Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. The Truth of Transcendence
     … There were skills that you developed around the truths, each truth requiring a specific skill: Suffering is to be comprehended; the cause of suffering, craving, is something you want to learn how to abandon; the cessation of suffering is something you want to realize, and the path to that cessation—which involves dispassion for the craving—is something you want to develop. But the … 
  3. Stick to Your Duties
     … We’re here to master the skills. And one of the skills is learning how to picture things to yourself as you’re trying to get the mind to settle down; how to talk to yourself as you get the mind to settle down; even how to *breathe *as you get the mind to settle down. It’s all very basic. But it’s … 
  4. Mindfulness: Get with the Program
     … If you’re really engaged in developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, there are a lot of things you’ve got to keep in mind: what’s skillful, what’s not; how you can recognize an unskillful quality hiding behind what seems to be a skillful one; and all the various duties you have—in other words, the things you can do to … 
  5. Dhammacentric
     … One is that skillful qualities should be developed, and unskillful qualities should be abandoned. The other is the four noble truths along with their duties. Suffering and stress are to be comprehended. Their origination is to be abandoned. Their cessation is to be realized, and the path to their cessation is to be developed. These things are always true, always beneficial, and always should … 
  6. Issues of Control
     … So there are skills to develop. And it’s important that we learn the patience and persistence required to develop skills. Think of a skill you’ve developed—in terms of music, cooking, carpentry, or any manual skill—and ask yourself, “To what extent was I able to control that? To what extent was it beyond my control?” And how did you work around … 
  7. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … So keep working with these basic skills, because they give you the tools and the skills you need to handle any situation that comes, not just for sitting here with your eyes closed, but also for dealing with your mind, dealing with the situation around you—tools you can apply all the time.
  8. A Small, Steady Flame
     … As you do this, you learn all the mental skills that go along with being patient: how not to get bored, how not to give up, the kind of conversation in the mind that helps keep it going. If you have any skills like that, think back on how you’ve talked yourself into being patient, consistent, persistent, and then apply those skills to … 
  9. Objectivity
     … You begin to have something to compare with the happiness you get from unskillful activities, and your desire to cultivate skillful desires gains more weight. Notice that you’re still using desires to overcome desires—skillful desires to overcome unskillful desires. The mind is not totally objective yet, not totally neutral yet. But you are making use of the one thing that every desire … 
  10. Playing by the Buddha’s Rules
     … You’re trying to use your inner power to figure out what’s the most skillful thing to say, the most skillful thing to do, the most skillful thing to think right now. Then you learn to associate the Buddha’s teachings with your breath. As long as you stay anchored with the breath, that’s your conduit to what you’ve learned about … 
  11. The Possibility of Letting Go
    There’s a passage where the Buddha says one of the secrets to his gaining awakening was that he was never content with skillful qualities. A while back, I received a letter from someone who asked if that was a misprint. Shouldn’t the Buddha have been content with skillful qualities? After all, he talks about delighting in developing skillful qualities as one of … 
  12. Abandoning Effluents (3)
     … Then whatever comes up in the context of that frame of reference—whether it’s the body or your feelings or the mind or mental qualities—you try to figure out which mental events are skillful and which are not skillful. That leads to the next factor for awakening, which is persistence. Once you see that something is unskillful, you try to abandon it … 
  13. Heedfulness
     … So it’s better to be open with yourself that there are skillful and unskillful urges in the mind, and you want to know how to sort them out. A large part of discernment is just this: sorting out what’s skillful in the mind, what’s unskillful, and then doing what you can to give rise to the skillful and to abandon the … 
  14. The Gatekeeper’s Duties
     … You learn how to recognize what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind and then do your best to keep out the unskillful qualities and develop the skillful ones. It’s in this way that mindfulness develops concentration, because it’s engaged in two types of activities. One is keeping track of something that’s good and skillful, like the breath coming … 
  15. The Reflective Self
     … looking back on your actions, figuring out what really is skillful and what’s not, and what can be made more skillful. If there are parts of the mind that resist, learn how to psych them out so that you’re happy to see your defilements go, happy to see that you’re able to put more energy into the practice than you might … 
  16. Take Your Time
     … Even if it takes up the whole hour and you’re not with the breath all that much, still learning how to think things through like this, is an important skill in the meditation: appropriate attention. The more you do it, the more quickly you can get to the point. You’re also working on that phrase that’s at the beginning of the … 
  17. Appreciating Goodness
     … With this horrible destruction of life, given that human life is so hard to come by, what would you do?” And the king says, “What else could I do but right conduct, Dhamma conduct, meritorious deeds, skillful deeds?” In other words, the king sees that when life is going to be destroyed like this, you have to find something that gets past the destruction … 
  18. Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging
     … This is what the Buddha calls the kamma that leads to the end of kamma, and it’s going to require firmly held right views, and devotion to skillful precepts and skillful practices, and a consistent view of yourself as being responsible, of wanting to put an end to suffering, and believing in yourself that you can do this—at the same time, realizing … 
  19. Matters of Life & Death
     … It’s a skill that you’ve got to develop. And in developing the skill, you’re developing your discernment, knowing what you should focus on, what you should let go. The meditation is practice in learning how to let go, let go, let go, of different thoughts that come up, the different concerns that come up, the chatter in the mind that gets … 
  20. Kindness in the Light of Karma
     … Things come into the mind from the past, and they’re going to be skillful and unskillful because you’ve done skillful and unskillful things in the past. Everybody has. But the question is, do you want to keep on doing the unskillful ones? What can you do to foster the more skillful ones? When you think in these terms, that’s when you … 
  21. A Refuge in Mindfulness
     … What’s skillful? What’s not skillful? How you recognize unskillful things when they start in the mind; how you recognize skillful things when they start in the mind; remembering what the duties are with regard to them; remembering what’s worked in the past. You don’t run these things through the mind all the time, but you try to have them near … 
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