Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. The Science of Meditation
     … And the skill in the meditation comes from learning how to anticipate when something is happening that will be skillful or not. If it’s not, what are you going to do to deflect it? If it is skillful, what are you going to do to make sure it really does give its results and that it keeps on giving its results? The only … 
  3. Remember This
     … The Buddha said to look at the body in and of itself; feelings in and of themselves—“feelings” here meaning feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; mind-states, which is where moods, emotions, and opinions all come in; and then mental qualities—specific mental qualities that are skillful or unskillful and go into making up mind-states. In each of these … 
  4. Take Down Your Sails
     … The amount of time, the amount of strength, the talents we have, the skills we’ve developed: There’s only so much we can do. Now we’re working on the skills in the mind so that we can expand our range. But that means we have to devote a lot of time to this project and let a fair number of things go … 
  5. Right Resolve & Right Speech
     … So what’s the connection? Part of it may have been because right resolve leads naturally into right concentration, but to get the mind ready to be concentrated you need to develop some skills, and one of the important skills is learning how to talk to yourself. A good way of getting practice in how to talk to yourself is looking at your speech … 
  6. Study & Practice
     … And learning how not to suffer requires a lot of skill. So when you find yourself running out of strategies, it’s useful to look and see what the Buddha had to say, what the ajaans had to say. You find as you practice that you go through rhythms. There’ll be times when you’re exploring inside, developing skill, and you don’t … 
  7. Mindful of Karma
     … You see the dangers of unskillful qualities, the dangers of allowing unskillful qualities to take over the mind, and the dangers that come when you don’t develop skillful qualities to take their place. Ardency is a function of right effort. It also means that you really do try to replace the unskillful qualities with something more skillful, that you don’t just sit … 
  8. The Path of Adventure
     … We have to develop all the skills needed in order to defer gratification. In other words, be willing to put up with some effort right now, put up with some difficulties right now, for the sake of a pleasure and happiness that really is true, really is lasting, and doesn’t kill you—something that’s actually good for you. If you haven’t … 
  9. Strong-hearted
     … It’s because we lack skill that we don’t get there. This is the crux of the problem: No one else can make us skillful. We have to learn how to be skillful ourselves. As Ajaan Lee points out, a teacher can give you the basic instructions in how to weave a basket, how to sew a pair of pants, or how to … 
  10. Encouragement
     … Some potentials are skillful to focus on; others are not. In fact, as the Buddha points out, what you’re doing right now is what’s going to determine whether you’re going to suffer from, say, bad past actions. This is why we focus on the present moment in our meditation: to see what we’re doing, sensing where it’s not skillful … 
  11. Negotiating with Death
     … So you want to hold onto the principle that you’re going to try to do what’s skillful. It starts from the outside and goes to the inside. Let go of things that are clearly not skillful. And have a clear sense of which things that you hold onto will get in the way of holding onto good things. Those are things you … 
  12. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … The spaces of well-being inside that you can create very simply by being mindful and alert to the breath, relating to the body, relating to the mind in a way that’s a lot more skillful, give you a foundation for a lot more skillful actions as you go into the world.
  13. Practice All Day
     … That’s a skill you’ve got to develop, because that’s what restraint depends on: how you talk to yourself about the sights you’re going to look for, the sounds you’re going to listen for, and, with the ones that you do encounter, how you take them in: in other words, what you’re going out for, and what you bring … 
  14. Mindfulness 2.0
     … As the Buddha said, if it were impossible to abandon unskillful qualities and to develop skillful qualities, he wouldn’t have taught it. Or if the process of abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful qualities led to pain and suffering, he wouldn’t have taught it, either. But because we are able to abandon these unskillful things and develop the skillful ones, and it … 
  15. Useful Thinking
     … And the best way to do that is to develop skill in what you’re doing right now. Because as long as you’re shaping your experience willy-nilly anyhow, you might as well shape it well. It’s in the development of skill that you understand things. It’s like learning to be a pianist. As you work on the scales, you begin … 
  16. Exploring the Basics
     … When the mind feels good, it’s a lot more likely to act in skillful ways—to be able to let go of unskillful intentions and to stir up the energy to act on skillful intentions. All of these are good reasons for coming here to focus on the breath. Then if, at some point during the hour, the mind starts rebelling, you’ve … 
  17. Controlling
     … So if you want to control things in a skillful way, this is where you focus. Develop some skill here. This will affect your sense of who you are, because your sense of who you are and what belongs to you is very closely connected to control. If there’s something you can’t control at all, you realize right away, “This is not … 
  18. Precept Meditation
     … They take your actions as your objects of meditation and they force you to develop many of the mental skills and attitudes you need in formal meditation: mindfulness, alertness, ingenuity, strategic discernment, and a scrupulous attention to detail. The precepts also teach you the power of your intentions. As you stick with a skillful intention, you’ll find it really does change your life … 
  19. To Delight in the Path
     … It is a skill to be developed, and it’s a good skill. It may demand a lot. It may demand a lot of patience, but as in those prison break movies, when you finally get out, you’ll be glad that you went to all those pains—that you were that careful, that patient, that heedful. So learn how to be glad that … 
  20. The Fangs of Conceit
     … But there have also been some skillful ones. If there weren’t any skillful ones, you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t be a human being. So you’ve got some potentials. Where do you use these potentials most wisely? In taking apart this problem of why you create suffering for yourself. After all, in creating suffering for yourself, it’s going to … 
  21. Into the Cave with the Tiger
     … Thoughts that were not skillful—based on sensual desire, ill-will, harmfulness—he would try to keep in check, in the same way that a cowherd would beat back the cows that would try to get into rice fields when the rice was ripening. But then there were skillful thoughts based on renunciation, goodwill, compassion: Those, he said, he could allow to have free … 
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