Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Cause & Effect Right Now
     … Your mind’s already active in shaping your experience, and so the Buddha gives you an active path to learn how to shape it in a more skillful way. In the process of doing that, you begin to see the difference between what’s skillful and what’s not, and gradations of skillfulness in between. It’s in developing that sensitivity that you learn … 
  12. Relate Everything to the Breath
    The breath is the basis of the skill we’re trying to develop here—which means that when anything comes up in the course of the meditation, you want to try to relate it to the breath. If there’s a pain in the body, how is it related to the way you breathe? How is it related to the way you conceive of … 
  13. Past & Future in the Present
     … What we’re doing as we’re meditating is learning a skill. We’re using the same qualities of mind that you need in any manual skill. Suppose that you’re playing the piano. On the one hand, you have an idea of what you want the piece to sound like: That’s your will. And then you have to pay attention to what … 
  14. Protect Your Energy
     … It requires that you learn some patience and some persistence, sticking with things even when they don’t come easily, because this is really an essential skill. You need to develop it. If our educational system really were designed for people’s needs, rather than using people as means for other purposes, one of the basic skills we would learn would be how not … 
  15. Figuring Out Concentration
     … Let that thought make you glad that you’re here, working on this skill. As the Buddha said, if you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and in developing skillful ones, that delight can take you all the way to the end of the path. So approach this as a skill that you’re trying to master. And it’s a good skill. That attitude … 
  16. The Door of the Cage (2)
     … But there are skillful views that you cling to provisionally, skillful ideas as to what you should do—habits and practices, the precepts, the practice of concentration, the development of discernment—that you hold to provisionally, and a sense of self that feels competent to undertake the path and that will actually benefit from all this. And, as I’ve said, clinging to habits … 
  17. What’s Not on the Map
     … We’re working on a skill, and where we’re coming from is ignorance. This means that although you can get a general sense of this skill beforehand by reading and listening to people talk, the actual practice is something you’ve got to learn to feel your way through. Getting that right feel for the practice is the essence of mastery. The basic … 
  18. Noble Priorities
     … The more cooking skills you develop, the more options you have, the more possibilities there are. It’s the same as you develop the path. As you develop the skills of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration, discernment, these give you more and more options. So in the beginning you get better—at the very least—at alleviating suffering. When you really master these skills, you … 
  19. Delight
     … And so one of the customs of the noble ones is to learn how to develop a sense of delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones. This sense of delight is something you sometimes have to work on. Because often the unskillful qualities are things you like and the skillful qualities are going to require some effort. And some days you just … 
  20. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … You already have the skills or lack of skills that are going to determine, when you get the raw materials, what you’re going to do with them and how much suffering or lack of suffering you’ll experience. So here, as part of the path, we’re developing better skills. We’re becoming more sensitive to how we fabricate things. We fabricate them … 
  21. The Cost of Happiness
     … This is why the skills you develop in meditation are so important and why they’re skills you want to take in to your daily life. After all, it’s not that you’re searching for happiness only now while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed. Everything you do in the course of the day is essentially part of that search. You … 
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