Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Change Your Habits… The apprentice tried to help the master and at the same time, was trying to learn how to pick up skills. And the skills involved a lot of habits: how you approach something. I knew someone at one time who had gone to study how to make pottery with one of those living national treasures in Japan. When she first got there, she was …
- Overconfidence & Underconfidence… If you have an opportunity to be more skillful, to look more carefully at the results of your actions, do it right now. Don’t wait. You have no idea how much more time you have to practice in this lifetime. This is why the Buddha, when he was talking to the monks gathered around at his passing away, stressed heedfulness as his final …
- Imperturbable… And then what do you do when you’re here? You remind yourself that this is a place you want to stay so that you can develop a skill: the skill of staying very, very still. Even though it may not seem like anything is happening, things are happening. There are little stirrings here and stirrings there that, if you paid attention to them …
- Persistence… You start out by understanding what’s skillful and what’s not. Anything that comes out of the mind based on greed, aversion, or delusion is going to be unskillful. Anything based on absence of greed, aversion, or delusion will be skillful. That means with your effort you have to notice when something comes up in the mind, where is it coming from? Then …
- The Buddha’s Wisdom… What is skillful in the mind? What is not? What’s skillful in the breath and what’s not? What happens when you actually develop skillful qualities?” You begin to see cause and effect in action. You breathe in a certain way and there are certain results. You conceive of the breath in a certain way and there are certain results. Try to think …
- Worlds to Watch Out For… So we work on the state of the mind to improve our intentions—to make them not just good, but skillful. “Good” is well-meaning. “Skillful” is not only well-meaning, but also involves checking up to see, when you do a well-meaning action, do the results actually come out well? If something you thought was good turns out to get bad results …
- Persistence… Then there’s right mindfulness, which keeps in mind the fact that you want to develop skillful qualities—the right factors—and you want to abandon the unskillful ones, the wrong factors. And then there’s the actual effort, a right effort that tries to develop the skillful ones and abandon the unskillful ones. These factors are also the first three factors for awakening …
- Working from the Inside… As you learn how to do it with more and more skill, that’s when your wisdom and discernment start to show their results. This is why one of Ajaan Lee’s favorite types of imagery has to do with skills: the skills of weaving a basket, carpentry, sewing things, making tiles, taking silver and making objects out of the silver. It’s in …
- Ending Suffering… Then learn to imagine yourself reacting in other ways that are more skillful so you don’t constantly repeat the same old mistakes over and over and over again. When you have a mature attitude toward your mistakes and a mature attitude toward your ability to improve, to develop more skillfulness in your actions: That’s what puts you on the path. We see …
- A Clear, Calm Lake… If something skillful is coming up, you develop it. When you develop that principle even further, it turns into the four noble truths and their duties, as we chanted just now. Stress is to be comprehended. Its cause is to be abandoned. Its cessation is to be realized, and the path to cessation is to be developed. How do you do that? You develop …
- Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom… The other way we fabricate our experience is through the way we think, so you can shoot yourself with skillful thoughts. Learn to think about the breath in a way that makes it easier to breath. For example, you can try holding in mind the perception that your body is like a big sponge, and the breath is coming in and out every pore …
- Protection… These skills that you learn while you’re meditating here are not just for while you’re sitting with your eyes closed. They’re meant to be used in all situations. And these are not just the concentration skills, they’re the insight skills as well. Things come in and the mind is like Velcro. It just sticks to all kinds of stuff. You …
- Tough Goodwill for a Tough World… Think about the fact that you’re living in a world where you would like to have everyone act in a skillful way so that we could all be happy, but some people are very determined to act in unskillful ways. And their lack of skill affects not only them, but also a lot of people around them, including us. As long as our …
- Goodwill & Kamma… It’s not a matter of deserving, it’s a matter of skill. And you can develop the skill, if you want. We often think of kamma as something very diametrically opposed to goodwill. How can people be happy if they’ve got bad kamma and deserve to suffer?—that’s what we think, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. The teachings …
- Be Observant… There are skillful and unskillful ways of doing all of these things. The purpose here is to train you to be observant: to see what’s skillful, to see what’s not, to see the see the implications of, say, when you sweep a path in a particular way, you may be creating a rain channel, or you may be wearing the soil away …
- Responsible Conviction… You remind yourself that, “Yes, it is true that I don’t know, but these are good things to believe”—to believe in the power of the mind, to believe that your skillful intentions will lead to happiness, and that if your intentions get really skillful, you can go to a happiness that doesn’t change at all. The Buddha compares this to being …
- Look at Yourself… So as you come to the meditation, as you come to the practice as a whole, you have to learn a lot of new skills. There’s a passage where Ven. Ananda asks the Buddha: How can a person live in the Sangha and live at peace? The Buddha’s basic answer, aside from developing your powers of concentration and getting rid of your …
- A Mental Fortress… What you can take back with you are the skills—the skills that you learn in meditation and whatever lessons you’ve learned about how to apply them in life—but you’ve got to protect them. In the monastery, the environment is conducive. It’s part of the protection. But when you go to the outside world, though, it’s another issue entirely …
- Compunction & Awe… Here the source of confidence is that the Buddha can teach you skills by which you can avoid doing unskillful things. The whole path is a path of skillfulness. You get training in how to be skillful. It’s not just telling you, “Don’t do these things.” He teaches you the mental strengths you need—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—so that you …
- On an Even Keel… You don’t stop with simply being nonreactive; you’re nonreactive for a purpose, for developing a skill. And the skill is learning how to use pleasure and use pain. This is what’s radical about the middle way. We hear that the middle way is a way between the extremes of indulging in sensuality on the one hand, and indulging in self-torture …
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