Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Keep Your Options Open
     … Because a principle that allows for skillfulness is an important principle to hold to. You can develop skills, and you will develop as a person. The more skills you have, if they really are skillful, then the more options you open for yourself. A view of causality that doesn’t allow for the development of skills closes all the doors. That’s why the … 
  3. The Path of Mistakes
     … They, in and of themselves, are not skillful or unskillful, but the way you perceive them and the thoughts you build around them — those can be skillful and unskillful.” So learn how to step back. In this way you use your understanding of fabrication to deconstruct unskillful emotions, unskillful mind states, and then to develop skillful emotions and skillful mind states in their place … 
  4. Just Rightness
     … That’s where you hold to the right questions to keep in mind all the time: “What am I doing that’s unskillful? What am I doing that’s skillful? What makes it unskillful? What makes a skillful? What can I do to become more skillful? What actions would be more skillful?” It’s a question of balance, keeping the mind balanced right here … 
  5. The Skill of the Breath
  6. The Skill of Not Suffering
  7. The Skills of a Hunter
  8. Equanimity as a Skill (outdoors)
  9. The Skill of True Happiness
  10. A Refuge in Skillful Action
  11. Use Your Defilements
     … This is a skill that we’re working on, and it’s in the process of developing these skills and the path that we refine the mind. We get to recognize which defilements are useful, which ones are not. Like that desire to get the mind to settle down: If you focus on the results you want, you’re not going to get them … 
  12. Intro to the Skill of Meditation
  13. For the Sake of the Skill
  14. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way
     … There are skills you can develop. And so—instead of just being frustrated with the fact that your old skills are not working, and are coming to a dead end—he says, “Try these new skills. They work. Pull on the udder of the cow and you’ll get the milk you want.” The skills are very simple. They require persistence. This is where … 
  15. Abandoning Effluents (1)
     … delight in developing skillful qualities, delight in abandoning unskillful qualities, and tracking down more and more the subtleties of what may seem to be skillful to begin with, but may have some lack of skill lurking inside. When you’re focused on these issues, then issues of becoming—your identity in the world—and ignorance—ignorance of the four noble truths—get weakened because … 
  16. Knowing & Acting
     … Approach it as a skill. Of course, in the beginning as with any skill, it’s like following a recipe. You follow what’s in the book and you do what you’re told to do several times until you begin to get more of an intuitive feel for what you’re doing. This is where your alertness and your understanding of what you … 
  17. Facing Danger & Hardship
     … And so, you should make a resolve, “I’m going to follow the Buddha’s teachings.” And Saripuuta says you also try to develop what he called skillful equanimity. Notice he places a condition on it: It has to be skillful. Not all equanimity is skillful. Indifference is not skillful; just giving up is not skillful, saying, “Well, I’ll just have to accept … 
  18. Commit, Reflect, Discern
     … So you approach all your actions as a skill. This relates to the Buddha’s teachings on avijjā, or ignorance. As he said, this is the factor that can turn anything in the mind into a source of suffering. The word avijjā doesn’t mean just not knowing about things. It also means a lack of skill. You’re not skilled in the duties … 
  19. Full Attention
     … Then there are the skills or lack of skills that we have in the present moment that can turn the feeling into something skillful or not. So here we’re working on our skills. The Buddha includes feeling-tones with perceptions as the big mental fabricators: the things that shape our emotions and other states of mind. This means that when trying to understand … 
  20. Learning How to Learn
    When we meditate, we’re learning a skill—learning how to do something we’ve never done before, learning to do it well—which is different from simply learning *about *something. The knowledge where you simply memorize words, analyze words, understand the words: That’s one thing. But learning how to do something is a different kind of skill. This is where the skill … 
  21. Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
     … In particular, you want to keep in mind what’s skillful and what’s unskillful, and to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities when they show their face. Then the function of right effort is to actually make the effort to encourage skillful qualities in the mind and to abandon unskillful ones. There’s a fair amount of judgment that goes along with that. You … 
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