Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Simplify… These skills are basic to all skills in life, so make sure that you really have them mastered. Whatever you have to give up in terms of time devoted to other things in order to master these skills, it’s a wise trade, a trade that leaves you with something far more valuable than whatever has been abandoned. That’s something you can depend …
- Wisdom Through Doing… You want to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. In fact, you do your best to motivate yourself so that you really do want that. The second is persistence. You stick with it. Once you’ve decided that this is the right course you want to follow, you actually put forth the effort. As when you’re meditating here right now: Anything unskillful …
- Positive Capability… But again, what else are you going to do in prison? Just sit there? You’ve got the skills to get out. And if you don’t have the skills yet, you can develop them. What we’re doing here is not humanly impossible. As the Buddha said, if this path of abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones wasn’t possible, he wouldn …
- Self-esteem… And the sense of self-esteem you need in order to keep going on the practice gets fed by your ability on the one hand to recognize an unskillful strategy for what it is; then, two, the ability to imagine a more skillful one to replace it; and then, three, actually using that skillful strategy and getting the right results. That’s where self …
- The Primacy of the Mind (1)… noticing what’s skillful and what’s unskillful, and remembering what’s skillful and unskillful, so that you can use your memories to direct your right efforts. You learn how to say No to the voices in the mind that say, “Well, just this once,” or “It doesn’t matter,” or “This should be okay, other people do it.” Other people do all kinds …
- No One in Charge… That kind of place requires several skills. One is the skill of just being able to be quiet. Another is the skill of being able to cut away your interest in things outside. Some people find this to be the scary part of the meditation. We’ve been taught to believe that our goodness consists of our being concerned about things outside, and here …
- Healing & Protection… After all, nobody else can make you skillful. You have to learn how to be skillful yourself. That’s your sense of balance. Nobody can keep someone else balanced. You keep your balance and you find that you’re not harming anybody. As you learn to find a source of happiness inside, you’re more and more secure in your knowledge that if things …
- Feeding While You Work… The best parallels are with manual skills: playing music, creating a piece of carpentry or joinery like a set of drawers. You work and you pay attention to the results of your work at the same time. It has to be a continuous, back-and-forth process. As when you’re planing a board: You plane and then you notice if you’re getting …
- The Karma of Meditation… Those are not really the skilled cooks. The skilled cooks are the ones who can take anything and make good food out of it. Now, as the Buddha said, if you tried to trace back where your past karma is coming from, who is responsible, who is at fault, or who can be credited with it, you’d go crazy. There are many stories …
- Talking to Yourself… So learn how to talk to yourself in a skillful way, because this is one of the essential skills of the meditation. It’s one of the essential skills in getting the mind to settle down. There will come a time when we’ve talked enough, and the mind and the breath seem to become one. When they become one like that, then there …
- Victory… When the Buddha talks about duties, it’s always in the context of the four noble truths, starting out with the principle of skillful action: that skillful action should be developed and unskillful action should be abandoned. “Action” here means not only outside actions but also actions of your mind. From there come the duties of the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to …
- Songkran… So, if you’re wishing for other people to be happy, you’re wishing that they become skillful in their actions. So, when you extend thoughts of goodwill, you’re telling yourself that you want others to be happy, and you want yourself to be happy, by doing good things. You’re not saying, “I want you to be happy just as you are …
- A Generosity of Spirit… This is where you go beyond simple generosity in terms of where you feel inspired, and where you try to turn generosity into a skill, realizing that because your resources are limited, you want to be a little picky about who you give to, and how you give, what you give, why you give. But even then, if there’s a sense that you …
- Freedom through Restraint… We’re here to commit ourselves to a skill, to a narrowing of the focus of our attention to the point where the real problem is. As the Buddha said, all dhammas come from desire. In this case, “dhammas” mean all phenomena, except for nibbana. Nibbana is beyond dhammas. So what is desire doing in your mind right now? Where’s it heading? Where …
- Dissolving Distress… That’s how you can use this exercise in staying with the breath as your frame of reference, to start digging down into your mind and developing new skills inside. When you see the benefits of this exercise, then you begin to realize that it’s a skill you want to maintain, a skill you want to keep with you, to take with you …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… It’s a basic skill. Then you want to bring that skill to bear any time anger arises, any time fear arises, greed, jealousy, any unskillful emotion. Ask yourself: “How am I breathing right now? How does this breathing aggravate the problem? Can I breathe in a different way?” Then there are perceptions. You learn as you focus on the breath that there are …
- Clinging & Its Cure… It’s as if we have a particular skill. We’ve learned how to fabricate things and we just love to keep fabricating, because we realize that’s where a lot of our happiness comes from: changing the world, changing our experience by the way we fabricate it. The problem is that we can also fabricate things pretty sloppily, with a lot of ignorance …
- Choices that Matter… As he said, he taught people to develop skillful qualities, abandon unskillful ones, because they can do it—and because by developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, it would lead to happiness. So you can make these choices, and the choices do make a difference between whether you’re going to suffer or not going to suffer. Now, some people don’t like …
- Ānāpānasati Day… Ask yourself, “Is this skillful? Is it not?” If it’s not skillful, what alternatives do you have? And then there’s persistence. You try to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful. When you do this well, there’s a sense of fullness, rapture, refreshment. We think of skillful and unskillful simply as duties to be developed and abandoned. But remember …
- Know the Dhamma by Its Results… As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was being not content with his own skillful qualities. That’s where the effort should be. That’s what the persistence is for, is to figure out how you can make yourself more skillful. This will involve making yourself want to do what’s skillful even though you may not like it, and making yourself …
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