Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- May All Beings Be Heedful… And what is the middle? Remember, the Buddha said that all skillful qualities come from heedfulness. What makes them skillful? They’re the proper answer to that question that lies at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” So …
- Put Your Books Back on the Shelf… Learn how to make that a skill. There’s a skill to learn how not to talk to yourself and yet still be alert. It’s a good skill to have. It’s like when I was learning Thai boxing, back when I was a lay person. The very first thing they taught was how to get out of a clench. In other words …
- True Honesty… This is why the issue of skillfulness is so important. It’s not a distraction. I think I’ve told you the story about the young man at the meditation retreat earlier this year who complained that the emphasis on skillfulness was a distraction from the deathless. All you had to do was open up to it and there it was, he said. Actually …
- Heedfulness Is Auspicious… But if you have the skills of meditation, they can help you when you most need them. So that’s what you want to take. That’s what you want to develop, and of those skills, thoughts of universal goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity are really important. As you encounter thoughts of what things you did that were not skillful, or things that …
- Cut Through the Narratives… You can focus on the fact that it’s going well and develop skillful qualities of mind or you could develop unskillful ones. The unskillful ones include getting complacent. There could be a sense of pride that goes around this, especially in places where people start comparing their jhānas. When the meditation is not going well, you can either use that as a skillful …
- Timeless… After all, the only thing you’ll have as you face death will be the skills you’ve developed in the mind. Everything else will leave you. And as with any skill that takes time and requires practice, you do it again and again and again. There will come a point, though, when something takes hold in the mind. There are moments, experiences, that …
- Mindfulness of Death… Finally, there’s discernment—seeing what’s skillful in the mind, what’s unskillful in the mind, and knowing how to talk yourself into doing what’s skillful and out of doing what’s unskillful, regardless of your likes or dislikes. When you reflect on the fact of your own death, remind yourself, “These are the qualities I’ve got to develop in myself …
- A Happy Tradition… Learn some skillful humility. And some skillful pride. We have traditions that tell us not to take any pride in the fact that we’ve done good, that somehow all the good we’ve done has to be attributed to some higher power working through us. Again, that comes from a very unhappy tradition. The Buddha’s tradition is a happy one, where everybody …
- Don’t Be Afraid of Mistakes… Where’s the territory of what’s skillful and where’s the territory of what’s not skillful? Where’s the dividing line between the two? When a particular problem comes up, how do you go about finding a solution? The people who’ve had trouble getting the mind into concentration are the ones who can tell you all the ins and outs, at …
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