Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Life’s First Question
     … it’s the same skill that’s applied to the question of virtue, in your thoughts and your words and your deeds. Now it’s applied on a subtler level, but it’s all in the same basic terms: action and result; skillful and unskillful; actions leading to suffering or stress, no matter how subtle, or actions leading away from suffering and stress. So … 
  3. The Inner Monitor
     … This quality of ardency means not just that you’re skillful with the breath, but that you’re also skillful in using the breath, learning how to associate this calm wise observer, this calm wise monitor, with a sense of physical ease and well-being. That association is important. You want to strengthen it as much you can, so that when you’re using … 
  4. The Interactive Present
     … But before you do that, you’ve got to get skillful in how you participate in the present moment. You can’t skip straight from unskillful participation to the ultimate skill of learning how to open up to the Deathless. You’ve got to go through all of the stages of learning how to make the present a more positive experience — through the way … 
  5. Cooking with Kamma
     … This means that you have to look more at your skill as a cook. The really skilled cooks are the ones who can take almost any ingredient and make good food out of it. This is what we’re learning as we’re meditating—to be good cooks: how to pay attention to things that we want to pay attention to, how to look … 
  6. Discernment All Along
     … Watch the mind as it’s engaged with all the various skillful things that are parts of the path: virtue, concentration, discernment—and see what you can learn. It’s easiest to learn when you’re engaged in skillful activities or engaged in the attempt to do something skillful. If you find yourself getting frustrated that things are not settling down as you like … 
  7. Two Kinds of Seclusion
     … This is one of the important skills in the practice, because what we’re developing is our ability to hold, not to the customs of, say, America, whatever country we’re in. The Buddha talked about the customs of the noble ones, in which the highest value is placed on developing skillful qualities of the mind and abandoning the unskillful ones. That’s the … 
  8. The Skill of Letting Go
     … Letting go is a skill. This blanked-out state is not where you want to go. Some people actually think that it’s nibbana. It seems like cessation. Based on this experience, they say, “There is no self,” because they don’t sense anything there at all. But it’s just blanking out. The Buddha didn’t teach the Big Sleep, he taught awakening … 
  9. The Value of Refuge
     … You’re not trying to establish guilt; you’re trying to develop a skill, which is why the Buddha used so many images of skill: cooks, carpenters, archers, people who worked on their skills by looking at their intentions, looking at their actions, looking at the results, and learning. It’s in this way that you develop your purity. In other words, your actions … 
  10. Only Your Best
     … They did a study one time of people who have mastered skills, and they discovered that the main difference between people who were simply good at a skill and those who really excelled at the skill was that the ones who excelled had a strong sense of the dangers that came from not really mastering the skill and also a strong sense of the … 
  11. Metta Math
     … So basically you’re wishing, “If this person is behaving in an unskillful way, may he or she see the error of his or her ways and be willing to change, willing to become more skillful.” That’s an attitude you can have for everybody. Then you can ask yourself: “Is there anything I can do to help that person be more skillful?” Rather … 
  12. Step Back & Watch
     … Things like infinite space, infinite consciousness, sound like abstractions, but they’re actually labels you apply as you’re developing your skills. The labels that are needed to get you to particular states of mind and to recognize where you are. So keep on reminding yourself that whatever the vocabulary here, it’s the vocabulary of someone who’s learning a skill. As when … 
  13. Relationships
     … So the skill of concentration—this ability to let things go for the time being and learn how to stand straight, without having to hold on to this or hold on to that—is one of the most important skills you can develop. So even though it may seem like a strange exercise, focusing on the breath, relaxing the patterns of tension here, relaxing … 
  14. The Joy of Growing
    As the Buddha says, one of the skills that you develop as a meditator is learning how to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. In other words, you have to be able to step back from your thinking and pass judgment on it as to what’s worth thinking and what’s … 
  15. In Touch with Your Fabrications
     … Then we can fabricate in more skillful ways. You can fabricate a path. You can fabricate a path that leads all the way to the end of suffering. That’s what the truths are telling you. So at the very least, you can learn how to fabricate a more wholesome emotion, something more skillful, something healthier for you. Even though it may seem something … 
  16. Accepting Yourself
     … And so you work on developing your sense of right and wrong with regard to your intentions—your sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate, your sense of what’s skillful or not. You’re beginning with something you can know, something you can watch in terms of intention and then see what happens as a result of acting on that … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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