Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. The Dhamma Points Inside
     … what’s skillful and what’s not skillful—in other words, what leads to the end of suffering and what creates more suffering. That’s the question that has to be asked. That’s the question that matters. And that’s the question he answered. The Buddha was very harsh with people who would not answer that question. It’s not the case that … 
  3. Dispassion & Delight
     … Have some passion for this skill that you’re working on. That’s how it develops. It’s not a tool just to give up. The Buddha’s giving us a training, and the training requires mastering some skills and enjoying the process of mastery. There should be some joy in right effort, as you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities. You see that you … 
  4. Fear & Insecurity
     … When you focus on what you can do and the skill with which you do it, you find that there’s a lot less reason for fear, because you’re dealing directly with the thing that is most fearful, which is that you can’t trust yourself to do the skillful thing in difficult situations. And here you are working on getting more and … 
  5. Self-doubts
     … To begin with there’s skillful and unskillful. Skillful doubt is basically curiosity: You realize there are things you don’t know, and something in the mind wants to find out. That kind of doubt is actually encouraged. It’s the doubt that has no curiosity: That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. And that can either be doubt about the … 
  6. A Good Buddhist Ego
     … And the Buddha says that sense of self lies at the basis of all that is skillful: that you’re responsible and you will benefit from taking responsibility in a skillful way. What the psychologists call anticipation, the Buddha calls heedfulness. It’s an important quality to develop. Even in the passages where the Buddha talks about the importance of focusing on the present … 
  7. Nurturing Patient Endurance
     … So when you think of any skills you’ve developed in the past, you can ask yourself: How do the lessons you learned then apply now? In other words, borrow your insights from your other skills. That’s what a lot of ingenuity is—seeing parallels that haven’t been pointed out to you. Now, all of these are qualities you’re going to … 
  8. Fighting the Defilements
     … Well, the problems of the world are caused by each person’s lack of skill. And nobody else can make somebody else skillful. You can teach people, you can point out the way, but that’s as far as it goes. Each of us has our own lack of skill and the only way we can overcome it is to train ourselves. But we … 
  9. True Friends
    You have a whole hour to work on this skill of staying with the breath. Approach it like a game: See how long you can stay with the breath. If you fall off, just get back on. Fall off again, get back on again. See if you can tell when you’re about to fall off and figure out how not to. Start with … 
  10. Genuine Goodness
     … Remember, this is a skill that we’re working on—the training of the mind. So approach it as you would any skill, something you do again and again and again, so that you can observe: What are the best ways to bring the mind to stillness? What are best ways to gain a sense of well-being in the mind? Focus on the … 
  11. Desires Have Their Reasons
     … But to get there, you have to cultivate your skillful desires. That question, “What, when I do it, will lead to long term welfare and happiness?” is basically giving guidance to your desires. One, it’s telling you that there is such a thing as long term happiness. The belief that the teaching on inconstancy means that things just come and go and come … 
  12. In Charge of Your Moods
     … But it can also develop a skill: that no matter what things are like outside, it can be fine. What this skill requires, though, is that you develop your inner resources. The Buddha highlights three things inside that you can have some control over and that will determine whether you’re going to suffer over things or not. The first is the breath. We … 
  13. To Be an Adult
     … Whereas the Buddha is teaching you a skill. When you’re learning a skill—how to be skillful in your thoughts, your words, and your deeds—both the motivation and the results are relevant, because you can learn from both. You’re judging a work in progress. So the Buddha is teaching Rāhula to be honest, to have integrity, to have compassion, to show … 
  14. Attention with an Agenda
     … Appropriate is when you take the lesson and you ask yourself, “How does this apply to the question of what is skillful, what is not skillful?” Then you try to carry through. If it points out that something is unskillful, you try to abandon it whenever it appears in the mind. If it’s skillful, you try to develop it. This framework, with time … 
  15. Metta
     … So you want to ask yourself, what would be the best thing to leave with that person, that that person could take with him or her to look after him or herself with ease? In other words, what skills would they need? If you’re dealing with your children, how can you teach those skills to them? A lot of times this means doing … 
  16. Good Work
     … But it requires a skill, and that’s one of those skills we’re working on. On the physical side, it means learning how to breathe in a way that feels good for the body. The mental side is a lot more difficult, but having that task of focusing on the breath is one way to anchor the mind in the present moment and … 
  17. What Am I Becoming as Days & Nights Fly Past?
     … As the Buddha said, if you want to make progress on the path, you can’t stay content with your skillful qualities, much less with your unskillful ones. Often we defend our unskillful qualities by saying, “Well, that’s just the way I am.” It’s better to try to tweak that verb “I am” more in the direction of “that’s the way … 
  18. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … It’s a much more skillful alternative. This is a lot of what the Buddha’s teachings offer: alternatives, ways of stepping out of your old habits of thinking that things have to be either like this or like that, neither of which is especially skillful. He said there always is a skillful alternative. The whole reason we listen to his teachings and the … 
  19. Your Quiet Corner
     … All the skills we learn in meditation are meant to be used in all situations. How to make the breath comfortable is a useful skill to have at all times. You find that when anger arises in the mind, it’s going to have an effect on the breath. When fear arises, when lust arises, it’s going to have an effect on the … 
  20. Make a Difference
     … As the Buddha says elsewhere, right resolve, skillful resolves, find their highest expression in the first jhana. You’re directing your thoughts to the breath, you’re directing your thoughts to whatever your topic of concentration might be, and trying to maintain them there. But then he also says you go beyond skillful resolves. That’s when you get the mind into the second … 
  21. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … You’re developing skill inside. This means that you need less and less from other people in order to keep your happiness going. And you also produce less greed, less anger, and less delusion, so the people around you are less subject to your greed, anger, and delusion. So the idea that we’re sitting here meditating just for our own sake is not … 
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