Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. How to Feed Mindfulness
     … The practice of meditation is learning how to put aside the unskillful potentials, how to develop the skillful ones, and how to take advantage of the skillful ones—learning how to feed them, to give them strength, so that they basically take charge and help put an end to suffering and stress. You could, if you wanted to, sit here and spend the whole … 
  3. Cross-questioning
     … Ask yourself, “How is the way I’m thinking about the problem actually getting in the way? What if I thought in a different way?” Try to think of some skills you have, manual skills, like cooking or carpentry, playing a musical instrument, and ask yourself, “When you developed the skill, how did you approach it? What made you more skillful in that skill … 
  4. Encouraging Perceptions
     … Now, in many areas of life, we may not have many skills, in which case that second kind of self may be pretty underdeveloped. But you have to think about the fact that you do have some skills, there are some things that you do well, and so think of those as the strong members of your committee. Then learn to take the lessons … 
  5. Skillful Desire
     … What you’re doing here is that you’re taking your desire and you’re combining it with skill. As with every skill, that fact that you develop it comes from having preferences: We prefer lack of suffering over suffering, lack of harm over harm. It’s inevitable that we’re going to have preferences and desires around the path. And to develop the … 
  6. The Stakes Are High
     … You learn new skills in the present moment. And the more clearly you see what’s going on in the present moment, the more precise those skills are going to be. There are lots of different things happening here. When we focus on the breath and try to get the mind to a sense of being one and concentrated, we want to bring things … 
  7. Right Resolve
    Right Resolve November 22, 2007 The more skillful you are in your search for happiness, the lighter you tread on this Earth—because you realize that happiness, to be true and lasting, has to be harmless, something that doesn’t take anything away from anyone else. Which means that it has to come from within. So that’s what we’re doing as we … 
  8. A Safe Space Inside
     … Whatever is going to be skillful, you try to give rise to it. Whatever is not skillful, you try to abandon it. You also try to be mindful of the lessons you’ve learned about what’s right and what’s wrong. These are lessons you learn from outside, lessons you learn from your own practice. Once you’ve learned a lesson like that … 
  9. Ups & Downs
     … It’s also important to remember that discernment is not just a matter of knowing what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. It’s also a matter of learning how to talk yourself into doing what’s skillful, and talking yourself out of doing what’s unskillful. In other words, it’s strategic. Sometimes we get a sense that the Buddha’s wisdom … 
  10. A World Apart
     … And the skill with which you handle them is your responsibility. No one else can help you. Others can give you advice. They can try to comfort you. But the actual skill with which you deal with these things—the extent to which you suffer or don’t suffer—depends totally on you. And this is an issue that should take high priority in … 
  11. How to Talk to Yourself
     … Some people simply take longer to develop some skill at this practice than others do. It’s not the case that if it takes a while that you have no hope. It’s simply that you’ve got more work to do than other people do. But this is a skill that anyone can develop. This is one of the things the Buddha has … 
  12. The Buddha’s Narratives & Yours
     … Why not look directly at actions? Actions that are skillful, actions that are unskillful—in ways that you can get past those categories of skillful and unskillful—in other words, to get to the kind of kamma that leads to the end of kamma. You do that not by thinking about who you were or who was guilty or who was innocent or who … 
  13. Selfing & Not-selfing
     … As he says, you’re defining yourself, and for the time being, you want to do it in a skillful way by developing skills. You’re not focused so much on the self, but on the skills that you can develop, and your sense of who you are and of what’s possible in this world will grow until you get to something that … 
  14. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … You realize that other people would appreciate your skillful actions, and you learn how to appreciate yours. Appreciation of your skill is an important principle in the practice. When you’re sitting here breathing, sometimes it gets mechanical and it feels like a chore. You have to remind yourself: You’re here doing something skillful. You’re getting the mind to settle in, you … 
  15. Potentials for Awakening
     … to find where they are and then to apply what’s called “appropriate attention” to them—in other words, seeing them in terms of what you can do with them that’s skillful, what you can do with them that would not be skillful, and particularly, how you can use them to help put an end to suffering. The Buddha talks about the potentials … 
  16. Read the Breath
     … That ardency is a factor of right effort, which means that you’re looking for what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, how you can develop skillful qualities in the mind, how you can to abandon unskillful ones. That’s an inherent part of right mindfulness. It’s what makes it right. The same with right concentration: having abandoned unskillful qualities in the … 
  17. Serenity
     … But this form of well-being is skillful. It’s worth developing. The danger of getting stuck here is extremely minor compared to the dangers of looking for your pleasure elsewhere. Because the nature of the mind is that it wants pleasure. If it can’t find it inside, it’s going to go looking outside. If you can’t produce your own food … 
  18. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … what’s skilful, what kind of action is skillful, what kind of words are skillful, what kind of thinking is skillful. When you’re dealing with the breath, what kind of breathing is good? And how do you relate to the breath? Where do you focus? How do you conceive the breath? What kind of perceptions do you have related to the breath? If … 
  19. Endurance Through Discernment
     … That way, when the time comes when you are really sick and you are dying, and you can’t just breathe through the illness or breathe through the death to make them go away, you’ll still have other techniques, other skills around your understanding of what the mind is doing. Those skills will hold you in good stead, because the more sensitive you … 
  20. Good Fences
     … In other words, you can look at anything as long as the mind is in a skillful state. Even though what you’re looking at may be a beautiful object that would give rise to desire in other people, or something upsetting that would give rise to anger, if you look at it with a skillful mind, there will be no desire, no anger … 
  21. Good & Independent
     … This doesn’t mean that you do what other people want, necessarily—after all, their desires may not be all that skillful. Basically, goodwill for others means realizing that their happiness will have to come from their actions, so you wish for them to act in skillful ways. If they’ve been acting in cruel and heartless ways, you want them to see the … 
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