Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Factors for Awakening
     … Once you’re able to make the distinction between skillful and unskillful qualities, building on that is the next factor for awakening, which is persistence. This is where you put energy into doing the actual developing of what’s skillful and the abandoning of what’s not. Now, here you have to find your resources inside. The Buddha says there is the potential for … 
  3. Part I : Basic Instructions
     … The more skilled we are, the more we can do with those choices. It’s like being a cook. A really skilled cook can go into a kitchen with just about anything, and come out with a really good dish to eat. Even if it’s just scraps, sometimes you can make good food out of it if you’re really skilled. We have … 
  4. The Uses of Fear
     … You’re giving yourself some concrete skills that can underlie a realistic sense of confidence that you can manage your mind, that you can learn how to train the mind, regardless of the situation. This combination of fear and confidence constitutes the heedfulness that underlies the whole path. You become heedful to try to develop skillful qualities, i.e., qualities of mind that will … 
  5. Strength for Your Goodness
     … It involves learning how to motivate yourself to do what you know is skillful. If something unskillful has arisen in the mind, you get rid of it. You figure out the skillful way to get rid of it. Once it’s gone, you figure out skillful ways to keep it from coming back. You try to give rise to skillful qualities that are not … 
  6. Harmless & Clearheaded
     … This is something you’ve got to work at every day, so that it becomes a skill. As with any other skill, it requires practice. One, you have to want to do it. Two, you have to stick with it. Three, you have to be very observant, really pay close attention to what you’re doing. And finally, use your imagination; use your ingenuity … 
  7. For the Sake of the Deathless
     … We make the path skillful. It’s skillful in such a way that it arrives at the threshold of something that doesn’t change. In other words, it delivers us there. It doesn’t cause it. It’s just like taking your car and driving down to San Diego. It doesn’t cause San Diego, but the act of driving the car gets you … 
  8. Consciousness, Name, & Form
     … In particular, when you focus on acts of attention and acts of intention, you see clearly that there are skillful ones and unskillful ones. Your perceptions can be skillful or unskillful, too. And whether they’re skillful or not has nothing to do with whether you like them or not. It has a lot to do with where they will take you. When you … 
  9. Evaluation
     … One of the factors of awakening is analysis of qualities, which is a skill of looking at events in the mind to see which ones are skillful and which ones are unskillful. Try to make yourself sensitive to the fact that whatever comes from your mind is going to have an effect. It’s not just that things come and go, but that they … 
  10. A Better Place to Feed
     … You think about what would qualify as true happiness, and a lot of the qualifications have to do with developing the skills to create this state of a large river inside, of wealth inside. Whatever we have to deal with in life, we have to process it. If your processing skills are poor, then, no matter what good stuff is coming from your past … 
  11. Non-Verbal Discernment
     … This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Lee often talks about meditation as being like a manual skill. The knowledge of a manual skill is often very un-verbalized. When you’re planing some wood, for example, your sense of what’s just right—the right amount of pressure to put on the plane as you run it along, how deeply to cut … 
  12. Concentration & Insight
     … This is what I mean when I say that you’re changing the balance of power inside so that the most skillful intentions of the mind, the most skillful voices in the mind, get placed more and more in charge—and everybody benefits as a result. So, however much effort it takes to get the mind to be willing to settle down with the … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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.
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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