Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Responsible
     … You’re an agent—you act—and you want to act in a skillful way. If they say you should be out there acting in the world and not sitting here watching your actions in the mind, it’s like saying that people off alone practicing the piano are being selfish; they should perform for others. But you practice the piano so that your … 
  3. A Handful of Leaves
     … You can develop the skill to be with it and yet not suffer from it. You can also use the breath to look at mental pain because mental pain has a lot to do with all the different voices in your head, many of which you identify with. If you can stay with the breath and learn how to simply watch these things, you … 
  4. Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana
     … You want to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. Like right now: We’re developing right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These are sankharas: things we do, things we fabricate. Sometimes non-reactivity gets inserted into the path under the factor of right mindfulness. But the Buddha never defined mindfulness as non-reactivity. Mindfulness in his lexicon means the ability to keep … 
  5. Restraint
     … He basically taught the distinction between what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. Our basic motivation for doing what’s skillful, he said, is heedfulness. And heedfulness does think about future consequences. It’s because of heedfulness that we have a sense of compunction, realizing that we should care about the consequences of our acts. So when there’s the impulse to say something … 
  6. The Buddha’s Buffet
     … He just says you have to learn how to moderate your clinging so that it’s relatively skillful. And be clear-eyed about the fact that, yes, there will be modified suffering that comes from that modified clinging. That chant that we do frequently: “I’m subject to aging, illness, and death, to separation from all that is dear and appealing to me, and … 
  7. Why the Breath
     … That’s where the skill comes in. It’s not some sort of mystic spaciousness where you get in touch with the Buddha-nature or anything like that. It’s simply the background awareness. It’s there. And there’s the question of being consciously in touch with it, being consciously open with it, or not. When you’re more in touch with the … 
  8. A Self Rightly Directed
     … You begin to see the varieties of things that can arise in the mind, skillful and unskillful, and you learn how to direct the mind in a skillful direction. That’s what it means to direct yourself rightly. So when thoughts come up in the mind that get in the way of the practice, you have to remember: They’re not the direction you … 
  9. Location, Location
     … The right approach is to consciously develop the desire of right effort to do the work—the desire to prevent unskillful qualities from arising or, if they have arisen, the desire to abandon them; the desire to give rise to skillful qualities and, once they’re there, the desire to maintain them and develop them. That effort is directed here at getting the mind … 
  10. Ingenuity
     … If you’re face-to-face with pain, what can you use—with these skills you’ve learned with the breath, the skills you’ve learned with concentration—to help alleviate the pain? Maybe they can’t make the pain go away, but they can at least help your mind not get upset about the pain. How can you use your discernment to figure … 
  11. Right Exertion at Play
     … You also have to develop skillful qualities. If they aren’t there, you give rise to them. Once they’re there, you develop them even further to their culmination. Only then is your practice complete. The nothing-but-letting-go model is based on the idea that your mind is basically pure. If anything comes up to disturb it, all you have to do … 
  12. Isolating the Aggregates
     … It’s like learning a physical skill—playing a musical instrument or dancing or learning a sport: You have to isolate your sense of the muscles you’re using if you want to master the skill. If the skill involves jumping and you haven’t been able to isolate the different muscles in your legs and the other parts of the body that you … 
  13. Analysis of Qualities
     … And when the sting is gone, it’s a lot easier to be willing to adopt some new patterns that are more skillful. That’s another thing that’s good to think about with regard to other beings, people who have actually followed the path, and who have gotten benefits. You can think: They can do it, so can I. All those people in … 
  14. In Control
     … You can remember your sense of what’s right and wrong, what skillful and what’s not skillful, and with the breath on your side, it’s a lot easier to follow through with that. If the emotion’s coming on really strong, you have to gauge whether you can do or say anything at that particular time. Sometimes you have to be very … 
  15. Sucked into the Tube
    One of the most important skills you can develop as a meditator is catching the mind in the act. To begin with, this means catching it in the act of wandering off. You make up your mind you’re going to stay with the breath. You stay for a couple breaths and all of a sudden you find yourself someplace else. So you come … 
  16. Trading Up
     … If the first time around the actions to get that pleasure happened to be skillful, maybe the second time won’t be so skillful. You’re setting yourself up for making a lot of mistakes. So resolve that you want to get the mind beyond your fascination with sensuality. The Buddha would get people ready to think in these terms first by giving a … 
  17. Concentration
     … You learn about the aggregates, you learn about which ones are skillful and which ones are not. You learn how to develop skillful fabrications and abandon unskillful ones. And it’s in this way that concentration leads to discernment. It both builds on discernment and creates the conditions for more discernment. After all, if you didn’t have some understanding of the mind, you … 
  18. The Little Things
     … It protects you from your less skillful intentions. It protects the people around you from your less skillful intentions. This is where positive self-image is an important part of the practice. Ultimately, you’re going to put even that image aside, but don’t think it’s a bad thing from the beginning. It has its uses. The same for fear of the … 
  19. Looking in the Dhamma Mirror
     … It’s one of the motivations the Buddha recommends for getting on the path, for engaging in right effort—the pride of a craftsman, the pride of someone who has mastered a skill—so that when you look at your skill, that’s the mirror you’re looking into. You say to yourself, “Okay, do this well,” and then you continue with the training … 
  20. Noble Treasures
     … Skillful action doesn’t just mean avoiding unskillful things, but also means actively doing skillful things. This is what the next treasure is about, i.e., generosity, the willingness to give, seeing that you’ve got something you’d like to share. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a material thing. It could be that you give of your time; you give of … 
  21. All-around Eye
     … As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he didn’t allow himself to rest content with skillful qualities. Even though he had developed powers of jhana, he didn’t stay there. He didn’t stay right at that spot. He kept trying to use those skillful qualities for something better and to develop things even further. That’s where you … 
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