Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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