Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 41
  2. Duties
     … With the first level of right view—about skillful action and unskillful action, the teachings on karma—the duty is to abandon anything unskillful in your actions and to develop whatever’s skillful. That, the Buddha said, is a categorical teaching. In other words, it’s true across the board for everybody. And again, the ought and the should here are conditional—conditioned on … 
  3. Good Fences All Around You
     … It’s remembering what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. As you learn how to live with this fence of virtue and this fence of concentration, you begin to get a sense of which of your thoughts actually are useful and which ones are not. It may sometimes sound as if the Buddha is forbidding you from thinking ever again once you start … 
  4. Emulating the Truth
     … to see which qualities of the mind are skillful, which ones are not skillful, by looking at what they actually lead to. This is how we also develop the wisdom faculty in the factors of awakening, the factor that’s called analysis of qualities, dhamma-vicaya: looking at what’s skillful in our actions, and what’s not skillful, and seeing that they’re … 
  5. Pleasure on the Path
     … To get the most out of this pleasure, you want to learn how to regard it as a skill and focus on mastering the skill. Get some satisfaction in mastering the skill as you carry the sense of being centered—along with a soothing, healthy breath energy—into lots of different activities. As you get better and better at this, you can take it … 
  6. Strength from Within
     … Mindfulness is also a kind of protection in that it helps you remember the lessons you’ve learned and remember the lessons from the Buddha about what should and shouldn’t be done, what counts as skillful and what doesn’t count as skillful. You want to always keep those things in mind as your main frame of reference. This means not focusing on … 
  7. Bases for Success
     … It is a skill that can be mastered. And as you master the skill, you find that you bring all the elements of the path together: Right view in seeing that the training of the mind is going to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. Right resolve: You decide you want to find happiness in a way that doesn’t involve sensuality … 
  8. Treasure Island
     … They start with ardent, Ardency is what makes everything skillful there, because mindfulness can simply be keeping anything in mind, skillful or unskillful; as you’re alert, you can watch yourself doing skillful or unskillful things, and it would count as alertness. But when you try to do this well, when you do it in a way that would give rise to concentration, that … 
  9. Not-self as a Raft
     … When is it skillful and when is it not? And one of the things you discover as you develop more of the skills of the path is that your sense of your self will change. This is a truth that applies to all skills. If you get really good at playing the piano, your sense of who you are is going to change as … 
  10. Cause & Effect
     … the fact that our unskillful desires give rise to suffering; skillful desires can bring an end to suffering. Our desires are about as intimate a part of ourselves as you can imagine. Yet we often don’t examine them carefully. What the Buddha is asking us to do is to look specifically: When you desire something, what are the results? Does acting on that … 
  11. Criticism
     … The Buddha starts out by saying, when you know for yourselves that something is unskillful, then you should avoid it; if something is skillful, you should develop it. But he doesn’t stop simply with your own observations on “skillful.” He also states that if something is praised by the wise, it’s something to follow. If something is criticized by the wise, it … 
  12. Acceptance
     … And what are you doing? Is it skillful or is it not? If it’s not skillful, then, one, you’ve got to admit the fact that it’s not skillful and, two, accept the fact you could make your behavior more skillful. This is the part of acceptance that many of us resist. We may not be happy where we are, but for … 
  13. Stick with It
     … They’ve done studies of people who were really experts at their skills, and they’ve discovered that these people have a very lively sense of the dangers that come when you don’t master the skill, and the rewards that come when you do master the skill. So we’ve got to learn how to cultivate that same sense of danger and rewards … 
  14. Coping & Beyond Coping
    When you meditate, you’re learning two basic skills: One is the ability to pull yourself out of unhealthy thought worlds, and the other is the ability to create a safe place inside for your awareness to settle. We create that place by giving the mind something good to focus on, something nearby—the breath, the way you feel the body from inside. When … 
  15. The Skill of Not Suffering
     … That way, you can free yourself from the suffering that you would otherwise feel if you weren’t skillful. We’re working on a skill: how to know our minds in the present moment. Even though we can’t change everything we want to change, at the very least we can use that knowledge of the mind to make the best of what we … 
  16. Loving Yourself
     … The trick is not to let yourself get depressed or down about your unskillful intentions—whether past or present—but to focus instead on the fact that you do have skillful intentions in here, too. And the more you follow those skillful intentions, the stronger they’re going to get. They may seem artificial sometimes. You might find yourself saying, “That’s not the … 
  17. A Good Independent Self
     … When you realize that your true well-being lies in acting in skillful ways, acting on skillful intentions, then even if you have the idea of an independent self, you’ll want to act on impulses for generosity, virtue, the desire to train the mind so that you can be truly happy. At the same time, you avoid a lot of the problems of … 
  18. Evaluating the Practice
     … That’s a very special skill. But in the course of that, you’ve got to learn a lot about your thinking: what gets it stirred up; when it’s going in a skillful or unskillful direction; what you can do to calm it down when it’s unskillful; and what you can do to encourage it when it’s skillful. These are all … 
  19. The Gatekeeper Doesn’t Just Note
     … Right view basically is knowing what’s skillful and what’s not, and the various techniques for dealing with skillful and unskillful qualities. Right mindfulness remembers those lessons and applies them to what you’re doing. Right effort is what actually does the work of abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their place. There’s another passage where the Buddha combines mindfulness … 
  20. Judging Your Meditation
     … Another important understanding about kamma is that there’s skillful kamma and unskillful kamma. Skillful kamma leads to a sense of well-being that causes no harm either to you or to other people. It doesn’t take anything away from them, and doesn’t lead to increased greed, anger, or delusion in your own mind. It’s important to understand that skillful kamma … 
  21. Go, Do Jhana
     … Those are the ones you want to encourage, because they’re skillful. Ultimately, they take you beyond fabrication. This is a part of insight. The fabrications that keep the mind still and steady, that keep the mind engaged in the pursuit of what’s skillful, are the ones you want to encourage. So this practice of steadying the mind, maintaining that still, steady flame … 
  22. Load next page...