Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 6
  2. The Skill of Restraint
    The Skill of Restraint December 20, 2007 People often ask how to bring the practice into daily life. The answer is relatively simple. It’s one many people don’t like to hear, but it is simple: restraint. There are basically two kinds of restraint. There’s restraint in what you do, and restraint in how you look and listen and smell and taste … 
  3. Self-Knowledge
     … You simply learn how to use whatever personality traits you have in a skillful way. And the only way you can learn that is by looking at your actions, to see what’s skillful and what’s not, what habits you have that are skillful, what habits you have that are not skillful. If you see you have lazy habits, you’ve got to … 
  4. Wise Choices
     … It’s a little bit harsh on Donatello, but it shows the importance of developing skills: You can make something good out of almost anything if you have enough skill. If you realize that you’re not skillful at taking a particular situation and making something wise, something good out of it, just put it aside, because there are lots of other potentials where … 
  5. Death Without Drama
     … When death comes, we know there is a skill to approaching it. The actions you’ve been developing, the skills you’ve been developing through your meditation, through your practice, will see you in good stead. As long as you have that conviction, you’ll work at getting more skillful in your actions, even up to your last breath. Finally, discernment is the fortress … 
  6. Heedful of Death
     … And remember that you’ve got these skills you developed as a meditator. Those are the skills you need at that point. If you’re really skillful, you won’t have to come back. But at the very least, you want to be able to come back to a situation where you can continue to practice. Think about the situation we have now, where … 
  7. Time & Place
     … As we follow the path, we’re going to go through stages and layers and layers of skillful actions, and then actions that are more skillful and then those that are even more skillful. We further fine-tune our understanding of what’s skillful and what’s not. This is how we develop our right view. We start out with the right view that … 
  8. Becoming Capable of Happiness
     … As you develop skills—the skills of generosity, virtue, and meditation—they can overcome those weaknesses and change you into a different person. And they are skills. Generosity is a skill. At the very least, it’s an exercise in free will. So many of the Buddha’s lists of teachings start with generosity because an act of real generosity—when you give something … 
  9. Pride in Your Craft
     … The pride of a craftsperson is a willingness to recognize a mistake, to recognize a failing in your skill, and to want to close up that gap. That’s a useful form of pride. So we work on getting the mind to settle down and make that a skill. Then when you’ve got the confidence of being a skillful in one area, you … 
  10. Lessons of Right Resolve
     … You actually encourage them, because they’re going to provide the motivation to act in skillful ways, to speak in skillful ways, to think in skillful ways. So you encourage them. Or at the very least you don’t have to keep them in check. You realize that they won’t do any harm. This is like the cowherd after the crops have been … 
  11. You’ll Wish You’d Meditated More
     … So learn to talk to yourself in a new way, a skillful way. Remind yourself of the dangers that will happen if you don’t develop these skills. That’s to motivate yourself to work more on them. And remind yourself of the good things that can come when the mind does have these skills. That’s the other side of heedfulness. Heedfulness doesn … 
  12. The Dhamma Is in the Method
     … Remember his statement that one of the secrets to his awakening was that he did not rest content even with skillful qualities. In other words, if they weren’t skillful enough to take him all the way, he kept on looking for what was more skillful. When he described his path of practice, he said he was in search of what was skillful. He … 
  13. Self-Doubt
     … that this was skill he had to work on. If he didn’t have this skill, he wouldn’t have anything. So try to have that attitude: that no matter what, you’ve got to work at this. It’s a necessary skill. Then look at the voices in the mind that would pull you away. Look at each of them. What’s the … 
  14. Alone at Death, but Not Lonely
     … With truths of the will, though—things like wanting to develop a skill—the skill won’t become a truth unless you want it to. In this case, the will has to be there. But for it to be a genuine skill, you have to have the ability both to be ardent and to evaluate very carefully. In other words, be honest with yourself … 
  15. The Wisdom of Self-regulation
     … One was that skillful qualities should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. The other was the four noble truths: stress, the cause of stress, the cessation of stress, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of stress. Both of those teachings have built-in imperatives. The first one is obvious: If something skillful comes up in your mind, you want … 
  16. Analysis of Qualities
     … The author was saying that the factor of analysis of qualities is the wisdom factor in the set—“although,” he said, “it’s defined as looking into what’s skillful and what’s not skillful in your behavior.” I was surprised at the word “although” there, that somehow understanding what’s skillful or not was not a matter of wisdom. That’s what the … 
  17. Licking Yourself Clean
     … They’re essential to any skill. So approach the meditation as a skill. Remember how you learned skills in the past. If it was music or art, a sport, carpentry, whatever: How did you go about mastering that skill? A lot of times you made mistakes. You noticed that they were mistakes but you didn’t give up. You went back and tried it … 
  18. Skills for Awakening
     … And it requires that you develop skills and do battle with your unskillful tendencies. So it’s good to think about where, as a meditator, you’re similar to a person developing a skill and where you’re similar to a warrior. And the list of qualities comes down to the factors for awakening. In both cases, you have to be mindful. In the … 
  19. Teaching Old Selves New Tricks
     … On top of that, there’s the self as the observer who passes judgment, that decides whether the producer is skillful or not, or whether the desires of the consumer are worthwhile or not. This is the self that passes judgment, saying, “I don’t like them,” either seeing that the producer is not really capable or at least doesn’t have the skills … 
  20. In the Elephant’s Footprint
     … And as with all activities, the question is, when is it skillful, when is it not? You learn how to create a skillful sense of self that can help you along the path, the sense that you will benefit from this, the sense that you’re capable of doing this. Those are skillful selves, and you have to create them. If you’re not … 
  21. Strength of Conviction
     … As long as you keep trying to choose the most skillful of the options available to you, you’re opening up the possibility for more skillful and more skillful and more skillful opportunities. This is why the traditional definition of conviction in the practice is conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, because what he saw was that there is an aspect of the mind … 
  22. Load next page...