Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Concentration Nurtured with Virtue
     … Are your good intentions really skillful intentions? There’s a difference, you know. Good intentions can have delusion, whereas skillful intentions don’t. That’s the distinction. So we use the precepts for training purposes. It’s not that we simply just hold on to them, hoping that by following the precepts we’ll be good little boys and good little girls and will … 
  3. How & Why We Meditate
     … So, to develop right effort as a beginning step, you use whatever cruder skills you have at your disposal: conviction, patience, your stick-to-it-iveness. Now, that can get very old very quickly if you don’t have something of interest. That’s why we emphasize working with the breath. When the breath gets comfortable, the next step is to think of that … 
  4. Your Inner Teacher
     … One of the most important skills in the meditation is training yourself to be your own teacher, your own observer, your own advisor. The role of the external teacher is to eventually fade into the background, as your internal teacher gets more and more skilled, more and more reliable. But this requires that you be really observant—observant of your intentions, observant of the … 
  5. Do Jhana
     … With that knowledge, you can get more and more skillful at disbanding it. That’s what I mean by zapping it. As the energies get tangled in that spot, you can comb out the tangle, vaporize the tangle like a spider on a web. The spider sits in one corner and senses something vibrating in the web. It goes to that spot, takes care … 
  6. Dhamma in Vinaya
     … Here you are, trying to get the mind to settle down, and it’s an important skill you’re trying to develop. If the mind wants to sneak out and catch a few flicks, have a few snacks, ask: for what purpose? That’s the intention. Then you look at the perception: the different ways you perceive the breath. If the mind is unwilling … 
  7. Getting Familiar with Concentration
     … There has to be the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities and to foster skillful ones. That much you can desire, but you can’t desire that it’s going to happen within an hour or a day or two weeks or whatever. You just work on whatever comes up. Sometimes you find that the mind throws a lot of issues back at … 
  8. Fear & Conviction
     … So being very conscious of skillful fears helps you to deal with unrealistic fears. It gives you a place where you can focus your efforts and your desire for what you need to do: You need to train the mind. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but you do know that, whatever happens, you’re going to need … 
  9. Goodness Comes from Heedfulness
     … This quality of watchfulness is probably one of the most important skills you’re going to have to develop as you meditate, realizing that just because you’ve made up your mind you’re going to do something good doesn’t mean that all the mind is going along with the decision. It’s as if you’ve got to committee in there—or … 
  10. Right Livelihood
     … There’s right resolve, the resolve to renounce sensuality, to find a pleasure that’s not involved with sensual passion; right mindfulness, which is the theme of right concentration; and right livelihood, looking after your needs in a skillful way. Right livelihood is the poor stepsister of the eightfold path. It’s the factor that the Buddha hardly defines at all. He simply says … 
  11. Guardian Meditations, Right & Wrong
     … We want to make sure that our motivation in dealing with other people is always right in line with what’s skillful. If you have ill will for anyone, it’s going to be hard to act skillfully toward that person. So we spread thoughts of goodwill, not so that we’ll stay around forever with everybody, but so that we’ll be motivated … 
  12. Delighting the Mind
     … Once he was able to step back from his thoughts and see them, not so much in terms of their content but in terms of the state of mind behind them and where they would lead—the skillful thoughts leading to good actions, the unskillful thoughts leading to unskillful actions—then he knew what to do: Abandon the unskillful thoughts and develop the skillful … 
  13. Respect
     … If you notice any skillful qualities, you try to develop them. You don’t just simply watch them arise and pass away. You try to nurture them, giving rise to them if they’re not there, and maintaining them when they are, so that they can grow. Among those skillful qualities, two really important ones are alertness and mindfulness. Mindfulness is the ability to … 
  14. The Dhamma Channel
     … what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, where true happiness lies, where long-term suffering lies. If you’re properly tuned, it’s crystal clear. So try to tune your mind to the breath energy right now. Tune your mind in to this channel where all the breath channels in the body are connected and everything’s nourishing … 
  15. What Am I Becoming?
     … This is your nourishment for skillful becomings. The more you engage in the practice of the precepts and the practice of meditation, the more you become a meditator, the more you become a practitioner—and that’s a good thing to become. The same with clinging to views: Views can cause you suffering or they can be part of the path, as when you … 
  16. On Being Non-reactive
     … it’s one of the mental skills you want to develop as part of a whole range of skills you’re going to need. When you know how to use it correctly, then it can do a lot for you.
  17. Basic Breath, Basic Insight
     … You’re trying to train the mind in new skills. While you’re with the breath, ardency means trying to be as sensitive as possible to how the breath feels, as sensitive as possible to how you can adjust the breath in a way that really does feel good, because sometimes when you adjust it, you can be too heavy-handed. You can force … 
  18. Up for the Challenge
    Years back, I was giving a talk at a meditation center back East, and I happened to mention that when you meditate, when you practice, there has to be the desire to practice, the desire to develop skillful qualities and to abandon unskillful ones. It’s part of right effort. One of the people in the audience raised his hand and said, “Wait a … 
  19. Generating Energy
     … They’ve done studies of people who are really expert in physical skills and they’ve discovered that these people have the ability to motivate themselves using both types of motivation: a strong sense of the harm that can be done if you don’t master the skill, and a strong sense of the benefits that can come when you do. So you have … 
  20. Appropriate Attention
     … The first is that unskillful action should be abandoned, skillful actions should be developed. These include actions in thought, word, and deed. So that there are some shoulds there. The other categorical teaching builds on that: the four noble truths. Craving, the second truth, is an unskillful action. The noble eightfold path, the fourth truth, is a skillful way of acting. And here, too … 
  21. Purity
     … trying to play our hand in such a way that ultimately we’re not dealt hands anymore, where we’ve got a happiness that doesn’t depend on either the hand dealt to us or our skill in playing it. That’s the goal. But in the meantime, we have to learn the proper skill and take it in the proper direction. The elements … 
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