Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Whatever It Takes
     … So here’s an opportunity to learn that skill, to develop that skill.” If you find yourself not doing well with it, just remind yourself that the only way you grow is by learning how to deal with the things for which you’re not talented, that don’t come easily. I was talking to a man trained in martial arts this past weekend … 
  3. Don’t Just Fatten Your Mind
     … True happiness comes from having skills—being able to maneuver through the difficulties of life without suffering from them—and you don’t learn those skills simply by indulging in pleasures. In fact, the more you indulge in most pleasures, the weaker you become. When you get hooked on certain pleasures, you get really irritated when you can’t have them. Those are the … 
  4. Voices in the Mind
     … You can’t get to freedom from thinking without first learning how to think in more skillful ways, how to encourage more skillful voices in the mind, more skillful dialogues in the mind. So that’s one of the important skills in the meditation as well. We’re not just here to focus on the breath. You find that being able to be with … 
  5. Equanimity as a Skill
    Equanimity as a Skill May 24, 2019 You’ll notice in the chant we had just now on the four sublime attitudes: “May all beings be happy. May all beings be freed from their suffering. May all beings not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained.” It’s “may, may, may.” But then the fourth one is not like that. It’s … 
  6. Hold on to Your Frame of Reference
     … You want to develop skillful qualities instead, and the Buddha has a whole list of skillful qualities that can build on mindfulness. Like the ability to analyze what’s going on in the present moment, to see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful: It’s called analysis of qualities, and it’s one of the factors for awakening that follows on mindfulness … 
  7. Willing to Learn
     … Translate the skills of generosity and virtue into meditative skills. Then work on the more refined skills that come from just sitting here with the pain, sitting here with the stress in the mind, and realizing that the physical pain doesn’t have to stress the mind. You’re doing something wrong if you let it stress the mind. It’s not that you … 
  8. The Kamma of Self & Not-self
     … If you’re not skillful in the way you react to your experiences, you’re the one who’s going to have to learn how to be more skillful. So having a good healthy sense of self in areas like this is necessary. It’s how you function and how you progress along the path. You look at an experience and ask yourself: What … 
  9. Strength of Persistence
     … So the various skills you need around the house, the various skills you need at work: Look at them as opportunities to master something, to do something well. And that attitude will then spill over into the meditation to animate it. They’ve done studies of people who are really skillful at something—and here we’re talking about not just being good at … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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.
  16. 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 … 
  17. When Your Head Is on Fire
     … It doesn’t teach you how to develop skill in areas where you’re not naturally talented. Now, in some cases, that doesn’t matter, because there are people who have that talent and they can perform services for you. But the skill to put an end to suffering: No one else can do that for you. The skill to find the deathless: No … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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