Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. A Sense of Yourself
     … It’s simply the sense that “I am.” And there’s a skillful sense of conceit and an unskillful one. The skillful one, which is actually necessary for the path, is a sense of “I am competent of doing this. I can do this. I am capable. I am responsible. Other people have done this. They’re human beings. I’m a human being … 
  3. Sensitive to Stress
     … As you develop skills as a meditator, you want to learn how to move from one of these modes to another when it’s appropriate. For instance, if you carry your narrative mode—“This is me, this is the person I’ve been all my life”—into your meditation, it gets in the way of your seeing the actions of the mind in the … 
  4. Moods Are Not-Self
     … The common way of thinking about it is that death is going to come anyhow, there’s nothing much you can do about it, you’re just going to die and be annihilated, so what’s the skill? But the Buddha’s saying there is a skill involved, and you want to be in the right mood to do that. This is where it … 
  5. Inner Baggage
     … You can take those skills and apply them to your whole life: the way you relate to your physical actions, the way you relate to your speech, the way you relate to your thinking. You become more capable of evaluating things on your own, of learning to be more and more skillful in detecting where you’re creating burdens for yourself and learning how … 
  6. Practicing on Your Own
     … You have to recognize what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. And these are not things that change from time to time. There were two teachings the Buddha gave that he said were categorical, i.e., true across the board, true back in India and true now, and true at any other time and place. One is that skillful qualities should be developed and … 
  7. Persistence
     … You’ve got to work on this other skill, the skill of being very still, because there’s so much that can be seen when you’re still that you can’t see when the mind is not still. So you hover around this for a while and then finally gain the confidence that you can just settle in. Then, as you’re maintaining … 
  8. Good & Bad Meditation
     … Meditation should develop the mental skills and qualities that make you a good judge of your progress. In the beginning, it’s good to sit with whatever comes up, because one of the attitudes and skills you need to be a meditator is patience. You’re able to sit with whatever happens. Whether it looks good or looks bad, you can sit with it … 
  9. Persistence: Lift Your Heart
     … We’re given two sets of views that are categorical—one, that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned; and two, the four noble truths together with their duties. If we have conviction in the Buddha's awakening, we believe these really are categorical. The problem is that they’re not truths that just sit there. They have duties associated … 
  10. Responsible for Your Goodness
     … You may need to develop a certain amount of pride or conceit as you’re working on these skills, but as the skills get better and better, you find that pride and conceit are really unnecessary, and they get in the way. You can put them aside because the goodness of the mind in and of itself is its reward. So we focus on … 
  11. Above the World
     … You get a better and better sense of what it means to be skillful and unskillful, and of how far skillfulness can go. Above all, you can see the really subtle things the mind is doing that are causing stress, suffering, a sense of burdensomeness to itself. You see these things and you can clear them away. That brings the mind to an even … 
  12. Uncertainty
     … when you’re willing to look at your mind in terms of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, and get very precise about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. And give the meditation some time, because not all the results are going to come right away. Sometimes it takes a while for the mind to be willing to settle down … 
  13. A Slave to Craving
     … But to be friends with pain, you need skill. That’s the skill we’re working on right now: the skill of getting the mind to be still, getting it to be mindful, concentrated, discerning. I know a lot of people who don’t like these teachings because they sound harsh, but the only way you’re going to get the mind out of … 
  14. The Art of Right Speech
    Ajaan Fuang often said, when we’re practicing the Dhamma, we’re working on a skill. We’re not just memorizing words or ideas; we’re learning how to deal skillfully with issues in the mind. And the first principle in that skill, he would say, is how we relate to the breath, because there are many layers in the mind. Some are more … 
  15. A Matter of Life & Death
     … Now, it’s going to take a while to develop it, but as with any skill, the more you stick with it, the better it gets. You can’t expect to get really talented at it right way. So you have to learn how to take pleasure in incremental steps, noticing that the little things that used to knock you over don’t knock … 
  16. More than a Sliver of Mindfulness
     … As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them and then develop them as far as they can go. This is where discernment comes in, as you understand what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. And you gain experience in directing the mind where it should go. One area you keep it away from, of course … 
  17. Seeing Danger in Birth
     … As the Buddha said, all skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness. We’re not skillful because we’re innately good. At the same time, we’re not innately bad. But our actions depend on a calculation: Is it going to be worth the effort? The more you believe in your power of action, and the more you notice the dangers that come from acting … 
  18. The Desire for Truth
     … And as you get more precise in observing yourself, you become more and more a true person, because you see the truth of the Buddha’s teachings as to which actions are skillful and which ones are not. When you develop the skillful actions and abandon the unskillful ones, you really do benefit. It may take time, but then you’ve got to think … 
  19. Balanced Meditation
     … Take your problem-solving skills and apply them to this problem—the stress right here, right now—to see exactly what kind of craving, what kind of ignorance underlies that stress. When you can catch these things in action, and that particular burden gets lifted off the mind, then the mind is in much better shape, ready to settle down to greater levels of … 
  20. Sorting Yourselves Out
     … All our selves, especially the useful ones, are created around skills. We’re working on a good skill here. We’re learning to find a sense of well-being simply by the way we breathe, a perfectly harmless peace, a perfectly harmless pleasure. Even though it may take a while to gain a sense of skill around this, it is possible. Once you have … 
  21. The Brightness of Life
     … They wouldn’t even know, but you could still work on skillful qualities in the mind: patience, endurance, goodwill, equanimity. These are all things that we’re free to develop. So the path is wide open. It’s simply that a lot of people resist: They want to look for light in other things. They’re perfectly happy where they are—and they don … 
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