Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. The Equanimity of a Victor
     … There’s a person looking for what can be gotten out of a snake and has to learn the skill of catching the snake properly. Life is a search. We’re all searching for happiness one way or another. And most people end up defeated. But the Buddha’s path was not like that at all. As he said, it’s “the unexcelled victory … 
  18. Self-starting
     … I want to do what’s skillful right now. And as for how long I’m going to be able to keep it up, that’s a decision to be made further down the line. But for right now, I want to do what I know is skillful.” It’s like discovering that you have a little tiny muscle that you never knew about … 
  19. Humility & Confidence
     … We’re here to learn a skill. And as with any skill, when you start out, things may not come out so well. But as long as you realize that this is a skill you really want to learn, you’re willing to learn from the mistakes and not let them defeat you. So you observe your actions. You can compare your actions. The … 
  20. Bowing & Chanting
     … We’re working on skills here, not just vague, amorphous values: skills that embody the values as you try to develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more ardency in the practice. Giving yourself a specific technique to work with helps set a standard for you to measure your mind against. Otherwise, you just muddle around—do a little bit of this, a little bit of … 
  21. The Safety of Jhana
     … Instead of measuring the path in terms of how much pleasure or pain it involves, the Buddha has you take a new attitude toward pleasure, to develop new skills around pleasure, new skills around pain, understanding how to the use pleasure and use pain. That’s something radically different. As part of the path, you use pleasure, as I said, as your nourishment. And … 
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