Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Acceptance
     … This is why, when the Buddha was talking about meditation, he would always compare it with different skills. As with any skill, the teacher can teach you the basic steps, but to get really good at it, you have to do it over and over and over again so that you get a better sense of what works and what doesn’t work, and … 
  3. Fire Prevention
     … The standard formula says that you give rise to desire, exert your persistence, uphold your intent to prevent unskillful qualities that haven’t yet arisen from arising; to abandon those that have arisen; to give rise to skillful qualities that are not there yet, and when they are there, to develop them to the full extent of their culmination. Notice the first three qualities … 
  4. Mental Seclusion
     … It depends on your skill, and skill comes from persistence. You stick with it. If the mind wanders off, you bring it back. If it wanders off again, you bring it back again. Don’t get discouraged. You’re developing new habits in the mind—and you’re raising the level of the mind so that it’s not a slave to the world … 
  5. Timeless Practice
     … His definition is the ability to see what’s coming in, see what’s going on, immediately gauge its level of skill, whether it’s appropriate or not, and be very firm about shutting down the things that are unskillful and allowing only the things that are skillful. Another aspect of timeless practice is simply observing the precepts, making sure that your actions cause … 
  6. Limitless is the Buddha
     … That can often mean accepting the fact that other people don’t respect you, they don’t like your practice, and yet you can learn to find your delight, not in the things other people can offer, but in developing good qualities of mind, skillful qualities of mind, and abandoning unskillful ones. The sense that you’ve done something skillful in your thoughts or … 
  7. Self-Correct
     … Ajaan Fuang realized after a day or two that he had the skills for taking his meditation into the forest, but he hadn’t yet learned the skills to take the meditation into the city. This was a new set of skills that he was going to have to develop. Again, to develop them, you don’t simply ask your teacher. You learn to … 
  8. Where Perceptions Can Take You
     … As for the more skillful perceptions, you learn how to develop them, and then you realize that there are levels of skill you have to master. So you start by looking out for the perceptions that lead to decline. These basically have to do with the perceptions around wrong resolve: perceptions of sensuality—in other words seeing something as really worthy of sensual desire … 
  9. The Uses of Pleasure & Pain
     … It requires a lot of finesse, a lot of skill in how you deal with the mind, learning to recognize the time for analyzing issues of stress and suffering, and the time for letting the mind rest so it that it can gain strength and then go back to work. The ultimate skill is learning how to put those two things together. In other … 
  10. How the Dhamma Protects
     … And you can focus on making sure that regardless of what you’ve got in terms of karma from the past, you know that you’ve got skillful intentions here in the future, intentions that don’t aim at harm, don’t aim at attachment, don’t have anything unskillful. That’s your protection. So work on developing the powers of mind: the mindfulness … 
  11. What Right Mindfulness Remembers
     … You do let in skillful mental qualities: right view all the way down through right concentration. So mindfulness is not simply a matter of being open and accepting of everything that comes by or comes up or comes in. There’s another place where the Buddha defines mindfulness as the ability to remember, to keep in mind what was said and done long ago … 
  12. For Your Benefit Here & Now
    For Your Benefit Here & Now August 5, 2015 When we meditate, we’re working on a skill: how to bring the mind into the present moment in a way that’s alert and quiet at the same time. You come to the breath because that’s your anchor in the present moment, and you try to stay here. To stay here solidly, figure out … 
  13. Volunteer Spirit
     … You owe the fact that you’re able to talk and walk and learn all the basic skills of being a human being. Whether they were good parents or bad parents, you still have a big debt to them. But even in the monastic hierarchy: When a student becomes apprentice to a teacher, the student is allowed at some point, if he feels that … 
  14. The Reality of Emotions
     … Master them as a skill. When you can master this skill, it gives you a sense of wellbeing in the present moment that doesn’t have to depend on conditions outside. You could sit here and think about all the reasons that would make you miserable being here: It’s hot outside. You don’t have the comforts you might enjoy if you were … 
  15. Diagnosing the Mind
     … Your basic skills as a doctor are, one, learning how to diagnose the disease and two, having the appropriate medicine, the appropriate antidote. That means having a full range of medicines to draw on. If you went to a doctor and the doctor had only one medicine, you’d have to find a new doctor. The same as a meditator: You’ve got to … 
  16. Training Your Desires
     … Then there’s the skillful desire in the noble eightfold path, under the factor of right effort, that leads to the end of suffering. The skillful desire wants to develop all skillful qualities in the mind and abandon all unskillful qualities. That’s the kind of desire you want to encourage. But the four noble truths also set out the possibility of finding an … 
  17. Mud Houses
     … You develop a skill, and that’s the best way to know anything: to get skillful with it. Otherwise, you can hear about the aggregates, and the five categories may seem like an artificial way of dividing up your experience. But when you’re trying to get the mind concentrated, you see how you put this state of becoming together with precisely these activities … 
  18. Here to Learn
     … Over the course of time, we’ll learn with greater and greater skill how to bring the mind to a sense of stillness, a sense of calm; how to direct our thoughts wherever we want them and drop any thinking that’s not helpful. We do work on these skills. We’re not simply sitting here watching willy-nilly whatever comes up. But to … 
  19. In the Mood
     … But in traditional culture, one of the basic skills of being a human being was, essentially, how to feel good about yourself, how to love yourself, how to wish yourself well, and how to act intelligently on that wish. Only really stupid people would hate themselves, and yet that kind of stupidity is rampant now in the modern world. Be careful not to pick … 
  20. Of Past & Future
     … So you want to do something skillful. The Buddha talks about Right Effort: the things you should abandon, the things you should prevent, the things you should give rise to, the things you should maintain and develop. He also talks about the four noble truths, and each of them has a duty. With stress and suffering, your duty is to comprehend it. If you … 
  21. Focus on What’s Important
     … If they believed in the power of skillful action, they tended to act in skillful ways and be reborn in good places. If they didn’t believe in the power of their actions, they would tend to be very careless in their actions and be reborn in bad places. But the pattern was complex. He saw that there were some cases where a person … 
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