Search results for: "Skillfulness"
- Page 85
- The Karma of Pleasure… So that’s the skillful way to deal with pleasure, the skillful kind of karma around pleasure. Try to create a pleasure that’s harmless, then use that experience of pleasure for a further purpose. That’s not the way we usually relate to pleasure. We like to indulge in it. And we don’t like to hear that there’s karma associated with …
- The Water in Your Cup… Who’s skillful? Are you skillful in handling all the difficulties of the world? This is something you can do something about. If you try to straighten out the whole world before you sit down to meditate and before you’ve worked on your mind, nothing would ever get straightened out because a lot of people would resist your ideas of how they should …
- Think… If there’s anything that’s skillful that hasn’t developed yet, you try to give rise to it. When it’s there, you try to maintain it and get it to develop even further. In other words, instead of watching things coming and going, arising and passing away, without interfering, without passing judgment, you’re actively trying to make good qualities arise and …
- Equanimity as a Factor of Awakening… Where do they get their skills? Where do they get their ideas? From the way the mind ordinarily fools itself. A thought comes in, and it’s not so much the actual content of the thought that pulls you in. There’s a lot of power of suggestion around it, a lot of hype in the mind. This is what you’ve got to …
- The Language of the Heart (1)… It was for the purpose of finding a skill that could be passed on to others: to solve his own suffering and then to teach that skill to others so that they could solve their own suffering as well. This was the whole point of the Dhamma. And so the ajaans went straight for the point. And they encouraged others to do that as …
- The Karma of Perception… For those of us who haven’t, it’s a learned skill but it’s something you can develop, sensitizing yourself to the sense of motion or energy throughout the body. Now, there are two kinds of motion. There’s the motion of the blood through your blood vessels and then there’s the motion of the breath, and they’re two different things …
- Feelings of Unworthiness… that regardless of your past, there is the possibility of learning a skill. Our educational system sometimes doesn’t encourage this. It tends to channel people into areas where they’re already talented. As a result we don’t have much practice in developing skill in areas where we’re not naturally talented. But you can learn how to learn. Think of all those …
- Questioning the Hindrances… The Buddha said the way to overcome uncertainty is to check and see what the mind is doing that’s skillful and what’s unskillful. In other words, learn how to look at cause and effect as they actually show themselves in your life, in your actions. You’ll notice that the skillful actions do require more mindfulness, more alertness, and here’s a …
- Going Out of Your Way… As the Buddha said, when you’re avoiding unskillful thoughts, that can mean either that the mind is in concentration, or simply that it’s thinking things that are skillful: not based on sensuality, not based on ill will, not based on harmfulness. But that’s not necessarily special. What makes it special is when you decide you’re going to focus in on …
- Negativity… Every thought to abandon something unskillful inside is a skillful thought. Just the thought that you would like to abandon unskillful thoughts is a skillful thought. Nourish that. See its value. Value your good intentions, because they’re the basis of the path and your ability to stick with it.
- Pleasure & Pain… As you learn how to approach both pleasure and pain in more skillful ways — as tools on the path, rather than ends in themselves — you find that your new understanding has an impact on the entirety of your life, because so much of your life is driven by pleasure and pain. When you can see them both more clearly — and your reactions to them …
- Dimensions of Right Effort… There are skillful desires and unskillful desires. The skillful desires are focused on the path for the sake of the goal. To make another analogy, it’s like driving to a mountain on the horizon. If you spend all your time looking at the mountain while you’re driving, what happens? You drive off the road. You have to focus your attention on the …
- Mindful Judgment… And as the Buddha said, with mindfulness as your gatekeeper, you develop what’s skillful and you abandon what’s not. Which means that mindfulness has an important function in learning how to be wise in judging what’s skillful and what’s not. You bring your full presence of mind as to what’s appropriate, what’s not appropriate, what needs to be …
- Endurance & Contentment… And the “knowledge” here is the knowledge of a skill: knowing how to breathe, knowing how to talk to ourselves, knowing what perceptions to hold in mind. One of the most harmful mental fabrications to focus on is how you’re suffering under some condition that other people are not suffering under and thinking that it’s not right. But then again, you don …
- Training Your Moods… One is that it is a skill that you’re working on here: the skill of staying with one object with a sense of well-being, developing skillful qualities in the mind and abandoning unskillful ones. Your ability to do this well will develop over time as you commit yourself to doing it and reflect on the results, make adjustments, and then do it …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… As you notice what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind, you let go of what’s unskillful, develop what’s skillful, and that’s what gives rise to a sense of rapture, well-being. Once you’ve been energized by the rapture, then you can calm things down. And here you’re coming from a sense of well-being, a sense …
- Appreciation… It’s a skill to master and there’s a joy that comes in mastering the skill. This is why it’s good to find happiness in the happiness of others. It’s good to find happiness in the activities of others that are genuine causes of happiness, because that makes us want to create those genuine causes in ourselves as well.
- Close to What You Know… What, at the present moment, is the most skillful way to interpret your experience of reality? What can you shape, what can you not shape? When you keep things on this level, you find you can deal with reality, shape your reality, in a much more skillful and beneficial way.
- Defiant Like the Buddha… That’s the essence of the skill that he taught. So, for unskillful mind states that you can convert into something skillful, go ahead, convert them. The ones that you can’t convert, just let them go. Even if they keep coming back, coming back, you have to remind yourself that you don’t have to go. No matter how insistent they are, you …
- The World of Conviction… But to get to the point where you apply not-self to everything, you have to learn how to create a good self, a skillful sense of self and, at the same time, have a skillful sense of the world around you, a world in which awakening is possible. Now this is a matter of conviction. You’re not going to know the truth …
- Load next page...
