Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Right Resolve & Right Concentration
     … And then as you’re able to start thinking in more and more skillful ways, it’s easier to get the mind into concentration. At the same time, concentration helps give strength to your resolve. As the Buddha pointed out, you may see very clearly that sensuality is unskillful but you still go for it. What you need to resist the desire to go … 
  3. Perfection in an Imperfect World
     … But even with skillful qualities, the Buddha said, he would not rest content. What he meant was that he was looking for the ultimate skill, the skill of the noble eightfold path that would lead to the deathless. And with anything that wasn’t up to that standard, he wouldn’t rest content. That’s how the Buddha gained awakening. And the message of … 
  4. The Equanimity of a Winner
     … He admits that the practice of abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful qualities will cause stress. It’ll be painful sometimes. But he says that even if it involves having tears running down your cheeks, you still want to stick with the practice. There is stress that’s just useless, that serves no purpose, but then there’s also the stress that leads to … 
  5. Intelligence of the Heart
     … Each time the potential comes up to do something unskillful, you say, “Nope, not going there.” Each time the potential for doing something skillful comes up, “Yes, let’s give it a try”—unless you can figure out something that’s even more skillful. This is why when Ajaan Lee listed the qualities for mindfulness practice—mindfulness, ardency, alertness—he pinpointed ardency as being … 
  6. 1. The Entertaining Breath
     … It’s all playing out right here, simply a matter of learning how to experiment to see what’s connected to what, which choices you make are skillful and which ones are not, and how to motivate yourself to work on being as skillful as possible. It’s work, but it’s entertaining work because there are lots of surprises. If you rule out … 
  7. The Power of Choice
     … But also, as you get a greater and greater sense of how to play with the breath, how to work with the breath, there’s pleasure in exercising that skill. Even before it’s really a skill, there’s pleasure in exploring. So it’s a source both of physical pleasure and mental pleasure, this practice of working with the breath. You can allow … 
  8. When Ill Will Is in Fashion
     … The Buddha lists goodwill as one of the ten types of skillful action—one of the three skillful mental actions: You’re devoid of inordinate greed, you bear no ill will, and your views are straightened out. In other words, you believe in the principle of kamma, the principle of rebirth. These are precepts for the mind as you engage with other people. And … 
  9. Putting out the Flame
     … If something is skillful and it’s not there yet, you’re mindful to try to give rise to it. If it already is skillful, you’re mindful to try to maintain it. This is your work. It’s in the course of doing the work that you see things on the level of having no narrative and no world view. That’s a … 
  10. Engaging the Whole Mind
     … It’s a skill. And as with all skills, it requires that you have a sense of what works and what doesn’t, trying to figure out—if it’s not working—what you can do to make it go better. In other words, for discernment to arise, you have to engage all the powers of the mind. So it’s not just a … 
  11. Feelings of Pain
     … You need the skills that enable you not to suffer from what’s going on at that point. That’s precisely what you develop as you’re meditating. You develop the skills to deal with pain, to deal with distraction. So this is something good to do. Give yourself a good pep talk as you get started in the meditation, as to why this … 
  12. Make the Most of Right Now
     … Think of the difference between simply enjoying the pleasures of the senses and enjoying the mastery of a skill: Delight in the path is enjoying the mastery of a skill. You’re working on a skill, something that you couldn’t do before, but now you can. Problems that you faced before and they seemed insurmountable, now you can surmount them: That’s the … 
  13. Unparadoxical Happiness
     … You have to go to a quiet place with as few impingements or responsibilities as possible, so that you can work directly on the skill. But as the skill becomes more and more second nature, you find you can carry that sense of ease, that sense of well-being, fullness, and refreshment, into any situation. It goes deep down inside. As the Buddha said … 
  14. The Desire for Freedom
     … As the Buddha said, all phenomena—skillful and unskillful—are rooted in desire. It’s simply a question of learning how to make your desires skillful. What the Buddha shows us is that the desire for total freedom is a skillful desire. That’s good news. But don’t leave it just as good news. Let it also inspire you to cultivate that desire … 
  15. Mindfulness of Death
     … So when you get really skilled at handling these things, seeing them clearly and noticing how you can develop skillful fabrications and how you can let go of unskillful ones, how you get really skilled to get beyond fabrication entirely, you can make a difference in where you go. But you’re not going to get beyond fabrication unless you really understand how to … 
  16. Universal Truths
     … He doesn’t teach just good or bad karma, or skillful or unskillful karma. He says that there are gradations of skillful karma. In particular, there’s the plain old skillful karma that keeps you in the cycle, and then there’s the karma that puts an end to karma, that gets you out of the cycle. That’s the path — the path that … 
  17. Mindfulness & Perception
     … As a skilled meditator, though, you’ll learn when are the skillful times just to watch, and when are the skillful times to be more proactive. That’s how wisdom develops. It develops in the direction of getting stronger and more refined concentration, until the insight comes, not simply in learning how to get the mind to meditate, or learning how to get the … 
  18. A Frame of Reference
     … But the basic skill, or the preliminary skill, the essential skill, lies in getting the mind to develop a sense of ease at its center—wherever you’ve chosen the center to be in the body—and learning how to maintain it. This takes time and practice. You’re going to slip off the center, and you’ll have to establish it again. It … 
  19. Factions in the Mind
     … That’s a skillful type of fear. It’s wise. The unskillful part of the mind says, “I don’t care what the long-term consequences are. I want pleasure right now. I’m going to make my profits right now and run.” But a sense of compunction looks to the future and says, “I don’t want to go there. No matter how … 
  20. Top Priorities
     … When you get skilled at this, it’s not just one more obligation placed on an already heavily obligated day. It’s a principle for clearing out, for sorting out what information is useful, what information can be put aside, what tasks are really important, and which ones are less important. So the skills you develop as you meditate have to take first priority … 
  21. Delight
     … You can develop skillful qualities, you can abandon unskillful ones, and you’ll be happy because of that. Which leads to the next two topics of delight: to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and to delight in developing skillful ones. Again, we tend to delight the other way around. We delight in our cravings; we delight in our defilements. We don’t take much … 
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