Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Unlearning Unskillful Behavior
     … abandoning unskillful states that have already arisen, preventing unskillful states that haven’t yet arisen from arising, giving rise to skillful states, and then, once a skillful state has been brought into being, you try to maintain it and develop it. That second one—preventing unskillful states from arising—is one that tends to get sloughed over too much because it does involve planning … 
  3. A Strong Post
     … The skills we learn as we’re sitting here meditating are not just for sitting with our eyes closed. They’re for us to use as we go through the day. After all, it’s not just now that your mind will wander around. It wanders around all the time—especially when you’re away from the monastery and you don’t have the … 
  4. The Use of the Present
     … In the past, the meanings have been unskillful, but now we’re going to learn how to put them together in a more skillful way. So we take them apart to reassemble them for a good purpose. We don’t take them as ends in and of themselves. There’s that tendency to fetishize the present moment. “If you can be in the present … 
  5. Lessons from Generosity & Virtue
     … And you learn some skills that will be helpful when you sit down to meditate. Qualities of mindfulness are required to remember your principles so that you don’t slip out of forgetfulness. Alertness is required to actually watch what you’re doing. These are skills that can be applied to your meditation. As with generosity, the basic lesson is that you’re going … 
  6. The Demands of Goodwill
     … One of the reasons we practice is that we look at our lives, we look at our desire for happiness; but then we also turn around and look at how much harm our desire for happiness can cause both for ourselves and for other people, if we’re not careful, if we’re not skillful. And so one of our underlying motivations for practice … 
  7. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … In fact, the more you exercise that freedom in a skillful way, the more you see of the mind’s greater potential for freedom. Because this is what everything is aimed at: freedom. Total freedom. A small taste of freedom in the present moment—conditioned freedom—lies in noticing when we have freedom of choice to go one way or another. Most of us … 
  8. A Tale of Two Kings
     … In the midst of all this destruction and realizing how rare it is to get a human life, what would you do?” The king replies, “What else could I do but skillful practice, Dhamma practice?” That’s one thing that the mountains can’t crush: your karma. And the Buddha says, “Okay, I tell you: Aging and death are moving, in crushing all living … 
  9. A Sense of Duty
     … In terms of skillful and unskillful actions, skillful actions should be developed, unskillful actions should be abandoned. In terms of the four noble truths, suffering should be comprehended—in other words, you should see that suffering is in the clinging to the aggregates. That takes a lot of effort to comprehend because we tend to see suffering in other places. But this, the Buddha … 
  10. The Luminous Mind
     … You generate the desire to develop skillful qualities in their place. These are all activities in the mind. That word “qualities” here, dhamma, can also mean actions. Remember that actions are not just things you do with the body, but also things you do with the mind. The path is something you fabricate. It’s something you will—a truth of the will. In … 
  11. The Wisdom of Restraint
     … But even though the thoughts wouldn’t lead him into trouble, still, thinking even skillful thoughts all the time gets the mind tired. When the mind is tired, it can’t control itself very well. So he realized he would have to exert some more control. Even skillful thoughts, he said, he would have to keep in check as he got the mind to … 
  12. Return of Wisdom for Dummies
     … Sometimes it takes a while to develop the skills you need in order to do what really will be for your long-term happiness, and the skills you need to say No to your likes and No to your dislikes if they get in the way of what leads to your true well-being. So wisdom, as far as the Buddha is concerned, is … 
  13. Looking at Your Life
     … That’s an important skill right there in learning how to understand how the mind functions, how intentions get involved in creating your sense of the present moment. As you get more and more talented, more and more skilled here, it also puts you in a good vantage point to look at your life as a whole. Where is your life going? What would … 
  14. Breath Meditation
     … Once you develop those skills with regard to the breath, you can use them in your own inner relationships—and in your relationships with other people. The ideas of these qualities become embodied in actual skills that you’ve developed in the mind, a sensitivity you’ve developed: when to be proactive, when to be more passive, and what ways to be proactive are … 
  15. Just One Person
     … You figure out what you’re doing that’s skillful, what you’re doing that’s not skillful, and you sort things out with no sense of nostalgia, no sense of attachment, but with a clear sense that what you do matters. So you want to be careful about what you’re doing right now. That requires your full attention, all of your mental … 
  16. The Thinking Cure
    The Buddha once said that he got started on the right path of practice when he learned to observe his thinking, noticing which kinds of thoughts were skillful, which kinds were unskillful. In other words which kinds of thinking lead to harm, which kinds of thinking didn’t lead to harm. Notice that: He didn’t say he got on the path when he … 
  17. Willing & Observing
     … The hard areas are the ones where it’s not a matter of blatantly skillful versus blatantly unskillful, but of different levels of skill and happiness. You know that when you do this it will give rise to a certain kind of happiness. You do something else and it will give rise to another kind of happiness. Well, which one is actually more reliable … 
  18. The Brightness of Life
     … As he said, if you couldn’t develop skillful qualities, it wouldn’t have been worth his while to teach. And if skillful qualities didn’t lead to true happiness, it wouldn’t have been worth his while to teach. So the teaching is all about skillful actions leading to happiness. When the Buddha talks about suffering, when he talks about impermanence and inconstancy … 
  19. Cheerfully Ardent
     … You’ll become a skilled cook only if you want to learn the skills. The path is a combination of both. Some things about yourself you simply have to accept. Other things you’re going to be able to change through your desires. It can hard to figure out which is which, but that’s what skills are: figuring out what you can do … 
  20. Fabricating Around Pain
     … Use them for a better purpose with more skill, because you want to learn that even though the mind is here with a body subject to aging, illness, and death, the mind doesn’t have to suffer from that if it’s skillful. If it’s not skillful, it lays claim to things and it fabricates things in ways that just pile more and … 
  21. Remorse
     … What does it come down to? An understanding of the principles of what’s skillful and what’s not. The Buddha gives some basic examples in the precepts. But then there are the subtler things, and those require a lot of discernment, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of alertness to see how the mind can lie to itself about what’s skillful and … 
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