Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Persuasion… The history of the world is full of all kinds of rationales for doing things that are really not skillful and are going to cause harm to yourself in the long term. Think about it. It’s really crazy. We can persuade ourselves to do things that we know are going to harm ourselves or harm the people we love. So obviously you’ve …
- Raise Your Standards… Can you learn to be more skillful? Can you learn to raise your standards for what it means to be skillful? Do you want to slough along with your idea of what’s good enough or would you rather take yourself to task and say, “Look, it can be better”? The Buddha said that the secret to his awakening was discontentment with skillful qualities …
- A Warrior’s Strengths… He asks him, “When you were a lay person, did you play the lute?” Yes. “Were you skillful at it?” Yes. “What happens when the strings were too tight?” They snapped, they didn’t sound good. “What happened when they were too loose?” Again, they didn’t sound right, you have to get the strings tuned just right. Then the Buddha says, “In the …
- Dhamma Warrior… The Buddha did talk about judging other people in terms of how skillful their behavior was, and the purpose of judging them is to look back on yourself: “This is what skillful behavior looks like. Can you do that as well? This is what unskillful behavior looks like: Are you doing that? This is what it looks like from the outside. Do you still …
- Chew Your Food Well… You can create a sense of self as a strategy in lots of skillful or unskillful ways, and he recommends the skillful ones. Being generous, being virtuous, following the path, meditating: These require a sense of self that’s responsible, a sense of self that can practice deferred gratification. Then when that sense of self has taken you as far as it can—you …
- Use Your Imagination… Classically, it means taking what you’ve already learned and figuring out how to develop new ideas and approaches from that—approaches that are skillful and ways of thinking that are skillful—because the Buddha doesn’t lay everything out in his teachings. Sometimes he’ll make passing references to things, and you have to fill in the blanks yourself. This is an important …
- Cut the Currents… I’ve got another skill I’ve got to develop—the skill of not flowing away.” After all, you never know: Death could come at any time, and you want to be prepared. You want to have the skills mastered that you’re going to need at that time. And this will be the number one skill you have to master: how not to …
- Antidotes for Narcissism… As a result, you can develop skillful reactions, skillful attitudes, skillful emotions around them: heedfulness, samvega, dispassion, compassion, equanimity, a sense of shame over what’s unskillful in your mind, a sense of joy over what is skillful. Ultimately, all these qualities are meant to lead to a sense of disenchantment, dispassion, as you see that all bodies are equal and impermanent, all feelings …
- The Joy of Renunciation… Then use whatever skills you have—the mind’s skills for fabricating things, which are already good at fabricating defilements: Convert those skills to fabricating motivation to practice the Dhamma, to finding joy in the Dhamma, joy in investing in the long-term. As the Buddha said, delight in the Dhamma, delight in abandoning, delight in developing: These are among the forms of delight …
- Work & Play… What is your present intention? Where is it skillful? Where is it not? What can you do to make it more skillful? How can you pare down all the unskillful parts so that you can see the really subtle forms of intention that keep everything together? As you get more skilled at this, you can get to a point of equilibrium where you realize …
- Three Levels of Concentration… It requires skill. If you’re not skillful, working with the pleasure can create pain and the mind won’t want to settle down. But keep working at it again and again, and after a while you’ll develop skill. You do your work, but you work in pleasure. You create an even more agreeable place to stay as you work with the sense …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… You have to store up your knowledge, and part of storing it up is learning that, Yes, you can develop skillful qualities in the mind, and you can abandon unskillful ones—to the point where you’re thinking nothing but skillful things. But all that thinking can be tiring, so the mind needs to rest from time to time. This is how the strength …
- Faith in Awakening… We see into exactly how the mind creates unnecessary suffering, how it can stop, and how it can master all the skills needed to stop. Discernment, in the Buddha’s teaching, is not just knowing things; it’s mastering skills. When we have these skills, especially the skills of discernment, then as Ajaan Lee says, even if you find yourself born with nothing but …
- Damming & Diverting… In other words, take the energy in the emotion and have it flow into something that’s actually skillful, like the skillful practice of concentration or other skillful thoughts outside. If there’s passion, divert the passion into doing your practice well. As you keep the mind in control like this, you begin to get a better sense of what’s going on: how …
- What Should I Do?… Which means that we see that some actions are skillful and some are not. This is why the Buddha said that skillfulness comes not from any innate goodness of the mind, but from heedfulness. We look around and see how other people are handling situations in their lives and we try to notice who’s doing it well—and then we take them as …
- Hold on to Right View… And as for your choices in the future, the more skillful you can make your choices right now, the more likely you’ll be to make skillful choices then. We do this because our choices influence the extent to which we suffer or not. This means we have to be responsible right here. Other people have to be responsible for their choices. We can …
- The Uses of Pleasure… This is one of the skills you’re going to need to deal with the results of past bad actions. It’s easy to understand that it would be necessary to learn how to be with pain and not overcome by it, in case your past bad actions yield in pain. Well, if you’re going to be overcome by pleasure, you’re going …
- A Safe Home… That way, the idea of acting on skillful intentions becomes more attractive, because an immediate sense of well-being comes with it. All too often, the choice in our mind is immediate gratification through acting on unskillful thoughts, or delayed gratification working on skillful ones. And if that’s the only choice, the skillful ones most often lose out. If the mind is hungry …
- Why Now… You’re trying to develop a skill, the skill of being mindful and alert in the present moment. Why do you want to be here? You have two reasons. One is that there’s work to be done in the present moment. Our lives are shaped by our actions. Our actions are shaped by our intentions—by the choices we make. And where and …
- Learning How to Talk to Yourself… What the world would be like if everybody were skillful? We know it’s not going to be the case anytime soon, but tell yourself you’d be really happy to see everybody act in skillful ways. Then be prepared for those who are not going to be skillful. But at least your beginning attitude starts off right, because that beginning attitude is going …
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