Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Mindfulness the Gatekeeper
     … If you can’t, then keep watchful for the next time when concentration arises so that you can see the connection between what you do and how the mind settles down, so that this becomes a skill. Now, part of the skill in creating a state of concentration is that we’re creating a state of becoming. Becoming is an identity you take on … 
  3. Goodwill for Safety
     … You don’t have to like the person or like the being, but you have to think about that person or that being’s well-being—so that your actions are skillful. If you repeat this theme to yourself often enough, and dig up all the resistance, you find that it does come more and more easily. It becomes more and more of a … 
  4. Four Bases of Success
     … Really pay attention to what you’re doing and what’s coming out as a result.” And then use your powers of judgment to figure out what’s going well, what’s not going well, so that you can make your practice more of a skill. For instance, with the breath, it’s good to remind yourself of why you want to be with … 
  5. Steal the Dhamma
     … In other words, instead of teaching the Dhamma as a body of information, he was teaching it as a skill. And part of the skill is ingenuity, figuring things out on your own. He himself told me about the time when he was young and starting out meditating. The instructions back in those days were just, “Bring your mind down.” This was before Ajaan … 
  6. Discipline
     … This is considered to be one of the hallmarks of people who really master a skill: They see that there’s a lot of advantage to mastering the skill, and a lot of danger in not mastering the skill. So we have a very live sense of what the mind needs for its own true well-being. That’s the self as a governing … 
  7. Samvega
     … Our own lack of skill is what has us entangled here, so we’re going to have to develop skill to get out. And nobody else can develop skill for us. It’s something each of us has to do for ourselves. So the Buddha devised ways of bringing us into the present so that it’s not that scary, so that we’re … 
  8. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … What does the Dhamma have to say about your thoughts? What does it recommend that you do with those thoughts? What are the standards for deciding what’s skillful and what’s not? Be willing to hold yourself to that standard. There’s that old saying from the third Zen patriarch that the great way isn’t difficult for those with no preferences. There … 
  9. Doing Your Duty
     … The Buddha said that heedfulness lies at the basis of all skillful action, all skillful attitudes: the realization that there is danger, but that your actions can make a difference. Now, in some cases your past karma may be such that no matter what you do, you’re going to get sick. But do you know your past karma? Do you know that it … 
  10. Skillful Papañca
    The word papañca has come into our vocabulary. In most practice centers it’s called a type of thinking where your thoughts run rampant, out of control. But when the Buddha talked about papañca, it was not so much the amount of thinking, it was the kind of thinking. He said it starts with the perception of “I am the thinker.” From there it … 
  11. Large Perspective, Small Focus
     … Beings go around and get born in different places, and sometimes they work, work, work hard at developing skillful qualities and then they reap the benefits of those qualities and they tend to get complacent. Or they find suddenly they have power. There was that cartoon in the *New Yorker *once: two Congressmen walking out of the Capitol and one of them is saying … 
  12. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … One was the distinction between what is skillful and unskillful behavior—that skillful behavior should be developed and unskillful behavior abandoned—and the other was the four noble truths. The truths about yourself as a meditator don’t fall into those categories. In other words, the question of whether you’re a good meditator or a bad meditator is never true across the board … 
  13. Dignity in the Face of Hardship
     … Now, it’s not the case that you have an infinite set of choices—the raw material available to you at any one time is based on your past choices, and sometimes is quite limited—but you can choose to do the skillful thing. Keep the Buddha’s graduated discourse in mind. The good things in life do come from virtue; they do come … 
  14. Motivation
     … As the Buddha said, heedfulness is the basic motivation for all good things we do, all the skillful actions we do whether in thought, word, or deed. We realize that if we act in unskillful ways, there’s going to be suffering down the line. Our actions really do make a difference. If our actions didn’t make a difference, heedfulness wouldn’t be … 
  15. Home Schooling Your Inner Children
     … I hope you take a skill, the skill of training your mind—like we’re doing right now: focusing on the breath, being mindful to stay with the breath, being alert to the breath, and developing a quality called ardency, in which you see the disadvantages of having an untrained mind, so that you get earnest and active in doing your best to train … 
  16. Stillness & Clear Seeing
     … You’re going to stand above them, lift the mind up to a higher level where it can look at its thoughts and decide which ones are skillful, which ones are not, which ones should be encouraged, and which ones should be discouraged. Remember, we’re working on the noble truths here. What’s noble about them is that they lift the mind to … 
  17. Resourceful
     … Be resourceful.” But actually, there’s no paradox at all within the parameters of what’s skillful and what’s not. You have to use your ingenuity to figure out what’s skillful right now with this particular problem. Because sometimes, when you’re dealing today with lust, say, or anger, a certain approach will work, but tomorrow the same approach doesn’t work … 
  18. Dealing with Pain
     … But you don’t have to worry about it, because you’re working on your skills in this part of the body—the comfortable part where you’re focused. Once you can maintain that sense of well-being, even though there may be a pain in some other part of the body, then the next stage is to start spreading that sense of well … 
  19. Capture Your Imagination
     … So what kind of effort involves joy? Think of some activity—a game, a sport, a skill—that has captured your imagination. You find yourself working at it, not because anybody’s forcing you, but because you enjoy doing it. That’s the kind of effort, the kind of attitude the Buddha recommends that you bring to the practice. Ajaan Fuang used to say … 
  20. The Creator of Worlds
     … You’re feeding the mind on skillful pleasures. You’re going to be holding on to this, but it’s a skillful thing to hold on to. You’ve got a sense of well-being that nourishes the mind, so that you don’t have to go feeding in hidden corners, feeding off of other people’s scraps. So this is food for the … 
  21. Guilt & Shame
     … Whereas Buddhism doesn’t talk about justice at all—it talks about being skillful in your behavior. Now, sometimes skillfulness does involve punishing people who are wrong, but you’re not necessarily trying to get justice done. Think of the case of Aṅgulimāla: all those people he’d killed, and yet the Buddha saw that he had a potential. So he taught him. Aṅgulimāla … 
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