Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Victory… Get to know this area really well, because your lack of skill in dealing with it is what causes the suffering. But that lack of skill can be turned into skill if you bring the right knowledge. When the four noble truths talk about suffering, they’re talking about this suffering, the suffering that’s caused from within. So explore this area. Like the …
- Booster Stages… It’s a slightly different skill from getting the mind into concentration. It requires a lighter touch. Less conversation. Or like when you’re sailing: It takes a while for the sails to finally catch the wind, then your work at the rudder is different from the away it was before the sails caught the wind. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, there are …
- Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong… We’re looking at life as a skill. And the skill is determined both by your intentions behind your actions and by the results of the actions. Say you intend to make a chair. As you’re planing the wood, the plane digs a little bit deeper than you intended it to. You’re judging a work in progress, so you figure out what …
- Sources of Lasting Happiness… qualities that help you act in skillful ways because they enable you to see what’s actually going on. They can help you see what you’re doing and see the results of what you’re doing. If you see that the results are not good, they can help you think of new ways of acting that will be better. These are the qualities …
- Question & Probe… So it’s important that you learn how to protect this space you create here, because it’s so easily overrun, especially when you’re first working on this skill. When you can develop and maintain it, it becomes your safe place. The mind needs a safe place—and not only a safe place, but also a range of weapons or tools: skills that …
- Samvega & Pasada… When you run up against obstacles, you sit there and watch them for a while and figure out, “Okay, what’s the obstacle here and what’s the way around it?” They’ve done psychological studies of people who are extremely skillful in different fields, and they’ve found that it starts with having a strong sense of the danger and drawbacks that can …
- Changing Your Mind… learning how to recognize an unskillful state when it comes, and then being able to remind yourself, “What do I do with this so that I don’t give in to it?” It’s the same with recognizing a skillful state: You have to remember, “What I do with this so that I can maintain it?” So this kind of change, you have to …
- Working Ourselves Free… Then there’s the effort of giving rise to skillful qualities that haven’t arisen yet, and maintaining and developing the ones that have. And these are the skillful qualities you want to focus on: your alertness, your mindfulness, your concentration, and your discernment. Underlying all this is a sense of heedfulness, that what you’re doing is really important. As soon as you …
- Inner Discontent… The next step is to figure out the next time around, “How can I improve on this? How can I learn not to make that mistake again? And how can I also encourage the set of skills that I can depend on?”—i.e., developing things that are right in the mind, that can give you the strength to keep going. This perception of …
- A Game of Chess… A very simple principle Ajaan Lee mentions is that, first, you learn how to let go of whatever’s obviously bad, obviously unskillful, and hold on tight to what’s skillful. When your skillful qualities have done their work, then you can turn around and look at them. See how those are fabricated as well. Then you let them go. It all sounds nice …
- Feeding the Mind… As you get more and more skilled staying here, learning how to work with the breath, finding what the breath can do for the body, you begin to realize that a lot of things you used to depend on emotionally outside, you don’t have to depend on anymore. It’s as if the breath is health food for the mind. We’ve been …
- The Food of Feelings… Fabricating it is a skill. Think back on any of the skills you’ve ever developed in your life and you realize the really important ones are those that take time and require your ability to just keep coming back, coming back, coming back. They require your ability to push aside any thoughts of doubt or discouragement or frustration or self-recrimination. Thoughts like …
- Seclusion… As you get more and more skilled with the concentration, you learn how to tap into that source of food at a moment’s notice. But in the beginning it takes time. So if you catch the mind leaning into the future, wondering what’s next, or leaning back into the past, longing for what’s gone, remember that that’s a form of …
- Choose Your Cravings Wisely… After all, to get the mind into the present moment requires some skill, and you have to be able to remember what’s involved in the skill. How do you make the most of the breath in the present moment? How do you get to the mind to be willing to settle down? These are things that you remember from what you’ve learned …
- Skillful Selfing… As with any action, the question is when is it skillful and when is it not. He recommends that you develop a sense of self that has a sense of responsibility. “The self as its own mainstay,” as he says, Attahi attano natho. The self is competent. There’s a passage where Ven. Ananda talks about how even though conceit is something we try …
- Getting Connected Inside… There are several skills that you have to juggle in the beginning: spreading your awareness, connecting the breath energy, trying to get centered. Sometimes they seem to be working at cross-purposes, but as you get more and more acquainted inside, you these skills all begin to come together. That’s how the concentration becomes solid all around, and a good basis for seeing …
- Jhana: Responsible Happiness… Which means that we need some internal skills. That’s what right concentration is for. As you focus on the breath, try to bring your focus to a nice steady spot. Ajaan Lee’s image is of a post planted at the edge of the sea. The sea rises, but the post doesn’t rise with the sea. The sea ebbs, but the post …
- Contentment vs. Initiative… He himself said that one of the secrets of how he gained awakening was that he didn’t rest content with his skillful qualities. If there were further skills to develop, he’d work on them. So you’ve got to show initiative in your practice. But there is a type of inner contentment where, once the mind has a single object, you learn …
- Gratitude to Things… These have all been provided through someone’s skillful intention, someone’s compassionate motives, someone’s generosity. The reason that this is an important distinction—that you’re grateful to the people for the things, rather than being grateful to the things themselves—is that if you feel gratitude to your bed, it’s hard not to get attached to your bed, and to …
- Focused on Your Duties… That requires a lot of skill. But even just the skill of being able to choose your cravings wisely so that you can go to a good place where you can continue practicing requires that you put a lot of time in to get to know your mind and understand the various ways in which craving has fooled you in the past. It lies …
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