Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Thoughts About Thinking
     … That’s a different set of skills: less thinking, but a lot of vigilance. You check to see whether the mind is ready to run off anywhere else. It’ll send its signals. Scientists have studied people who aren’t aware of when they’ve made a decision. The decision comes to the surface of their minds after it’s been made someplace deeper … 
  3. Comprehending Pain
     … the effort to abandon unskillful mental qualities that have arisen, and then to prevent more unskillful qualities that haven’t yet arisen from arising; then wanting to give rise to skillful qualities, and wanting to maintain them once they’ve arisen. So the path involves effort, and it’s the right concentration that gives you the strength rewarding your efforts so that you can … 
  4. Farming Your Body & Mind
     … But if you sense them, you can move them in a skillful direction. One of the strongest fermentations, of course, is the desire for pleasure. This is one of the reasons why we try to create a pleasant state of concentration, so that when the mind is hungry for pleasure, you can say, “Well, here it is. Why go looking for it someplace else … 
  5. Developing Discernment
     … Seeing people excel in a particular skill, and we’d like to excel the way they do, because it looks like a good way to live. It looks like we’d be happy doing that ourselves. And so what the principle of conviction is asking is that we take the Buddha’s life as our map, as a basis for judging what it’s … 
  6. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
    Years back, I was teaching a retreat on karma, when one of the retreatants, whose background was in Zen, raised his hand and said, “Why this emphasis on the minutiae of actions and their skillfulness when the unconditioned emptiness is all around us? We can just open up to it, and there it is.” I explained that you’re not going to see the … 
  7. Alone Together
     … People found that being forced to live together became unbearable because they lacked the skills needed to live together in a peaceful way. This is one of the reasons why we have the Vinaya. The rules are there, not simply to look after the individual’s mind, but also to look after peace in the community, harmony in the community. So as we’re … 
  8. How the Tree Leans
     … It can be skillful or unskillful. So the fact that it’s bent is not necessarily bad. You want to bend it in the right direction. The Buddha gives some examples of what the wrong directions are. Thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of harmfulness: These bend you in the wrong way. You’re heading in the wrong direction. Thoughts of renunciation … 
  9. Wise About Pleasure
     … Once you determine that you’ve got to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones, you actually do it. When unskillful qualities haven’t arisen yet, you do your best to prevent them. This is a part of the path that tends to get overlooked. We spend so much time thinking about the present moment, focusing on the present moment, but there are times … 
  10. Control
     … So what we are trying to do here is to find the limits of control, and what skillful control is—and to see how we can control the aggregates to turn them into a path to get what we really desire, which is a happiness we can trust, a happiness that doesn’t change, a happiness that doesn’t let us down, a happiness … 
  11. Restraint Leads to Freedom
     … May beings be skillful.” Of course, you’re included among all beings as well. That’s why we start out with the thought, “Ahaṁ sukhito homi, May I be happy.” That means, “May I understand the causes for true happiness and be willing and able to act on them.” Those causes include developing skillful qualities and being restrained in unskillful qualities, to the point … 
  12. Maybe the Buddha Knew Something
     … The simple fact of trying to develop skillful qualities in your mind and to delight in developing skillful qualities and to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities: That really places you outside of the social norm. After all, we’re told that people who don’t give full expression, say, to their sexuality are warped and all cramped-up and unhappy people. But the Buddha … 
  13. Working Through the Breath
     … You have to go through this skill to get to that point beyond skill where all the fabrications fall away. So focusing on the breath in this way teaches us important lessons about the mind—lessons we wouldn’t have learned if we had focused just on the mind from the very beginning. This means that, even when the breath falls away at death … 
  14. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
    As we sit here, we have influences coming in from the past, and then we have our skills in the present moment. The skills are primarily in the three kinds of fabrication—bodily, the way you breathe; verbal, the way you talk to yourself; and then mental, the perceptions and the feelings you focus on. They’re all important. For instance, with the breath … 
  15. An Hour of Bliss
     … If you can’t be at home in the present moment, where are you going to be at home? If you can’t be on good terms with your breath, who are you going to be on good terms with? So it’s an essential skill. If you come at it with the right attitude, you find that the breath has a lot to … 
  16. Nurturing Your Inner Adult
     … Then you can sort things out: “Okay, what kind of fear is this? Where is the skillful element in the fear? Where is the unskillful element? What unreasonable voices do I have to talk to? How can I change your perception of the situation?” Remember those three types of fabrication. There’s the breath, which is bodily fabrication; directed thought and evaluation—in other … 
  17. Shame & Compunction
     … Now, he’s not saying to feel bad about yourself, because he wants you to develop skill. He’s also talking within the context of their being noble warriors. Noble warriors were a very proud caste. Their sense of shame was based on the idea that certain things were beneath them. That’s an attitude you really want to cultivate actively: Harmful behavior is … 
  18. Adjusting the Flame
     … Right effort is generating the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities and to develop skillful ones, and that gets parsed out: If unskillful qualities have not yet arisen, you want to make sure they don’t. If they have arisen, you want to get rid of them. As for skillful qualities, if they haven’t arisen yet, you try to give rise to … 
  19. Life Well Lived
     … Look at all the endless suffering that people go through in life—all caused by their own lack of skill. So you can shine a light in your life and with your life by following this practice. The important thing about recollecting the Buddha is to remind yourself that he was a human being. He put an end to suffering not through any special … 
  20. A Load Off the Mind
     … This is the skill you want to be able to take back with you when you leave this quiet corner. It allows you to have that quiet corner in the mind where you can observe these things. And you can use that quietness to get more and more sensitive, more and more skilled at learning how to take the loads off the mind.
  21. Breath Meditation: The Second Tetrad
     … The mind can be on a more even keel and much less likely to tip over because you’re getting more and more skilled at the things that shape the mind, that keep it in balance. And you can use that skill to a lot of good ends.
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