Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 44
  2. Why We Practice the Way We Do
     … Then, as you take that principle of being continuous and apply it to trying to do what’s skillful and abandon what’s not, that becomes your right effort. As the Buddha said, to maintain skillful qualities in the mind requires energy, requires nourishment. This is where mindfulness and concentration come in. Here the Buddha defines the factors that lead you from mindfulness to … 
  3. Levels of the Breath
     … You understand them by learning how to master them, bringing them all together—as we’re doing right now when we focus on the breath—and approaching their fabrication as a skill. What’s the most skillful way to breathe? What’s the most skillful way to think about and evaluate your breath? What are the most skillful perceptions to apply to the breath … 
  4. Caring Enough to Doubt
     … It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about the cure for doubt or uncertainty, the cure is the same as the program you follow for developing discernment—in other words, looking at what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in your mind, and seeing what happens as a result of those qualities. “If I develop the skillful qualities, what happens? What happens when … 
  5. Gaining the Dhamma Eye
     … There are skillful ways of selfing and unskillful ways, so you learn how to be more and more skillful in applying the four noble truths to the activity of selfing, realizing that there are some areas that you can change in terms of what you’re intending to do right now. As for the raw materials you’ve got, often they come from past … 
  6. Borrowed Goods
     … Anything that’s unskillful, you let it go, but for the time being, you hold on to skillful things. There’s a skill to letting go. You’re not going to comprehend the aggregates until you’ve made something good out of them. So you do your best to make something good, and treat them well, because you need them to practice. Someone once … 
  7. The Skill of Patience
     … And when you think about people you resent or people you’ve had really bad relationships with, the idea that if they could become skillful in their actions is not such a bad idea. Now, part of your mind may say, “Well, I’d like to see them suffer a little bit first, so that they could have a taste of what they’ve … 
  8. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … In fact, he says one of the advantages of getting the mind into concentration with a sense of well-being is that it helps get you past some of the pain and hardships involved in developing skillful qualities. Unskillful qualities aren’t the only ones that involve pain. Sometimes skillful qualities do—or the act of trying to develop them is going to be … 
  9. Your Duty Lies Right Here
     … Appropriate is when you see things in terms of the four noble truths and their duties, or on a more basic level, seeing things in terms of whether they’re skillful actions or unskillful actions. Then, if they’re skillful, how can you develop them? If they’re unskillful, how can you abandon them? This gets further elaborated in the four noble truths, with … 
  10. You Can’t Clone Awakening
     … If you recognize that a thought has come from an unskillful intention, you hold it in check and try to replace it with something that comes from a more skillful intention, until the skillful intention becomes more and more habitual. From there, the mind is in a better position to start getting into good states of concentration. This is how the path factor of … 
  11. Leaving Meditation
     … So remember that the skills of meditation are not just skills for when you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. They’re survival skills for the mind all through the day, through all your activities. This is how the well-administered mind is administered, a well-managed mind is managed: by giving it a foundation spot and keeping it there. In other words … 
  12. A Path Rooted in Desire
     … As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there, you generate desire to give rise to them. As for skillful qualities that are there, you generate the desire to develop them to their consummation. In fact, the whole path is a path of desire. The Buddha takes the strategies by which we approach any earnest desire we might have and gives a right version … 
  13. Happy to Be Here
     … If they were driven by skillful motivations, he’d let them, as he said, roam around. But there comes a point where thinking, even in skillful ways, gets tiring for the mind. That was when he was ready to settle down and be still. That first exercise, dividing thoughts into two sorts and resolving to keep away from the unskillful ones and to promote … 
  14. The Power of Action
     … One of the qualities that’s true across the board is that they become really solid people, with a very strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. They have a sense of shame around behaving in an unskillful way, which is the obverse side of having the sense of honor and self-esteem … 
  15. A Legacy of Strengths
     … As for skillful qualities, those potentials are also there, so you want to actualize them. Once they’re there, you want to maintain them and keep them going. This is our important work right now. We can think of all the other things we need to do for other people, but the best thing we can do oftentimes is setting a good example, so … 
  16. Strategies for Happiness
     … There is skillful fear and unskillful fear. Skillful fear focuses on the harm and suffering that comes from doing unskillful things. Unskillful fear comes from holding onto things that you know are going to change. Once you understand this, you can work on refining your sense of self and ultimately learn to adopt the teaching on not-self as well. When you learn how … 
  17. A Safe Harbor
     … Right effort starts off with the desire and the intent, and the energy you put into sensing what’s skillful and unskillful, then trying to abandon what’s unskillful, prevent it from arising again, giving rise to what’s skillful in the mind and once it’s there, trying to maintain it, letting it develop to its full extent. As you move on to … 
  18. Working with Fabrication
     … So even though the teachings on fabrication may seem abstract, they’re really very direct and very good tools for learning how to pull yourself out of the thought worlds, pull yourself out of the identities of all the different committee members, using the skillful ones in order to gain more strength over the unskillful ones. When the skillful ones have done their job … 
  19. Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill
     … We suffer from our own lack of skill in how we relate to the good and bad things of the world. In the same way, if you want to be happy you have to bring some skill to how you relate to the things in the world. And the good message of the Buddha’s teachings is that true happiness is possible, something you … 
  20. Taking Charge
     … You recognize a skillful one when it comes up. And then do your best to strengthen the skillful ones, weaken the unskillful ones. As the Buddha often said, the things you keep thinking about form the inclination of the mind. And so as with any new habit, it takes a while to get used to the new habit. But you can lay down these … 
  21. The Mind’s Ostinato
     … Right view teaches you to look at everything in terms of actions, because then you can watch yourself act and see that certain actions are skillful, others are not. You can let go of the ones that are clearly unskillful. Then, as you get more and more refined in your sensitivity, you begin to see that things you thought were skillful before are not … 
  22. Load next page...