Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- On Top of Your Actions… What can you do to make sure they don’t arise, and if they’re there, what can you do to get rid of them? As for skillful qualities, what can you do to make them stronger? How do you strengthen your mindfulness, how do you strengthen your concentration? Just keep coming back. You have to be really on top of things. Right effort …
- The Real World Isn’t for Real… He encourages persistence, i.e., learning to take delight in developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, whether it means just watching them or actually actively undoing the unskillful ones to replace them with something more skillful. The Buddha has you feed on mindfulness, concentration, discernment—finding joy in all these things. When you can find joy in this path, you can look at …
- Being Still… But remember that being quiet is also a form of doing, and sometimes it’s the most skillful doing, the most skillful thing you can do. Try to keep the mind as quiet as possible, as still as possible, as if you’re listening to music far, far away and you want to try to make out the tones, make out the melody. You …
- Metta Metacognition… where it’s skillful, where it’s not skillful, where you’re getting good results, where you’re not getting good results. You can apply the same principle to the practice of metta itself. You might call this metta metacognition: observing and thinking about what it means to think thoughts of goodwill. What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean for …
- The Gift of Spiritual Materialism… It’s through our actions that we can foster them and bring them to that same level of skill, the same state of maturity. Virtue grows out of that conviction. In your quest to be skillful, you don’t want to harm anyone in any way. So you hold by the precepts—the five, the eight, the 227 precepts—as a way of making …
- A Refuge Bigger than the World… how to see the importance of their actions, and to develop skillful actions, and to be convinced of the truth that there is such a thing as cause and effect. There are consequences to our actions, and we have the power to make those consequences good or bad. The best use of that power, of course, is to do things that give rise to …
- Virtue, Concentration, Discernment… Then you reflect on the commentator to see how skillful it is. You make sure that it’s not discouraging, that it’s not a horrible beast of a critic, that its criticism is there, not so much to put a final stamp of disapproval on something, but simply to say that, given that this is a work in progress, this is how things …
- Goodwill & Gratitude… Of course, it was assisted by other qualities, but it started with that wish: “Is there a happiness that’s true? Is there happiness that doesn’t harm anybody? “He said that his search for awakening was a search for what is skillful. And that’s what skillful means: something that’s conducive to true happiness for yourself and for other people, other beings …
- Choose Your Actions Wisely… You’ve got to figure out why you keep doing something that’s not that skillful. Sometimes it’s just a lack of imagination. You can’t think of any other way of relating to that particular issue. This is why it’s good to read the Dhamma, good to listen to the Dhamma, because the Buddha gives you new ways of taking apart …
- Don’t Practice in a Row… Then, as your powers of observation get sharper, you begin to see that there may be some unskillful motives lurking behind what seems to be skillful. But you’re not going to see them until, one, you’ve been trying your best to work on skillful intentions and, two, you learn how to get the mind really quiet so that you can see the …
- Exploring Contentment… In other words, you want to learn skills so that you can walk into a situation and get the most out of it. That’s the approach you take to the breath. It’s not a matter of simply sitting with whatever the breath is going to do—because, as you’re going to find out, what the breath can do is not totally …
- On the Path of the Breath… You can’t get to that level without having developed these other skills, because these are the skills that refine your powers of awareness. They’re not taking you to a place that you could create, which is what you’ve been doing all along, but they are taking you to a dimension you couldn’t have found without having created the creations. The …
- Quiet in Every Way… Anthropologists say that when they try to pick up the skills of primitive tribes, these are the hardest of all—the skills of a hunter—because being a hunter requires so much mind/body discipline. So we need to be disciplined, even though it takes effort, for we’re here hunting the deathless. In the beginning we’re hunting subtle breaths, and then we …
- Heedfulness… As the Buddha said, the root of all skillful qualities, all the goodness in life, comes from heedfulness: the sense of how important your actions are, and the sense that you have power in your power of choice—so you want to use that power well. Heedfulness is often equated with a sense of fear, but it’s a skillful kind of fear: the …
- Worlds Inside & Out… There are two skillful ways of dealing with this. One is to create a sense of real ease, well-being in the body through the breath so that you get more and more inclined to stay. The other is to look at these worlds in the mind to see what you get out of them. In other words, get yourself tired of this continual …
- The Time & Place to Let Go… You have to figure out when it’s skillful, when it’s not; in which ways it is skillful and which ways it’s not. So for anything that would pull you away or adds extra burdens to the mind that are unnecessary, the thinking or the perception of not-self is a useful tool to have to cut them away. You can say …
- Meticulous… It’s in seeing cause and effect—and particularly the difference between a skillful way of speaking and an unskillful way of speaking, a skillful way of acting and an unskillful way of acting, and noticing the ramifications of your words and deeds—that you develop the sensitivity and the quickness to know the even more subtle ramifications of events in the mind. So …
- Truths Noble in the Heart… You do, or say, or think something with a skillful intention, and the results are going to be good; you do, or say, or think something with unskillful intentions, and the results are going to be bad. That’s simple – but the problem is that that simple principle gets iterated many, many, many times. And that makes its results complex. How many times in …
- Give of Yourself… pleasant, painful, neither pleasant nor painful, because they’re related to skillful, unskillful, and neutral actions. You’re talking about karma to get people to know what kind of actions they should and shouldn’t be doing. If you say that all feelings resulting from action are painful, who’s going to bother trying to be skillful? That’s a case where there’s …
- Battling Negativity… That’s only one of many allies that you can call on, one of many skills that you can master so that you can unlearn your old habits and replace them with skillful ones. In this way, your sense of well-being, your desire for happiness, isn’t so divided and conflicted. It’s all open and aboveboard and it’s focused on one …
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