Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 63
  2. Your Secret Foundation
     … It’s an important skill and it’s a skill you learn as you focus with the breath. So pay a lot of attention to this process of breathing, not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed with nothing else to do, but also when you do have other things to do as well. Often it’s useful to catch yourself … 
  3. Being Somebody, Going Somewhere
     … We want to accomplish something with them, so the skillfulness of the karma is based on what we want to accomplish. We want our actions to go someplace because we’re going someplace. As the Buddha pointed out, people are on different paths. They may consciously be on a particular path or not. There are paths going to hell, there are paths going to … 
  4. Reclaim Your Breath
     … That way, this area of the body, this area of the mind that tends to get closed off, you can start to reclaim and you can use that dimension of your awareness to your own advantage—your own skillful advantage. This is one of those meditative skills that’s meant to be used throughout the day, so don’t leave it on your meditation … 
  5. A Unified Committee
     … This is a very important skill. Often when the mind settles down, you say, “Okay, what’s next? We don’t have much time.” Well, that’s part of the committee that’s ready to move on to another job. You’ve got to say, “No, we’re going to stay right here.” Keep everybody right here, because you need to learn the skills … 
  6. Giving Ballast to the Mind
     … In the Pali Canon, there are all kinds of similes dealing with the skills of soldiers, the skills of cooks, similes drawn from plants, from animals—and they’re all very apt. But, he said at one point, there is one thing that’s really hard to find a simile for, and that’s the quickness with which an untrained mind can reverse direction … 
  7. Breathing to Awakening
     … Once you see what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, you focus on what you can do to give rise to what’s skillful and let go of what’s not, keeping in mind that this is what you want to train the mind in, so that it’s its attitude all the time. As this life goes on, illness comes, aging comes … 
  8. The Karma of Ideas
     … There are skillful actions on the worldly level, in other words, there are skillful ideas that help you live in the world in a happy and pleasant way. There are unskillful ones, which make you live in an unpleasant or unhappy way. There are mixed ones, and then there are the ideas that take you beyond ideas, take you beyond action entirely. Those ideas … 
  9. Strength to Be Good
     … Mindfulness is keeping things in mind, particularly what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. You learn this either from listening to others or reading books, or from your own experience. And you want to have that at your fingertips, so that when something bad comes up in the mind—greed, aversion, delusion—or something good comes up, such as rapture, you can remember … 
  10. A Home & a Mobile Home
     … The role of mindfulness is that if you see something is skillful, you remember to give rise to it. You don’t just let it come and go. And if it seems like it’s going to go, you remember to do what you can to prevent it from going. If it’s not arising, you remember to do what you can to make … 
  11. Prevention
     … one, to prevent unskillful qualities of mind that haven’t arisen yet from arising; two, to let go of those that have; rhree, to give rise to skillful qualities that haven’t yet arisen; and four, to develop and take to perfection the skillful qualities that have arisen. Of the four, the first one tends to get the least attention: preventing unskillful qualities from … 
  12. There’s Work to Be Done
     … This is a skill we’re developing here. I wouldn’t say all, but many of the Buddha’s images for people who are meditating involve people with skills—cooks, carpenters, soldiers, archers—people who work to master their skills and are willing to do whatever work is required. So we’re not just letting go. Ajaan Fuang, my teacher, was never one to … 
  13. Not Getting What You Want
     … The path starts with the realization that there are skillful desires and unskillful desires. That’s part of what right view tells you, so you have to learn how to encourage and nourish the skillful ones and abandon the unskillful ones. This requires that you make distinctions. There are states of concentration where whatever comes up, you just let it go, but those states … 
  14. Anti-slacker Dhamma
     … One was discontent with skillful qualities. In other words, he didn’t rest content with the state of his mind until it actually attained the Deathless. With anything else that was short of that, he would look for something more. He never told himself, “Well, maybe this is as good as it gets. I might as well give up at this point.” That was … 
  15. On Not Being a Victim
     … Simply holding that different picture in mind helps you to read your experience in a different way, and also to shape your experience in a way that’s more skillful. There may be a pain in the body in some place, and if you breathe in reaction to the pain, many times it just compounds the problem. In this way, the business of both … 
  16. No Foolproofing
     … What here is skillful right now, and what’s unskillful? The fact that you’re taking a proactive approach to asking those questions—and trying to answer them—should help stir up the juices a bit, get you interested in what’s going on. This sluggishness: How do you feel it? Where do you feel it? Sometimes you notice there are a few stray … 
  17. Solid in the Face of Death
     … This is a really important part of the skill. It’s one of the reasons why the Buddha didn’t teach a totally one-pointed-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else kind of concentration. His concentration was more broadly based. You think of the breath coming in and out through the whole body, nourishing all the cells throughout the body, nourishing the nerves, nourishing … 
  18. Training Wheels
     … The skill of gaining some control here so that the currents of your craving don’t go flowing off in every which way and instead start flowing in the direction you want them to go: That’s a skill you need to master. Then, once they’ve taken you where you want to go, you can put them aside with a sense of appreciation … 
  19. A Well-stocked Memory
     … You do what’s required to develop the skillful qualities and abandon the unskillful ones. Then, following that, come the factors deal with concentration directly: rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. But there’s another description in which mindfulness is defined as being mindful of the Dhamma teachings you’ve memorized, that you’ve learned: what you’ve read, what you’ve listened to. Then analysis … 
  20. Perfections as Priorities
     … That requires ardency, the willingness to give energy to the practice with the confidence that if you do it in the proper way, in a skillful way—and that’s what ardency is all about, it’s not just plain old effort, it’s skillful effort—if your effort is skillful, then you gain energy in return. But you first have to be willing … 
  21. Understanding Contentment
     … The secret to his awakening was not only being discontent with unskillful qualities, it was even being discontent with skillful qualities. As long as his level of skill hadn’t reached the point of full awakening, he wasn’t going to rest. This is in the attitude he taught to his son. He told him that if you see you’ve done something well … 
  22. Load next page...