, it’s on the action, but self is always there in the background. Sometimes it … 
  7. Filling in the Buddha’s Outline
    Filling in the Buddha’s Outline January 4, 2019 We’re working on a set of skills here that are meant to solve a problem: Why is it that everything we do is for the sake of happiness but we often end up causing pain and suffering? The Buddha gives two big frameworks for approaching this problem. In fact, they’re his only teachings … 
  8. Analysis of Qualities
     … It’s more a matter of just getting to know what’s going on, sorting out what’s happening in your body, sorting out what’s happening in your mind, to see what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, what should be developed, and what should be abandoned. After all, meditation is all about what you’re doing. Sometimes you hear people say, “We … 
  9. Selves with Skills
     … As you see how you’re putting all this together and getting really skilled at it, the skill is what confirms the sense of wanting to identify with this path. It’s hard in the beginning when the path doesn’t go as smoothly as you’d like and you keep on thinking, “There are other things I can do more easily, other things … 
  10. The Pain of Conviction
     … And then interestingly enough, he says it’s also an escape from the pain that comes from skillful mental states. That’s an interesting idea, that some of the skillful states are going to be painful. But still, they’re painful for a purpose. The skillful mental state that says, “I want to have more concentration, I want to get past this,” is a … 
  11. On Deserving to Be Happy
    One of the most distinctive features of the Buddha’s teachings is that he approaches happiness as a skill. There’s a path of practice that you can master that takes you to a happiness that doesn’t harm anyone, a happiness that lasts. It’s a happiness that’s not dependent on conditions at all, which means it’s not going to change … 
  12. The Path Requires Effort
     … The desire to let go of unskillful habits in the mind, unskillful qualities in the mind, the desire to develop skillful qualities in the mind: These are all an essential part of right effort. In fact, the whole practice comes down to this issue of looking for what’s the most skillful thing to do right now, what’s going to get the best … 
  13. An Issue of Control
     … As for the factors of the path, they’re skillful karma. And skillful karma exists on two levels: a skillful karma that keeps you going around in the cycle of rebirth, but in a pleasant way; and then the very skillful karma that takes you out of the cycle—the whole point being that the really important thing in your life is what you … 
  14. Keep It Simple
     … Look at the mind, see what’s skillful in the mind and what’s not skillful. You know that mindfulness and alertness are skillful, so you stick with them. Try to be alert to the breath and keep remembering to stay alert to the breath. For the time being, any other thought that comes along not related to the breath can be dropped as … 
  15. The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites
     … If you said that everything you do, skillful or not, is going to lead to stress, there’d be no incentive to try to do anything skillful. If there’s no incentive to do anything skillful, then you’re going against one of the Buddha’s truly categorical teachings, which is to try to develop what’s skillful and abandon what’s not—the … 
  16. Endurance & Restraint
     … Look at your thoughts, your words, and your deeds as an area that you want to master as a skill. We’re born into this human realm, we have these human abilities, we should try to think of all our activities as an attempt to be skillful in our thoughts, our words, and our deeds, to look for every opportunity to be skillful. You … 
  17. Shaping the Present
     … The first one is called analysis of qualities, in which you try to figure out what the mind is doing that’s skillful and what it’s doing that’s not skillful. The other two are persistence and then rapture. Persistence is when you try to do things really skillfully. It’s that quality of ardency again. And specifically you learn how to motivate … 
  18. Start by Relaxing Your Hands
     … Right effort is simply noticing which attitudes of the mind are skillful and which ones are unskillful, then trying consistently to encourage the skillful ones and let go of the unskillful ones. And you notice very quickly as you sit here, it’s not just a matter of the mind. The way you hold the body can also be skillful or unskillful, in the … 
  19. Judging Your Efforts
     … Of course, everybody wants to jump past that to get to the real music, but a cleanly played scale is something really nice and it requires a lot of skill. Then, of course, you can transfer that skill to the music, but you have to be willing to go back when need be. Realize that if the music’s not going very well, maybe … 
  20. Learning from What You Do
     … So we are working on a skill here. And as with any skill, it partly depends on your own powers of observation and partly on finding other people who are skillful. As the Buddha said, when you get things wrong, it’s good to talk them over with someone else who is on the path. This is the other factor the Buddha extolled, the … 
  21. Inner Worlds
     … Here, though, we have the skills, we’ve learned the skills. So take advantage of them. Because otherwise, there’s no real escape from the suffering we cause ourselves. Remember the Buddha’s teachings on the four noble truths: The suffering that weighs the mind down is the suffering that comes from inside, not from things outside. If we’re constantly focusing on things … 
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