Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- 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 …
- A Gift of Well-Being… If you learn how to tend to that state, your actions will be a lot more skillful and a lot more appropriate for the situation. It’s in this way that the meditation is a gift to yourself and to other people, just at the practice as a whole is a gift. This is clearest in generosity. You have something and you see that …
- Infinity… They went up and down depending on the skillfulness or lack of skillfulness in their actions. He also saw that the pattern of how this simple principle worked out was complex. Sometimes you would do something skillful in this lifetime and go to a bad destination next time around, either because of something bad you had done before, or because of some bad action …
- What’s Constant, What’s Not… You put good things into the system—especially skillful intentions—and good results will have to come out. You put unskillful intentions in, bad things will have to come out. That’s something you can rely on—because as the Buddha saw, it is possible to put an end to suffering. There is a path of practice that does end suffering and it does …
- Against the Stream… As with all kinds of karma, the question is, “When is it skillful, when is it not?” And the skillful question is: “What when I do it, will lead to long term welfare and happiness? What will lead to long term harm and suffering?” It’s the same with your thoughts: Which thoughts, when you engage with them, will lead to long-term welfare …
- Habits & Practices… You don’t need the pride, you don’t need a strong sense of “I,” in order to maintain them, because you’ve directly seen the value of skillful behavior. You realize that your unskillful behavior was what prevented you from seeing the deathless before that. So there’s no reason to break the precepts again. As a result, you no longer need the …
- Asalha Puja… But it’s a skill that can be mastered, especially when you appreciate the advantages that come from mastering the skill. That makes it easier to stick with it. So if you find the mind wandering off, remind yourself: If you don’t master this skill, there’s just a lot of suffering left over, waiting for you in the future. And there’s …
- Fabrication at the Breath… As some of those physical symptoms go away, it’s a lot easier to look at the situation and have more of a balanced view of what’s actually going on, and what would be a skillful thing to say, as opposed to what you just feel like saying. What would be the skillful thing to do? Is this the right time to act …
- Frame Your Questions Well… But when he was talking in later years about his quest, he said he was in search of what was skillful. In other words, he was looking for what could be done skillfully to put an end to suffering. He framed all his questions in terms of actions and the results. If he saw that he wasn’t getting the results he wanted, he …
- The Wheel of Dhamma… As long as you’re still on the path, you have to develop all the qualities the Buddha recommended, including desire—the desire to figure out which qualities in the mind are skillful and which ones are unskillful, and what can you do about them so that you can maximize the skillful ones and get rid of the unskillful ones and make sure the …
- Keep Things Simple… But the Buddha’s focus in the practice is on being skillful in doing - keeping mindful, keeping alert, being ardent in the practice, finding a sense of “just right.” When they talk about the Middle Way, the middle-ness lies in the amount of effort that’s just right for where you are right now, which sometimes may require a lot of effort, sometimes …
- Perception… So you can replace that perception with more skillful ones. Then you can look at the other perceptions and thought-fabrications that gather around the pain — the stories the mind tells itself about how long you’ve had this pain, or how much you’ve suffered in life, and “poor you”: all this suffering, all this pain. You begin to ask yourself, “Do you …
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