Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. How to Use the Teaching on Kamma
     … So when you’re trying to develop a skill, you look at what you’re doing right now, and if you see that you’re making a mistake, you can correct that mistake right now. You’re not determined to, say, make a bad table or a bad set of clothing. Influences do come in from the past—your past skills, what you’ve … 
  3. The Language of the Breath
     … It’s a balancing act, as is every skill in the world. What helps you progress in language learning, and the same goes for meditation, is this power of evaluation, as you learn how to listen to yourself and make adjustments. This is the beginning of discernment. Discernment starts out with simple things, like: Which way of breathing feels best for the body right … 
  4. Looking Off to the Side
     … You can get more skillful at comprehending suffering, more skillful in abandoning its cause, more skillful at developing the path and realizing the cessation of suffering. These are skills you can work on; they can develop incrementally until you finally get to the point where you’ve thoroughly mastered all of them. That’s what awakening is. So it is something you can approach … 
  5. The Power of Choice
     … And you can learn to make a more skillful “I,” or you can make all kinds of unskillful ones. And you find that you’re actually changing your sense of self over time. It’s not solid; it’s not static. It moves around, sometimes quite erratically. You may be sailing along with no clearly-formed sense of self and all of sudden somebody … 
  6. Fear of Death
     … And the actual end of stress comes as you get more and more precise, more and more skillful at following the path. Your precision and skill lead you to detect even more and more subtle levels of fabrication going on in the mind. When you see the stress that comes with even the subtlest fabrication, and see that you also have the choice not … 
  7. Noble Ardency
     … In the Canon, they talk about ardency as the proper response when you realize that if you don’t develop skillful qualities of mind there’s going to be suffering down the line. If you allow unskillful qualities to stay, there’s going to be suffering down the line. So you do your best to be as skillful as possible. Mindfulness is what keeps … 
  8. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … The constant is this pattern that in acting on skillful intentions, you get good results; acting on unskillful intentions, you get bad results. Now, the working-out of that pattern can be complex because what you’re experiencing right now is not totally determined by the past. It’s also partially shaped, in fact, largely shaped by your skills here in the present moment … 
  9. Here to Learn
     … If they seem skillful, go ahead. But you’re going to find out sometimes that a skillful intention leads you to do something that’s not skillful. Or what seems to be a skillful intention… let’s put it this way, it’s a good intention, but it can lead to bad results. Which means you have to go back and look at the … 
  10. Fabricating Goodwill
     … If we can get other people to behave in a skillful way, just as we’re trying to behave in a skillful way, that requires some strategic thinking. All too often it’s a bit too much to ask for you to come up with a solution to the problem right on the spot if you haven’t been thinking in these terms beforehand … 
  11. Loss
     … All these things require a sense of self that’s strong, competent, willing to learn from mistakes, focused on doing what’s skillful, learning to recognize what’s not, admitting when you’ve made a mistake, and wanting to learn from it so your skills can grow more solid. That may seem like a far away goal. That’s renunciate grief: realizing that this … 
  12. How to Leave Meditation
    We hear so much about how to get the mind into concentration that we tend to forget the skill of how to leave it. Because these talks come at the beginning of the period, the skill in how to leave doesn’t often get mentioned, although how you leave concentration is relevant to how you get back into it. This talk basically is about … 
  13. Free from Buddha Nature
     … Which actions are worthwhile, i.e., skillful, and which ones are not? That’s the basic dividing line in his teaching. And notice that there’s no question there of what you are. What are you truly? What is your true identity? As the Buddha said, any attempts to answer these questions, on the one hand, entangle you in a thicket of views, which … 
  14. Images for Right Effort
     … As the Buddha said, “All skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness.” That’s the motivation for doing anything skillful at all: realizing that unskillful things will give bad long-term results and so will put you in danger. Skillful things will give good long-term results and so provide you with safety. So you have to learn to think in the long term. Get … 
  15. The Triple Training
     … We have to take joy in the skillful qualities we develop, so as to encourage ourselves to develop even more skill. So you’re combining two principles here. One is admirable friendship, consulting people who are a bit further on the path than you are, to learn from them, so that you don’t have to keep on reinventing the Dhamma wheel. The second … 
  16. Safe Haven
     … Some of them are skillful; some of them are not. Right now you want to develop a really solid sense of self that’s just aware of the breath. As for any narratives that come up about people in your life or things you’ve done in the past or things you’re planning in the future, change the narratives. Say, “Whoever that person … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Friends with Pain
     … And the best way to do something skillful right now is to make sure that you’re alert, that you’re mindful, that you’re totally present for whatever decisions are going to be made. That’s why you’re meditating. The purpose of all this is to disentangle you from the narratives and other storylines and ideas that the mind can get itself … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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