Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 69
  2. The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis
     … As for thoughts that were skillful, he’d allow them free range, like the cowherd during the dry season. There’s no trouble about getting into the rice fields because there’s no rice in the fields, so the cows can pretty much go anywhere they like. But the important thing was that the Buddha learned how to step back from his thoughts—this … 
  3. Truthfulness
     … On the other, there’s bound to be an element of questioning, an element of wariness, and you want to figure out kind of doubting, what kind of wariness is skillful and what’s not. You can learn that only through the practice. If you blindly accept, “Well, this has to be the way it is,” and throw yourself into a particular practice without … 
  4. Don’t Limit Yourself
     … And see how skillful you can make those intentions. As the Buddha said, you do this by, on the one hand, not doing anything that you anticipate would cause harm. And then, two, actually watch the actions you think will be harmless to see if they cause any problem either immediately while you’re doing them or after they’re done. That’s how … 
  5. The Story behind Impatience
     … Learn the skills you need to focus on a skillful intention and stay there in the midst of all this randomness. The randomness helps remind you how artificial your storyline is. Storylines, if they’re going to maintain your interest, have to have a clean trajectory. There may be a few setbacks here and there to make the story interesting, but eventually there’s … 
  6. Determined to Be Undefeated by Death
     … So the skills you develop—the determination to get the mind to settle down and all the qualities that go along with that determination: Those are the skills that will see you in good stead. As the strength of the body goes, you substitute that with strength of the mind. And that will see you through.
  7. Adolescent Practice
     … But you have to go through many, many layers of intention first, for it’s only through gradually developing skill in this area that you can really sense the most subtle forms of intention. This is why the activity of developing skill in the way you deal with the breath is not a distraction from vast openness of Awakening. That’s not the case … 
  8. Finding Your Own Balance
     … If you’re the type of person who thinks too much, you’ve got to develop the skill of not thinking. In other words, if you see that your thought processes are spinning out of control, you have to be able to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut them, not so that you ultimately will stop thinking altogether, but you need the skill of learning … 
  9. Feeding on Right Resolve
     … It requires that you analyze what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, and when you see that something’s unskillful, you bring in the persistence to abandon it. If it’s skillful, you bring in the persistence to develop it, so that you can give rise to sense of *pīti, *as it’s called in Pali, which can be translated as rapture, refreshment … 
  10. Hedgehog Knowledge
     … So we go over the same spot day after day after day, staying with the breath, exploring the sensations of the breath energy in the body, playing with them, experimenting with them, learning how to manipulate them with skill. Sometimes we manipulate them without skill. You’ll learn, for instance, that certain ways of breathing give you a headache, certain ways of breathing make … 
  11. Producing Experience
     … You can develop skill in the way you focus on the breath, the way you adjust the breath, the way you develop sensitivity to what’s going on in the body. These are all things you do as a producer of experiences, and you can learn to do them more and more skillfully to create a sense of wellbeing in the present moment. Even … 
  12. The Power of Intention
     … Simply the fact of staying focused on the body can be done in a skillful way or in an unskillful way. You stick with one intention and if you don’t handle it right—if you put too much pressure on different parts of the body or engage in unskillful mental images of what happens as you breathe in, which parts of the body … 
  13. Don’t Clap Hands with Pain
     … That’s a really useful skill to develop. And it teaches you an important lesson: Even where there’s physical pain, there doesn’t have to be suffering. But to see that, the mind has to get very quiet. You don’t want to wait until birth, aging, illness, and death hit you hard before you suddenly decide to take up this training. You … 
  14. Admitting Mistakes
     … siding with an unskillful thought as opposed to a skillful one, taking up an unskillful practice and refusing to see the harm it creates. These are things we really have to be on the lookout for, because often they’re the things nobody else can see, the things that go on inside our mind. Other people may be able to see some of the … 
  15. Skillful Fear
     … It’s because some forms of fear are unskillful, but others are skillful. The most unskillful form of fear is the one that the Buddha lists in the four biases, when you treat people unfairly out of fear. Someone has power over you or you fear their power, so you give in to them in ways that you shouldn’t. There’s also fear … 
  16. Training the Whole Mind
     … If you keep allowing this to happen, where are you going to pick up the skills you’ll really need when aging, illness, and death hit with full force? This is why the Buddha stressed the principle of heedfulness all the time. We can’t just spend our time sniffing the flowers and looking at the sky. There’s work to be done. When … 
  17. At Normalcy
     … If you’re going to produce skillful actions, you’ve got to get the mind in a position where it’s not a slave to its moods. From this perspective, the idea of a mind free from its moods sounds like freedom, not dullness: the freedom of a mind that doesn’t have to be under the sway of its very undependable moods all … 
  18. Freedom
     … In the course of making the most of that freedom, you develop a lot of skill. Any area of your life where you can devote your full attention to it is an area that can become skillful. This is a pattern you see throughout the Buddha’s teachings. As he once said, the essence or the core of his teaching is freedom or release … 
  19. The Buddha’s Filters
     … The Pali term, yoniso manasikāra, is translated in a lot of different ways: “wise reflection,” “right approach,” “skillful approach.” Often it’s treated as a very vague “wise reflection” without any clear notion of what’s wise about it. But the Buddha is very specific. It’s a double-filtration system. The first is that unskillful qualities should be abandoned and skillful qualities should … 
  20. Up for the Challenge
     … Then, once you’ve got the right attitude, you have to work on the skills that will be needed. You start with the skill of conviction: being convinced that your choices really will make a difference. If your attitude is, “Well, it doesn’t really matter, I’ll just go with whatever,” then it’s hard to gather the strength you need in order … 
  21. True to the Breath
     … That’s a skill the mind already has mastered. You don’t lose that skill when you meditate. You simply learn when to use it and when not. For the time being, the skill lies in trying to stay right with the present moment and not allowing yourself to get entangled in these other worlds. So when a thought arises in the mind, you … 
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