Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. More Buddhist Engineering
     … The idea of making happiness may sound artificial, but it’s actually a skill. That’s what’s appealing about Buddhism. It takes things that in other systems of thought are pretty random and shows that they can be nurtured as a skill. This applies not only to the act of making merit, but also to the act of making the path. Sometimes people … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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