Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 88
  2. Subduing Greed & Distress
     … They require new skills, and there’s a different sense of you. After a while, though, as your skill develops, you begin to get used to the fact that being a meditator is a good person to be. The world of the meditation is a good place to be. You find that you can get your balance and keep it here. And ideally, this … 
  3. Taking an Active Role
     … You do try to extend skillful types of pleasure, based on concentration, based on mindfulness, but you realize that you don’t just stretch the pleasure itself. You work on the causes. Try to keep them going as long as you can. If you find you mind slipping off, ask yourself: What happened just now? Where did you lose your focus? Where did you … 
  4. Hunker Down
     … There might be kusala dhamma or akusala dhamma, in other words, skillful or unskillful qualities in the mind, but the Dhamma’s right there in the mind, good or bad: That’s what you’ve got. As a meditator, your task is to sort out which mental events are skillful and which ones are not, who are your friends inside, who are not your … 
  5. Establishing Priorities
     … So there is a skill to leaving meditation as well, a skill to opening your eyes. When you open your eyes, remind yourself that the breath-body is still here, the sense of energy in the body is still here. All too often when we open our eyes, all our attention goes flowing out into the visual world and our sense of the body … 
  6. Taking Responsibility
     … Meditation is like a skill. The teacher can teach you the basic techniques. It’s like a skill of learning how to weave a basket. The teacher can teach you lots of different weaving patterns, but whether you will weave well or not is up to you: your own powers of observation, learning to look at what you’ve done and see what needs … 
  7. The Flood of Views
     … such as the view that skillful actions need to be developed, that unskillful actions need to be abandoned. Suffering and stress should be comprehended, their cause should be abandoned, their cessation should be realized, and the path to their cessation should be developed. Those are the views that get us across. As for other views, we have to learn how to let them go … 
  8. Setbacks
     … This is an important skill in the practice: the ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep on going. And there are various aspects to this skill. One is learning how to look at things over the long run. Just because there’s a setback doesn’t mean that you’re in an inexorable downward trend. Things can get set back for … 
  9. Old Kamma & New
     … So you try to make it skillful. The skillful intention now is to create a state of concentration in the mind and let go of everything else that comes in. As for the right quality, you want to have a sense of ease and congeniality with your object. When you’re working with the breath, remember that it’s your friend. If you find … 
  10. Eyes in the Back of Your Head
    One of the most important skills in meditation practice is learning how to develop both a clear center, a strong focal point, and full-body awareness. You’ve got to have both. A focal point without the full-body awareness is hard to maintain continually. You can maintain it when everything is quiet and there are no disturbances. But as soon as there’s … 
  11. The Pursuit of Excellence
     … As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he was discontent with regard to skillful qualities, to say nothing of unskillful qualities. Anything that was unskillful in his mind, he would drop it. As for what was skillful, he said: “If there’s anything more I can do, anything I still have to master that I haven’t mastered yet, I … 
  12. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … Which means when you think of goodwill for yourself, it should include not only, “May I be happy,” but also, “May I understand the causes for happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Then you spread the same thought to others, hoping that they will behave in a skillful way, too. You place no limits on your goodwill. Ask yourself: “Is … 
  13. Heedfulness is the Path
     … When you look back through the Canon, you find many places where he said that heedfulness is the quality that underlies all the other skillful qualities you develop in the mind. Heedfulness, appamada , can also be translated as vigilance, wariness, non- complacency. In other words, it’s the realization that there are genuine dangers in the world and you have to be careful about … 
  14. The Limits of Old Kamma
     … Make the most of your freedom to focus on your ability to expand skillful potentials. Occasionally you’ll find yourself running up against some blockages, or pains that, no matter how skillfully you breathe, are going to stay as pains. Or there may be some chatter away in the mind that won’t go away. You don’t have to focus on it; just … 
  15. Seriously Happy
     … That was the problem the Buddha himself said he had to overcome with his desire to do whatever needed to be done, and not to satisfy himself even with skillful qualities. He had to be discontent with his skillfulness. As long as he hadn’t reached the ultimate level, he wouldn’t rest. He would appreciate what he had gained. As he often says … 
  16. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … It’s not a matter of being smart or dumb, simply a matter of holding onto the conviction that these are skillful mind states. And the task is set out: If you want to find a way to true happiness, you learn how to stitch these things together. So you focus on arising and passing away, but with a specific purpose. When those moments … 
  17. The Middle Way
     … You see that your actions play a huge role in giving rise to suffering, so you have to resolve to act in ways that are skillful. And you actually follow through, in terms of your speech, you actions, your livelihood. Then you start focusing more directly on the mind, because the mind is where all these actions come from. You look at the qualities … 
  18. Guardian Meditations
     … He gained awakening because he was so determined that whatever skill there might be, he was going to master it. If the mind wasn’t skillful enough, he’d keep on trying, trying, trying. When he found that Dhamma, he taught it for free. He walked all over northern India, teaching whoever might be available, whoever might be ready to hear the teaching and … 
  19. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … In other words, you learn to replace unskillful attachments with more skillful ones. Eventually, you’re going to have to let go of the skillful ones, but that doesn’t mean you don’t hold on tight in the mean time. It’s like climbing a ladder. You hold on tightly to one rung, knowing that you’re going to have to let go … 
  20. Lust
     … The developing refers to developing skillful qualities of mind, developing the path. The letting go is the letting go of craving, ignorance, all the causes of suffering. This is an important point to keep in mind, but we tend to forget it in different ways. One way of forgetting it is to delight in developing unskillful qualities. We like our greed. We like our … 
  21. Chewed Up by Your Food
     … Or you might start thinking about the things you did in order to get that pleasure, which were not necessarily skillful. That can eat at you. And our thoughts, as we’ve seen many times, can eat us up. Especially when we think about the stupid and thoughtless things we’ve done in the past, or ways in which we’ve suffered in the … 
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