Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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