Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Turning Anxiety into Heedfulness
     … Because, as the Buddha said, “All skillful qualities are rooted in heedfulness.” Those skillful qualities are the things that will create your haven of well-being, even in the midst of dangers all around you. The world will never stop being a dangerous place, but you can learn to stop posing dangers to yourself and others. In so doing, you find that you really … 
  3. Asking the Right Questions
     … How can you master these processes so that they’re skillful? How can you develop an even more refined taste, or more refined standards for what really is skillful?—what you’re going accept as the kind of pleasure you feel is really what you’re after. Because for a lot of us, it’s just, “Well, I’d like a little bit of … 
  4. Alertness: What Are You Doing?
     … So, under the shadow of death, what should you be doing right now? What’s the most skillful thing? Are you frittering away your day, building up defilements? Or is there a better choice? The Buddha said, if you’re heedful, then you say, “I’ve got this breath. Let’s practice with this breath,” because you know you’ve got this breath. You … 
  5. Strength of Conviction: 2
     … As he once said, the secret to his awakening was, one, an unwillingness to rest content with skillful qualities and, two, an unwillingness to give up in the effort, no matter what it would take. So that’s the kind of person we have faith in, we have confidence in. It means also, of course, that we try to develop those qualities in ourselves … 
  6. The Four Noble Truths from Within
     … You’re focusing on this part of your awareness and learning how to engage with it with knowledge, with skill. The word for “ignorance” in Pali, avijja, literally means lack of skill. The Buddha’s teaching us how to be more skillful in how we approach our awareness from within, so that we can solve the problem of suffering from within—not pinning our … 
  7. The True Cause of Suffering
     … As for people who are already happy or are doing skillful things, you’re not jealous of their happiness, you don’t resent it. Because, after all, that means if someday you gain happiness there, will be people who resent your happiness. Do you want that? Well, no. It doesn’t help anything in the world at all. So you develop empathetic joy, taking … 
  8. Victory over Death
     … Strength of persistence, as you try your best to act in skillful ways. Strength of mindfulness and concentration, as you try to give the mind a place to rest fully alert and to gather its strength. And then strength of discernment, as you examine your own actions above and beyond what the Buddha said was skillful and not skillful—as you learn to look … 
  9. Savor Your Breath
     … Think about all the skills the Buddha found in his meditation, leading at last to the ultimate skill, which is the ending of the effluents. How are you going to know what an effluent is unless you get really sensitive to how things flow around in the heart and mind right here? So try to get sensitive right here in the heart, right here … 
  10. The Pursuit of True Happiness
     … And of the happiness that turns into pain, the Buddha asked, “Is it a noble thing to search for that kind of happiness? Is it a wise, skillful thing to search for that kind of happiness as an end in and of itself? If you know it’s going to let you down at some point, why put so much effort into it?” That … 
  11. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
     … As the Buddha said elsewhere, if you believe that your actions play no role in determining your happiness or your pain, then what motivation would you have to act in a skillful way—to put forth any effort at all or even to think about the consequences of your actions? That kind of view is a dead-end view. As the Buddha also said … 
  12. Judging the Dhamma
     … The Buddha taught more how to get to know the present moment, how to recognize what’s good in the present moment, what skillful and what’s not skillful, and to make your choices. It’s these little movements of the mind in the present moment that are the creative forces of the world. You’ve got tendencies, you’ve got habits that come … 
  13. Unskillful Thinking
     … As you keep at this, you gain a sense of the pleasure that comes from having mastered a skill. In the beginning, the thoughts will come in and they’ll drag you away before you realize what’s happened. You give into them because you don’t really realize that you have the choice to go with them or not. You don’t notice … 
  14. In Harmlessness Is Strength
     … But we stay because we see that once the mind has rested, it can be a lot more skillful in dealing with situations around us. It’s just important that you keep in mind the fact that as long as you’re acting, there’s going to be some burden on other people. For example, with the precepts: The precept against killing comes down … 
  15. New Feeding Habits
     … As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them; and once they’re there, you try to develop them as far as they can go. We were talking earlier about how unskillful qualities come from the way you breathe, the way you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in your mind, but skillful qualities can … 
  16. The Power of Intention
     … Notice, we’re not saying, “May you be happy doing whatever you’re doing.” We want all beings to be skillful, because that’s the true cause for their happiness, and we’re willing to do whatever we can to help in that direction. With that thought as the background, then we focus our intention on being with the breath. The question came up … 
  17. The Thinking Heart
     … So to arrive at the result of putting an end to suffering, you need to start with skillful causes: skillful desires, skillful actions. If suffering is the result, the causes are unskillful desires, unskillful actions. So there are two things—actions and results—divided into two types: skillful and unskillful. That’s why the truths are four. Why are they noble? The word for … 
  18. Feeding on Ardency
     … You can watch yourself doing all kinds of skillful and unskillful things, and it would still count as alertness. It’s ardency that makes mindfulness and alertness skillful. You want to do these path factors well. You want to do them skillfully, in such a way that you can put an end to suffering. The intention there is what you feed on. So the … 
  19. Delight in Striving
     … The other was not resting satisfied even with his skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities in the mind. He didn’t practice “radical acceptance.” If something in his mind was unskillful, he would try to get rid of it. If he had done something skillful, he would take joy in that fact but he wouldn’t rest satisfied. He would try even … 
  20. Calm
     … When you figure out what your mind is doing that’s skillful and what’s not, then you can move on to persistence. Put forth the effort to encourage what’s skillful, discourage what’s not. There should come a sense of refreshment as you’re able to do that. That refreshment is your food for the practice; it gives you energy—it’s … 
  21. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … What are you doing? What do you expect to gain from your intentions? Which ones should you act on? When you act only on skillful intentions, what happens? If something bad comes up as a result, you have to ask yourself: “Maybe my intention was good, but it wasn’t skillful.” Go back to the drawing board. So you reflect. Remember the Buddha’s … 
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