Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Mindfulness Gets Intimate… Mindfulness as a factor for awakening is present in me.” “Me, me, me.” But you’re using “I” and “me” in a skillful way, because it’s on this level that you’re making an effort to get the mind into right concentration. In fact, you could read that instructions for keeping track, say, of the breath—ardent, alert, and mindful—putting aside greed …
- Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt… If you have goodwill for yourself and goodwill for others, it’s a lot easier to act on skillful motives, to do skillful things. So how do you develop goodwill? You remind yourself of where happiness comes from: It comes from the mind and it gets expressed through your actions. Your actions can have an influence on your happiness and the happiness of others …
- Lessons from Stilling the Mind… But when you’ve gained some control over your unskillful thoughts and you’re thinking only skillful thoughts, you’re like a cowherd who doesn’t have to worry about the cows getting into the rice, because the rice has been harvested. They can wander as they like, and nobody’s going to get upset. The cowherd can just be mindful of “those cows …
- Better to Give than to Consume… First you give up your unskillful selves as you develop the skillful ones, but then after you’ve worked so hard on developing the skillful ones, the Buddha said you’ve got to give those up, too, for the sake of your long-term welfare and happiness. There’s a reward that comes from not hanging on. You’re always trading up—but you …
- Loving Yourself Wisely… When there’s a skillful impulse, you can see that it’s there as well. The second gift that comes from the meditation is the strength to let go of the unskillful impulses and to develop the skillful ones. And to remember these things: what’s skillful and what’s not, and what you should do with these things as they arise. That’s …
- An Island above the Flood… If something unskillful comes up in the mind, your duty is to comprehend it and abandon it, and then to give rise to skillful qualities in its place. So again, you’re not just “being the knowing,” you’re not just accepting whatever comes. You’re applying appropriate attention. Bare attention, by the way, is not appropriate. Bare attention is just aware of what …
- Clinging & Feeding… In other words, he has you look at your feeding habits for the mind and notice where they’re unskillful and how you can replace them with more skillful feeding habits—particularly in terms of your views, your habits and practices, and your sense of who you are. You try to develop those in a skillful way, so that eventually they lead you to …
- The Karma Snake… What are you doing right now? Is it skillful? What will its results be? What can you do to make sure that you get better and better at your skill? For instance, as you’re staying with the breath, how you can get more stably concentrated, and more reliably concentrated, and not get worked up about the things that eat away at your concentration …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… So whatever skills can get you here, either by taking an interest in the mind in the present or by taking an interest in the breath in the present, you want to develop them. Sometimes, though, when people can settle down in the present moment, they’re in a great hurry to move on, saying, “What’s the next step?” Well, the next step …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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