Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Ready for Death… The Buddha teaches us these skills that we’re going to need to resist the pull of vagrant cravings. The reflection on death is not simply, “You’re going to die someday and it could happen at any time,” because after all, you could react to that reflection in all kinds of ways, many of which are unskillful. The skillful way is to realize …
- Introduction… You learn how to develop a more skillful sense of self by working on the skills of the practice. This sense of self is a type of karma as well. It’s something you create. As you get a sense of your talents and your abilities, and you develop those talents and abilities, it’s inevitable that a certain sense of self will develop …
- Balancing Effort & Patience… You water whatever other skillful qualities you can find, and you weed out the unskillful ones. As you’re persistent in this, the skillful qualities grow. Sometimes they grow faster than you might expect, sometimes more slowly, but as long as you’re looking after them properly, they’ll take care of the rest.
- Creating Your Environment… But if your actions are skillful, if your attitudes are skillful, you can walk through the world with a sense of being protected by your practice. You create the environment in which you live. Even though all sorts of things may be happening around you that you can’t control, there’s an area right around you where you do have control—or you …
- Getting Out of Karmic Debt… We suffer because we have a lack of skill, and you can’t make somebody else skillful. Skill is something you have to develop through your own powers of observation, doing things and looking at the results and then adjusting your actions in line with what you’ve learned from the results. This is something each person has to do for him or herself …
- Skillful Fear… It’s actually training the mind in the skills it needs so that when something unexpected comes, you’re in a better position to deal with it. Then there’s the whole issue of fear. There are skillful fears and unskillful fears, and skillful ways of protecting yourself and unskillful ways of protecting yourself. As the Buddha once said, the main things to fear …
- The Noble Path to Happiness… What he did teach is a whole series of skills for learning how to relate well to the present moment. And as you’ve probably learned with any skill, to really get good at will take time. So try to bring all the proper attitudes you learned from developing skills. Think about some skill you have, that you’ve worked on and you’ve …
- Focused on Results… Sometimes it takes a while to develop the skill that we need. And it takes a while, once we’ve finally got the skill, for the results really to get solid and dependable. So when you find yourself frustrated in the practice, step back a bit and ask yourself, “Are you being too impatient?” Now, patience doesn’t mean that you just sit back …
- Not Swept Away… If you’re looking for someone else to take the suffering away, that’s a problem, because the real suffering is not caused by things outside, it’s by how we react to them—and that’s a question of our own lack of skill. No one can come in and make you skillful, but skillfulness is something you can develop from within, which …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… Mindfulness is what helps you remember to look for what’s skillful and unskillful; analysis of qualities—which is nurtured by appropriate attention—is what enables you to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities as they arise; and persistence is what carries through with the desire to develop the skillful and abandon the unskillful ones. Analysis of qualities actually helps you in many ways. It …
- Standing Outside Your Thoughts… The Buddha gives you skills not only in passing judgment on your thoughts, but also in learning how to stop the thoughts that are not worth thinking and to encourage the ones that are. He talks about five skills all together. When a distracting thought comes up as you’re meditating, the first approach is to simply note the fact that it’s a …
- Ways to Think… These are precisely the skills you’re going to need as death occurs. So remind yourself that no matter what happens in life, no matter how bad things get, there’s always a skillful response—and that you benefit and the people around you benefit as you try to find that response and act on it. The second way of using these reflections is …
- Healing Skills… It’s a skill, a healing skill. This way, whatever comes up in the mind, you have a way of healing the wounds in the mind. Whatever comes up in the body, you find the breath actually has a lot of impact on the way different illnesses going on in the body. Any illnesses that come from stress or tension will gradually disappear. As …
- A Simple Path Through a Complex Map… So here the Buddha is laying things out in their complexity to show you why his approach works, and then he focuses you on the loop of getting things past appropriate attention and skillful intentions. Whatever comes up, apply virtue, concentration, and discernment to loop it through those two factors, attention and intention, in their skillful forms. That’s how the end of suffering …
- Unhindered at Death… How do you overcome doubt? You overcome doubt by observing what’s skillful and unskillful in the mind. What are you doing right now that’s skillful? Whichever thoughts coming through the mind are skillful, hold on to those. As for the unskillful ones, don’t let yourself wander off in their direction. See that this really does clear up the mind, and that …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… You can learn to be more and more skillful in how you shape your experience. And it’s worth developing this skill because your actions have such a huge impact on your experience. This is where the concept of heedfulness comes in—that you really do want to be careful. You want to be meticulous, even about little things. One of the teachings the …
- The Duties of Compassion… So when you’re spreading those thoughts of goodwill, that’s the thought you’re spreading: “May all beings act on skillful intentions.” And skillful intentions are informed by right views, so: “May all beings have right views.” This is why, when the Buddha taught the four noble truths, it was an act of compassion: to help beings—anyone who was willing to listen …
- Believe in Your Actions… Because there are skillful and unskillful actions, you want to abandon unskillful ones and replace them with skillful ones. The whole rest of the path grows from that. So what we want to find out is, okay, what’s the payoff when you really believe in your actions? Well, it’s not anything you’re going to know just by looking or thinking. It …
- Fighting off Ignorance… And then, in that context, develop the skills you need. The knowledge that the Buddha is talking about here is not an either/or kind of thing, where either you know it or you don’t. It’s more like the gradually developing knowledge that comes with a gradually developing skill, because each of the four noble truths has a skill, a task appropriate …
- Shoulds & Desires… There are also the desires to be skillful, to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. That’s in the other half of the four noble truths, the skillful half. You can divide the four truths into two sides: There’s the unskillful cause, craving, and the undesirable result, which is suffering. Then there’s the skillful cause, which is the noble eightfold path …
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