Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Your One Responsibility
     … The number one question should always be “What’s the skillful thing to do right now? What’s the skillful thing to say? What’s the skillful thing to think?” As for the various voices in the mind that are giving you different kinds of advice—and they all tend to sound like you—you’ll start discerning which ones really are in your … 
  3. Present Kamma
     … If your present karma is skillful—in other words, your attentions and intentions and perceptions are skillful—then even when bad things are coming in from the past, they don’t weigh on the mind. But if they’re unskillful, even good things coming in from the past can weigh on the mind. They can cause a lot of trouble. As the Buddha said … 
  4. Truth as Medicine
     … It also includes having a sense of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, watching what you’re doing to see what the results are, and then being very earnest in doing what’s skillful and not doing anything that’s unskillful. That basic attitude is useful all the time. It requires mindfulness, alertness, and a sense of ardency in what you do. Then … 
  5. Well-armed Efforts
     … And he explains that by saying that you’re mindful to give rise to skillful qualities, and when they’re there you’re mindful to keep them going so they can develop. In other words, you don’t simply see things arise and pass away, arise and pass away and think you see them happening on their own. You consciously try to make skillful … 
  6. Potentials
     … This is where the skills you develop in the present moment make a huge difference. One of the potentials we can develop in the mind is not being easily swayed by pleasure or pain. This is an important skill to develop as you meditate. If you get easily swayed by pleasure, then when the sensations of comfortable breathing get really, really nice, you just … 
  7. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … The Buddha explains the fourth custom as finding delight in developing, finding delight in abandoning—in other words, to delight in developing skillful qualities, to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities. This is where you’re not content. You don’t simply tell yourself, “Okay, here comes an instance of suffering. I’ll just watch it come and go and not be worked up about … 
  8. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … So the cowherd can just sit under a tree and all he has to remember is, “Oh, the cows are over there someplace.” It’s the same with the skillful thoughts. You see that it’s okay to think them, it’s worth the effort. Still, the Buddha realized that if you think even skillful thoughts all the time, it’s going to be … 
  9. Leaving Distractions Alone
     … You’re working on a skill. At some point, the skill will finally take hold. Then you’ll be glad that you worked on it and spent all that time. So it’s not the case that the only good meditation is a meditation that feels good, calm and serene. Sometimes the meditations where you have to work the hardest are actually the best … 
  10. Possessed by Emotions
     … I don’t need these things.” And so the skill to keep from being possessed is to be very mindful, very alert, to fully inhabit your body, fully inhabit your mind, right here in the present moment. Remember the Buddha’s teaching on fabrication: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself—technically it’s directed thought and … 
  11. A Meditation Karma Checklist
    Meditation is a type of karma, skillful karma. Of course, the more skillfully you do it, the more desirable the results are going to be. It can either be the kind of karma that leads to good results that you’ll experience in this lifetime, to a good rebirth, or it can be the kind of karma, as the Buddha said, that leads to … 
  12. As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past
     … That way, what you’ve learned in one skill you can apply to the skill of the mind. This is why the ajaans—Ajaan Lee in particular—were so good at analogies: analogies for the skilled mind, analogies for the foolish mind. They’d seen those patterns in themselves and were able to use those patterns to teach themselves. This is where you make … 
  13. Goodwill for the Real World
    Years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, there was a Buddhist teacher who said that the attacks had burst his “complacent Buddhist bubble.” That’s a contradiction in terms: “complacent” and “Buddhist.” After all, the Buddha said that all skillful qualities come from heedfulness, and heedfulness means having a very strong sense of danger. There are dangers in the world. There are dangers in … 
  14. Learning by Doing
     … You begin to see that there are more and less skillful ways of putting these things together—and you aim at the greater and greater skill. This is how you really get to know them. This is a principle that applies to all the different ways of analyzing your experience that the Buddha talks about with reference to developing discernment. With the aggregates, it … 
  15. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … There are times when it’s a skillful sense of self, and other times when it’s not. Learn to see your different senses of self as perceptions, as activities. Then class them as to whether they’re skillful or unskillful activities. Thinking this way loosens up your perceptions, so you start looking more and more directly at actions and their results. This is … 
  16. Trust Your Desire for Happiness
     … Finding true happiness is something each person has to do for him or herself, because the reason we’re unhappy is because our lack of skill. And as we all know, you can’t make someone else skillful. You can show them your own skill and give them pointers, but they have to make an effort and be observant of their efforts. They have … 
  17. Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
     … Here you have an opportunity to master a skill—the ultimate skill. Or through a healthy sense of shame—here’s the opportunity to practice. It would be a shame to throw it away. So figure out which way you can most effectively motivate yourself to practice. Learn how to be a self-starter, because just as nobody hired us to be born, nobody … 
  18. Questioning Everything
     … We suffer because we lack skill. And our lack of skill is something nobody else can undo for us. They can help point things out, they can help make recommendations, they can give examples, but the actual acquisition of a skill is something each of us has to do for him or herself alone. Which is why no one person can awaken another person … 
  19. In the Mood to Meditate
     … Part of the reason for this is to put you in the right mood and part of it is to remind you that you have the skills to say No to unskillful impulses. Because you’re going to need those skills as you meditate. You sit here with the breath and it’s not all that long before another thought comes up and says … 
  20. Escape from Inter-eating
     … As he said, heedfulness lies at the base of all skillful qualities. Whatever skillful qualities you want to develop in the mind come from realizing that without those qualities, you’re in danger. Like right now, we’re meditating because we realize that an untrained mind is a dangerous mind. It can create a lot of trouble that’s totally unnecessary. It’s like … 
  21. Four Determinations
     … That way, you can focus on the area where the Buddha said you should be discontent, which is the level of skillfulness in your mind. You have the time, the energy, and the opportunity to focus on wherever your skills are lacking, so try to develop them as far as you can.
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