Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Conceit Defanged
     … Now, with the fact that conceit is one of the last fetters that’s abandoned, you’ve got some people who say, “In that case, I don’t have to worry about it right now.” But conceit has its skillful and unskillful uses on the path, and it’s important to notice the difference. The unskillful ones are referred to in the passage we … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. The Search for Happiness
     … The more open you are about the fact that, yes, you are searching for happiness, the more skillful the search is going to be. The more skillful the search, the more rewarding the outcome.
  13. Determined Goodwill
     … Even when we go through all the brahmaviharas and get to equanimity, the reason we use equanimity is for the sake of mature goodwill, realizing that there are areas where we would like to see people do what’s skillful and to experience the results of skillful actions, but for one reason or another, it’s not going to happen. If you have genuine … 
  14. Impatience
     … So even though we may have trouble with the judging faculty in our mind sometimes, that, too, can be trained to be more skillful so that it passes judgments skillfully, makes suggestions skillfully. These are all skills that can be learned. We’ve probably picked a lot of the unskillful habits up from people around us but those bad habits can be unlearned. Good … 
  15. Not-self Is a Value Judgment
     … That’s the same pattern of inquiry that he has us adopt for every activity, skillful and unskillful. There are times when you drop unskillful activities for the sake of skillful ones, and then you drop certain skillful activities because you want to move onto something even more skillful. When you gain a sense of awareness and fluidity around this, you learn how to … 
  16. Skills Needed at Death
     … The skills you develop as you meditate are precisely the skills you’re going to need at the moment of death, so take them seriously. Give your full attention to mastering them. This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, to give the mind direction. That’s the most important thing you’re going to need at that point: a direction. And … 
  17. Tenacity
     … In other words, you let go of unskillful mental habits, but you work on developing the skillful ones. This takes work. This takes dedication. It takes tenacity. It requires that you hold on. You hold to the precepts. It’s the whole point of having precepts. You make a promise to yourself. We all already follow the precepts to some extent in our lives … 
  18. Asalha Puja – Completeness
     … No matter how much your past karma may weigh on you, you always have the choice to do the skillful thing in the present moment. First, of course, that requires getting more sensitive to what the skillful thing would be. Then, once you see it, you make the choice: “Okay, I’m going to go for what’s skillful,” regardless of what you might … 
  19. Three Levels of Refuge
     … You look for good people to put the question to, and they’ll teach you about skillful behavior: avoiding things like killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle chatter. They’ll also teach you about learning how not to be greedy, how not to have ill will, and how to develop right view. These are the things that are skillful … 
  20. The End of Uncertainty
     … Your thoughts are skillful or unskillful, your words and your deeds are skillful and unskillful, depending on the extent to which they put an end to suffering. So always keep this principle in mind as thoughts come in and out of your mind. You may have heard that the Buddha taught, say, that there is no self. To what extent is the non-self … 
  21. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … So learn to think about it in a skillful way. This, too, is like learning how to be a skillful cook. There are some foods out there that can be good for you if you fix them the right way, but if you don’t fix in the right way, they’re actually poisonous. And this is one of them. If you’re feeling … 
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