Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Sending Happiness… You try to figure out new ways of advancing that skill, whatever the skill is on which you base your livelihood. And you try to be untiring and energetic in what you do. You can also interpret this is terms of your meditation practice. Show initiative in your meditation by being clever and untiring. You sit down, and things are not working out well …
- What You Can’t Change, What You Can… When you do something skillful, you can enjoy it. The Buddha says that that’s an important part of the practice. Sometimes we feel embarrassed about looking at our own goodness. But if you’re embarrassed about your goodness, you’re not likely to do any. We’re not doing it to gloat or to compare ourselves with other people. We simply want to …
- Fighting Attitude… This is an important skill, because sometimes they’re not there when you think they are; sometimes they’re there when you think they aren’t. An example of the first case is when you’re angry. The anger flares up and your blood starts racing, your heart starts beating faster. Then the actual thought of anger disappears for a while from the mind …
- No Resistance… Then learn the skill of how to allow the things that you’re not paying attention to occupy the same space, but without your going with them. This will be an especially important skill to develop as you’re moving from concentration into discernment. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about analyzing pain and realizing that pain may occupy the same space as the body does …
- All Winners, No Losers… Find it in being skillful, in your search for happiness in a way that harms no one. Think about the Buddha teaching Rahula. He said, “Look at your actions. Before you do something, ask yourself, ‘Is this going to harm anyone?’ If the action is going to harm them, you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, you go ahead …
- The Challenge… But as you get skilled in the precepts, you find that the return really is worth much more than what you give up. When you come to meditation with that experience behind you, it’s a lot easier to give up a lot of the things that are really closest to the heart, things inside the mind: your sense of who you are, your …
- Take Nothing for Granted… He talked about how modern-day anthropologists, when they study a tribe, try to master all the different skills that the people of the tribe have mastered so that they can get an inside feel for the culture of the tribe. But one skill they found they had real trouble mastering is hunting, because hunting requires a lot of mental powers: concentration, a purposeful …
- The Joy of the Battle… As the Buddha said, every skillful intention that comes into the mind, every intention to abandon something unskillful, or to develop something skillful: That initial intention right there is good karma. And to whatever extent you’re able to carry through with it, that’s more good karma. So even at times when it seems like you can’t get a handle on something …
- More than a Slice of Mindfulness… If you’re trying to give rise to skillful qualities, what helps skillful qualities originate? If you’re battling with unskillful qualities, what’s their origination? You’re looking for cause and effect, and the way to understand cause and effect is to experiment by manipulating the potential causes. If the mind refuses to settle down, you can breathe in different ways or visualize …
- To Be Sure… Think of the Buddha’s determination that he wouldn’t let himself rest content with skillful qualities until they had delivered him someplace that really was certain. The other secret to his awakening—which he doesn’t mention that much but is implicit in the story—was his ability to self-correct, to observe himself. He’d be perfectly honest with himself about what …
- Discernment… things that are skillful, things that are unskillful, what kind of results they lead to. So your discernment, when it’s penetrative, sees more than just arising and passing away. You see what kind of arisings are skillful and which ones are not, which things lead to well-being and which ones don’t. That has to do with the “noble” part because, remember …
- Seven Facets of Discernment… Is it a skillful quality that you can simply allow to grow on its own or is it something you have to encourage? The same with unskillful qualities. Some of them will go away when you look at them. It’s like turning the light of the sun on a little bit of water and it evaporates. In other cases, the water is so …
- How to Be an Admirable Friend… Then your actions, of course, to be really skillful have to go into two directions. One is to actively do things that are positively skillful, and the other is to avoid things that are not. The positive skills, of course, have to do with generosity – the way you give to others. It can be a matter of material things. It can be giving your …
- Reflecting on Karma… If you just said that all feelings coming from actions are going to be stressful, why bother trying to be skillful? It’s because some actions lead to more pain than others, more stress, more harm than others that you want to be very careful about what you do. So that’s another attitude that this reflection is suppose to give rise to: one …
- The Brahmaviharas Are Not Enough… You’ve got to consciously probe to see what’s going to be skillful right now in your given state of mind. That’s the second of the factors for awakening: It goes almost seamlessly from mindfulness into analysis of qualities, trying to figure out what’s skillful and what’s not. That, in turn, moves into persistence when you actually try to abandon …
- The Buddha Defines Wisdom… someone who was learned, was mindful, who could understand what was being said to him, and was skilled in the affairs of the world. In other words, the minister was describing himself, and was giving a very worldly definition of wisdom. He asked the Buddha, “Do you want to praise my definition, or do you want to criticize it?” The Buddha said, “Neither.” But …
- An Apprenticeship in Integrity… In the past, this aspect of direct personal example was highly valued, not just in the area of the Dhamma but in terms of other skills as well. There are a lot of old skills that used to be practiced in Thailand that have died out because the teachers didn’t see anyone worthy of passing them on to. And the question of worthiness …
- The Wisdom of Wising Up… That way your intentions become more skillful. Sometimes it’s good to do preventive strikes on wrong resolves before you settle down. If you know that the mind has been obsessing about a particular thought during the day, you’ve got to do some antidote thinking to pry the mind loose. Other times, you may realize the problems only after you’ve started settling …
- Factors for Awakening… What’s the point of balance? What coming into the mind is skillful, and what’s unskillful?” If you see that something is skillful, as when there are a few moments of concentration, those are to be developed. In other words, you keep doing them. If you’re distracted, you recognize that as an unskillful state and then drop it. Come back to the …
- Noble Conversation… This is one of the skills of being a meditator: knowing what to talk about, when and where to talk about it, and who to talk about it to. The Buddha discusses ten topics that are valid for discussing. Some of them have to do with meditation—the practice of concentration, discernment, release, and knowledge and vision of release—and people like to talk …
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