Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Breaking the Arrows… That’s a skill you can develop—the skill we’re working on right now.
- Do Jhana… Are these things really skillful or not? If they’re not skillful, what can you do that’s more skillful? That’s where the discernment comes in. This is why evaluation is such an important part of that first jhana. You evaluate the breath to make it more comfortable. You evaluate your focus. Where are you focused in the body? At what spot is …
- Everything Gathers Around the BreathThere’s a phrase in Thai, lak wichaa, which means the basic principle of a skill you’re trying to master, or the principal thing you’re trying to master in a skill. And in our practice here, our lak wichaa is the breath. You can relate every issue in the practice to the breath. Ajaan Lee has a lot of Dhamma talks where …
- Avoidance… We meet with this problem of suffering simply because of our own lack of skill. It sounds easy enough—if you’re unskillful, just practice and practice until you become more and more skillful—but you’ll find resistance in certain parts, and this is going to vary from person to person. But a willingness to question your assumptions is basic, and that willingness …
- The Dead Snake Around Your Neck… And you do that first by mastering an alternative skill, using fabrications as you meditate in a skillful way. Once you know how to fabricate in a skillful way, why go back to your old ways? What keeps pulling you back? The fact that you’ve got this alternative skill gives you a perspective you wouldn’t have acquired otherwise. It also gives you …
- You Are Not Powerless… You want to be alive to the fact that in whatever you’re doing, even as you’re practicing meditation, even as you’re developing insight, there are things that are skillful to hold on to, and things that are skillful to let go. You want to discern the difference, along with the right time and the right place to hold on and to …
- Success with Breathing… You may not have been thinking consciously of them, but reflect back on your work, reflect back on your manual and artistic skills to see how you actually have used these qualities. For example, with desire, you know from experience that if you simply want the results, they’re not going to happen. You have to focus your desire on the causes, trying to …
- Contentment… When is it skillful to tolerate something and when is it not? That’s a question of skill, and that should be uppermost in every consideration.
- Blessings… On the one hand, they relate to the teachings on skillful and unskillful action. If you see that the mind is doing anything unskillful, or you’re doing anything unskillful in your words or your deeds, you abandon that and you give rise to skillful qualities instead. Those duties, the Buddha said, hold across the board. The same with the four noble truths: Each …
- Suffering is an Addiction… But as the Buddha said, if it weren’t possible to abandon unskillful ways of acting and develop skillful ones in their place, he wouldn’t have taught. So it is possible. You have to hold that possibility in mind, and talk to all the members of your mind’s committee, because some are very fearful. Some are very close-minded. Some are very …
- Learn from the Ants… This is why he said that the two secrets for his awakening were, one, not resting content with skillful qualities, and, two, strong determination, strong effort. The effort here doesn’t always mean sitting longer hours or sitting through pain, but it does mean putting an effort into understanding your mind and seeing where you’re causing suffering. It’s going to be a …
- Right View as Tool… It’s something each of us has to do for him or herself alone, because the reason we suffer is our own lack of skill, and no one else can master a skill for us. We have to master the skill ourselves. But the more people we have who are mastering the skill, the more their influence spreads around. So it’s not a …
- The Purity of Your Intentions… And you have to learn the skills of saying No, so that it sticks. It’s not one of those cases where you just say No and that’s going to take care of everything. You need to give the mind good reasons to stay. Some of the reasons come from your discernment, such as thinking in the long term, that this will be …
- Inner Civil War… the exertion to prevent unskillful qualities from arising, the exertion to abandon any unskillful ones that have already arisen, the effort to give rise to skillful qualities that have not yet arisen and the effort to develop the ones that have. With unskillful qualities, we try our best to prevent them, but there are times when we slip. They’ve moved in and invaded …
- Stress… But again, the Buddha said that you can’t rest content even with skillful qualities. You give rise to the skillful qualities, you nurture them, but you have to keep trying to keep making them more and more skillful. This is reflected in one of the suttas where the Buddha talks about getting the mind into deeper and deeper stages of concentration by looking …
- The Search for Something of Substance… The Buddha found that if you act with enough skill—training your mind with enough skill—you can actually find something that’s not subject to aging, illness, death, or separation. As he said, he had reflected on his life. All the things that he was looking for, searching for, to find happiness were subject to aging, illness, and death just like him, and …
- Appreciating Your Practice… And you want to appreciate the skill that you’re developing in and of itself, without any reference to how other people may be skillful or how they or some text might measure your progress. You want to be able to see for yourself that things are getting better and, as the Buddha would say, learn how to delight in that. One of the …
- Opening Your World… But if you realize there are the weak members of the mind and there are the stronger members, skillful members and unskillful members, you see that you just have to strengthen the skillful ones, and not identify with the ones that keep going out. This is why we meditate: both to learn the techniques for getting a sense of well-being right now, and …
- Streams of Anger… That means learning to be skillful in our thoughts, in our words, in our deeds. And part of skill, especially in words and thoughts, is thinking in ways that lead to harmony. We’ve heard many, many times that the antidote for anger and irritation is goodwill combined with equanimity. But just thinking thoughts of goodwill and equanimity won’t be enough. You have …
- Wise Endurance… So it’s a skill that can be developed. There is a way to find happiness in any situation. One of the foundations for that skill, of course, is endurance. The Buddha emphasizes its importance at the very beginning of the Ovāda-pāṭimokkha: “Khantī paramaṃ tapo titikkhā—Patient endurance is the highest austerity”—the burning away of defilements—but it has to be endurance …
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