Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Choosing Freedom
     … That’s the skill he perfected, and that’s the skill he’s passed on to us. So it’s a good skill to practice. The skill comes down to knowing where to focus your attention and knowing what to do, and reminding yourself why you’re doing it. We’re doing this for the end of suffering. We’re doing it to find … 
  3. Broaden Your Range of Choices
     … The more skill you have in being generous and the more skill you have in being virtuous, then the more you realize you’ve got lots of choices. Sometimes your choices force you into difficult situations, but that’s where you can develop your discernment. For example, if you make up your mind you’re not going to lie, there are certain things you … 
  4. Wild Horses
     … Whatever—skillful or unskillful— comes up, just be okay with it. But that attitude doesn’t take you anywhere at all—at least it doesn’t take you anywhere new. If you really want to overcome your sense of self, you dedicate yourself to developing skillful qualities no matter what you might like to do. You tell yourself, “I’m just going to do … 
  5. The Meaning of Happiness
     … There are good intentions and there are skillful intentions. With good intentions, you may mean well, but you can end up causing a lot of harm because you’re not really looking carefully at what you’re doing or the results of what you’re doing. You’re deluded. Skillful intentions, which are free from delusion, are the ones that actually do lead to … 
  6. Attention to Your Potentials
     … what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. In the beginning, he’ll give you some lists as to which actions are skillful and which ones are not. But as you get into the practice, you realize that question of what’s skillful and what’s not gets more and more subtle. It’s a very basic distinction, but it’s not as simple as … 
  7. Practicing Your Scales
    Developing skill as a meditator is very similar to developing skill as a musician. You start out with the scales—say you’re learning the piano—and you want to play beautiful music, but they have you playing these dumb scales and it can be pretty boring. But if you don’t stick with the scales, you can’t play the music. Over time … 
  8. The Ennobling Path
     … We can direct them, seeing which desires are skillful, which desires are unskillful. And learn the persistence and wisdom that enable us to follow the skillful desires and put the unskillful ones aside, seeing what truly is in our own best interest. In other words, we sort through the imperatives our appetites place on us, and the imperatives that society places on us, learning … 
  9. A Confident Ego
     … The skill with which you treat your thoughts, your words, your deeds; the skill with which you encounter sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations: That’s a skill you have to develop on your own. No one can do it for you. And it does make a big difference in your life. So whether it takes a short time or a long time is … 
  10. Prepare to Die
     … And as you develop those skills of the mind, you really do touch a dimension there that doesn’t die. This is why contemplation of death is not a depressing or discouraging thought. It’s the basis for heedfulness, and heedfulness is the basis for skillfulness. Skillfulness is the basis for release. So learn to think about death in this way and you find … 
  11. Perfecting the Mind in an Imperfect World
     … What did they come from? Where do they lead? Then he learned how to keep the unskillful ones in check and to give free rein to the skillful ones. But even then, he said, if you give total free rein to your skillful thoughts, the mind gets tired after a while. So even skillful thoughts have their limitations. At that point, the most skillful … 
  12. Undomesticated Happiness
     … But as the Buddha pointed out, we can’t do that, because your happiness has to depend on your own skills. Other people’s happiness has to depend on their own skills. You can’t make somebody else skillful. Think of Ajaan Lee’s example. You’re going to learn how to weave a basket. There are people who can teach you how to … 
  13. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … As he said, he was looking for what was skillful, and that’s how skills are developed. You focus on the particulars of the skill, and the larger picture will begin to become clear. You can see this in his instructions on breath meditation. There was that one time when he was telling the monks to be mindful of the breath, and one monk … 
  14. Pro-self, Pro-help
     … Once you see that there are unskillful and skillful qualities in the mind, you’ve got to do something about them. You’ve got to make sure the unskillful qualities don’t arise. If they do arise, you try to get rid of them. As for skillful qualities, you try to give rise to them. And then, once they’re there, you try to … 
  15. Peace of Mind
     … And you need skills. It’s not that you’re simply looking haphazardly. There are skills for relating inside, skills for developing qualities of mind that are good, noble qualities of mind. This is what gives dignity to human life. This is what brings goodness to human life. The purpose of the meditation is to tap into those qualities and bring them to fulfillment … 
  16. The Essence of the Dhamma
     … The Buddha himself said that part of the secret of his gaining awakening was that he didn’t rest content with skillful qualities. He kept trying to find out and to master what was more skillful. This means that you turn your attention away from trying to make your hut as nice as possible, or your robes as nice as possible, or worrying about … 
  17. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … You can learn to understand your mind’s own lack of skill and you can replace it with a better skill. When you hunger for something that gives you a sense of strength and well-being, you can provide that food for yourself. That’s one of the things you have to accept: the fact that there’s going to be unpleasant speech. But … 
  18. Appropriate Attention
     … It asks the questions: “What’s skillful? What’s not skillful?” And from there it goes into something implied by those questions. In other words, if something’s skillful, it’s going to be a skillful cause that leads to a desirable result; an unskillful cause leads to an undesirable result. Right there you’ve got the framework for the four noble truths. As … 
  19. You Can Make a Difference
     … You should develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. And you can do that—you have the choice. And you’re going to benefit from choosing to abandon the unskillful ones and to do the skillful ones. This is how he protects you: one, helping you to see that your actions do have consequences, and then, two, pointing out which kinds of actions have … 
  20. Teachings to Rahula
     … Sometimes that’s skillful and sometimes it’s not. You want to get used to the fact that everything you experience is the result of past actions and your present actions and the results of your present actions combined. Secondly, if you follow the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula and get used to being skillful in what you do every day, then it teaches … 
  21. Working at Home
     … That requires skill: making sure you don’t get bored, making sure you don’t lose your focus, noticing when it begins to unravel, when it begins to fray, and learning how not to get complacent about repairing the little frayed ends. So as soon as the slightest leak develops in the roof, you’ve got to fix it. Otherwise mold sets in and … 
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