Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Evaluation
     … There are people out there doing lots of unskillful things in the world, and you’re going to be putting up with a lot of their lack of skill that you can’t change. But what you can change is how you respond to all that, and the extent to which you actually make yourself suffer from other people’s lack of skill. The … 
  3. Discernment: Commit & Reflect
     … What’s skillful in the mind? What’s unskillful in the mind? If you don’t actually try to develop some skill, you’re not going to know. You won’t have a basis for comparison. So you’ve got to do these things if you’re going to understand, if you’re going to gain some discernment. You have to do the path … 
  4. Equanimity & Endurance
     … That may be part of it, but in order to provide skillful warmth, skillful help, skillful goodwill, it has to be backed up by equanimity: the ability to step back and rely on that part of the mind that’s not affected by anything. We talk about the committee of the mind, and there is one member of the committee that tends to get … 
  5. The Train Trestle
     … But you always have the choice to do something skillful with it. That choice is always there. It’s simply that we’re latching onto other things that make us push the skillful alternative aside. If you give the mind a more solid place like this, you can do your work with clearer vision, a lot more patience, but at the same time, you … 
  6. The Buddha Aimed High
     … That’s why this is a search for what’s skillful: the skills you can develop as you meditate, as you practice all the aspects of the training. They’re there to provide you with a relatively solid place to stay, so that you can begin to call some of your cravings into question. Get the mind in a good state of concentration where … 
  7. Enlarged Awareness
     … If there’s a sense of identification there, well, fine, it’s a skillful identification. After all, the mind still has its habit of identifying, so give it something good to identify with: a large open sense of awareness. When you can maintain that, you feel less threatened by things. Pains come and go. People come and go. Good people, bad people, they all … 
  8. A Valuable Gift
     … It’s found by straightening out your own mind, because the source of suffering is inside, in our own lack of skill. You can’t make other people skillful, but you can train yourself to be more skillful. And in doing so, you set a good example and you have a more solid base to offer advice to others. The extent to which you … 
  9. Hold on for All You’re Worth
     … So it’s a skillful attachment. It’s a skillful clinging. And once it’s done its work, that’s when you let it go, but don’t let it go until then. Hold on for all you’re worth.
  10. Strength of Conviction: 1
     … You ask yourself: “How does this teaching apply to me, to my suffering, to my unskillful actions? Where do I measure up? Where do I not measure up? If I don’t measure up, what can I do to make improvements?” Because appropriate attention means looking at things in terms of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, but also realizing that there … 
  11. Empathetic Joy
     … Mudita is an attitude you extend not only to the results of skillful actions—which is what the happiness is—but also to the skillful actions themselves. When you see someone else doing something meritorious, and maybe you’re not able to do it yet, if someone’s further along in their meditation or they’re able to be more generous, whatever, you learn … 
  12. High-Level Dhamma
     … Because our habit is to deal unskillfully with whatever comes up, then when the results of skillful actions come and are nice, we tend to get complacent—an unskillful reaction to something that was originally skillful. Or when things get bad, we just pile more unskillfulness on top of it, what they call positive feedback loops, “positive” in the sense of strengthening what’s … 
  13. Self-starting
     … Now, it does help to know that there are other people who are trying to be skillful. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha established the monastic Sangha, to create a community where people can encourage one another in the right direction. But even if you’re not around the monastic Sangha, or if you happen to be in a branch of … 
  14. Faith
     … So his reaction was, “I’ve got to build a lot of good karma now.” His faith in that proposition, that he could really make a difference through developing skillful actions, was what saw him through. His life as a monk wasn’t easy. He had a lot of health problems. During the Second World War, he lived up in the forests of Northern … 
  15. The Buddha Meant What He Said
     … It’s like someone who’s really good at a physical skill: a sport, a musical instrument, carpentry, dancing, being an acrobat. The Buddha would often use skills as analogies for his teachings to help explain what he was trying to get you to do with your mind. But in all cases, it’s getting the mind to be skillful in its inner actions … 
  16. Dhamma Intelligence
     … That’ll be a necessary skill as you approach death: to see how the mind fabricates things, and to watch out for any unskillful fabrications that’ll come up. Your practical experience, your hands-on experience in saying “No” to your distractions, will help you say “No” to the things that could pull you in the wrong direction. So, working on skills requires a … 
  17. Fear of Death
     … The skills we’ll need at that point—the skills of being mindful, learning how not to go for distractions, learning how to stay firm in our intention, and not be afraid: Those are skills that serve us well as we’re living, and will serve us well as we’re about to die.
  18. Death Is Normal
     … And we need skills in order not to have to suffer from these things. We have to be prepared. This is why we meditate—so that we can have some skills in the mind, so that when something comes up in the mind, you don’t have to go immediately to what the first thought is. You can step back and focus on the … 
  19. To Be Debt Free
     … Your concept of what’s skillful and what’s not skillful will grow. When you take that attitude, that’s an attitude of respect. That’s how you learn: through respect. In respecting the Dhamma, you help keep it alive by putting it into practice. And you benefit from that respect, too. It’s in this way that you begin to repay your debts … 
  20. Rivers of Craving
     … One of the skills you want to learn is how not to go with those other thoughts. You’ve made up your mind that the breath is where you really want to stay, and the more you can stick with it, the more you’re developing good habits in the mind. Remember, when the Buddha gained his awakening, where did he gain it? We … 
  21. The World Is Aflame
     … We work hard to be skillful and then the rewards, when they come, are rewards we can’t really hold on to. If we hold on to them, we suffer. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be skillful, because the another way of dealing with those positive things is to use them as tools. We have the opportunity now to … 
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