Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. Healing Your Energy
     … Over time, this becomes a skill. The more skills we have in life, the more opportunities for happiness we can find. This is a skill that many people overlook—getting in touch with the energy flow in the body and using that in-touch sensitivity to create a really good place for the mind, a good home for the mind. You learn to cut … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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