Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. The Rivers of Karma
     … The other skills you need, as the Buddha said, are learning how to keep the mind from being overcome by pain and being overcome by pleasure. And again these are among the skills you learn as you’re meditating. Pain comes up in the body, and you learn the appropriate ways of dealing with it. In some cases that means focusing on another part … 
  3. Undividing the Mind
     … They say that people who excel at a physical skill—and we’re not just talking about doing it well; we’re talking about doing it exceptionally well—are the ones who have a very strong sense that if you master the skill, there are a lot of benefits that come. But if you get sloppy even the least little bit, there are going … 
  4. Nobility Through Inner Strength
     … So mindfulness takes the lessons you’ve learned about the importance of your actions and whatever skills you’ve developed when developing skillful qualities in the mind and abandoning unskillful qualities, and it keeps those lessons in mind so that you can apply them all the time, not just when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. The fourth strength is concentration, the … 
  5. Respect as a Sign of Intelligence
     … That means the realization that there are dangers out there in the world, but you can avoid those dangers if you develop skills, and so you want to learn those skills. If you try to pretend that there are no dangers out there at all, you’re going to get hit over the head pretty easily by all kinds of unexpected things. But if … 
  6. A Thread Out of the Maze
     … You can learn to make your choices more and more skillful. This is why the path is a gradual one, because it’s like developing any skill. You work at it again and again and again, gradually becoming more skillful and observant, and suddenly you see something you didn’t see before, and the only reason you see it is because of what you … 
  7. Thinking About Rebirth
     … That requires a lot of skill, more skill than most people are willing to put into a situation. Look at how the Buddha handled Angulimala. Angulimala had killed all those people. According to the Canon, it was hundreds: according to the commentaries, it was one short of a thousand. If we look at karma as a deterministic teaching, then the appropriate thing to do … 
  8. Non-Reactive Judgment
     … The Buddha said one of the functions of mindfulness on the path is to remember what right view tells you about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s skillful and what’s not. Then you use your ability to keep that in mind to direct your efforts, to get rid of what’s unskillful and to encourage what’s skillful. Think of … 
  9. King Asoka’s Vow
     … Alertness is being alert to what you’re doing, and again, you can be doing something skillful or unskillful. But ardency is where you try to get rid of what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful. This is where the real discernment comes in and applies both to the mindfulness and to the alertness. It’s the ardency that makes you eager to … 
  10. It’s All about Action
     … Can you focus on them and relax them at the same time? That’s an important skill: the skill that helps you stay with the body without putting undue pressure on different parts of the body. This way, you can stay here longer and longer. In this way, you get to see your mind in action: where its intentions are, what counts as an … 
  11. The Allure of Self
     … In the meantime, work on trying to identify with what’s skillful in the mind. Disidentify with what you can see is not skillful. As when you’re practicing concentration: Anything that comes in to interfere with the concentration, see it as not-self, not-self. If there’s any sense of self lingering in the concentration, okay, make it skillful. That way, you … 
  12. Not-self, Not No Self
     … In this way, you can use this sense of self in a skillful way as you’re meditating. The practice is all about learning to have a more skillful way, a more systematic way, of defining who you are, what you are, what’s your responsibility and what’s not. You’ll find that that changes as the practice progresses. This is what the … 
  13. Conviction in Charge
     … the fact that he wouldn’t rest content with skillful qualities. In other words, as long as he hadn’t reached the ultimate level of skill, he wouldn’t say, “This is enough.” He kept looking for ways to improve his skill. He actually called this a form of discontent. He was not content with how skillful he had been so far. He wanted … 
  14. Something New
     … a skillful thought, a skillful intention. Once there is a skillful intention, then you can continue it. That could be new, too, even though it’s the same skillful intention—as when you’re doing concentration practice. The fact that you’re continuing it is something good that you can keep bringing into the world, and then you learn how to reflect on yourself … 
  15. The Karma of Narratives
     … That involves mastering two skills. One is simply the skill of learning to turn off a thought when it’s bad, and the other is the ability to develop your discernment as to which thoughts really are worth thinking and which ones are not. For the time being, put everything aside, every thought except the thought for what you’re going to be doing … 
  16. Dhamma Medicine for Free
     … You’ve been watching them, observing them, taking notes, developing a skill. Ajaan Lee uses the word vijja, which means a combination of skill and knowledge that comes from experience and from experimenting. You learn the basic principles and then you apply them to what’s happening right here, right now, so that the skill becomes your skill, not just something you’re imposing … 
  17. A Master of Your Thoughts
     … That’s a necessary skill in the maintaining. Then in the using, you start developing that skill even further. You begin to realize: This thought that came from who-knows-where—you’re going to find out where, what triggered it, and how the mind gets involved in these thoughts. What are the stages of a thought developing? For instance, there’s a little … 
  18. Strong & Heedful
     … That leads to the second strength which is persistence—you just keep at the practice of getting rid of unskillful qualities in the mind and fostering skillful ones. The skillful ones are the ones that determine the quality of our life, and make it a quality life. This is why we’re sitting here meditating: our conviction that the quality of the mind is … 
  19. Look after the Source
     … We have our skill and lack of skill at the moment in how we handle these things. And it’s our present karma, the new karma, that really makes all the difference. When bad things happen in the world, you can take them as an opportunity either to suffer or to not suffer. The skill lies in not suffering. You’re protecting the source … 
  20. Independent of the World
     … As he said, if it weren’t possible for people to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones, he wouldn’t teach them to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. But because we can do it, that’s why he taught. Think of the verbs that the Canon uses to describe his style of teaching: There’s informing, but there’s also exhorting … 
  21. Heedful, Attentive, Mindful
     … So mindfulness is associated with heedfulness in every way, every form—skillful or unskillful. What makes it skillful is that you apply it to the right things. Here, you keep in mind what appropriate attention has taught you. At the same time, you try to be alert. This, too, is a quality that goes with heedfulness of any kind—you’re alert to what … 
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