Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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.
  13. The Language of the Heart (2)
     … So you’re taking on the culture of the noble ones, the values around wanting to abandon unskillful actions and wanting to develop skillful ones in their place. And we take on their language—which the ajaans often call the language of the heart—for analyzing what is skillful, what’s not. How do things get developed? How do things get abandoned? These tools … 
  14. 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.
  15. Giving Weight
     … Where does the weight go? Where does the importance go? Make it a habit, make it a skill, that you’re going to give the weight to the mind, that you’re going to keep the importance centered right here inside. After all, that’s where it really belongs. And when it’s here, then it can function in the most skillful, most appropriate … 
  16. Blowing Bubbles
     … Replace it with a more skillful one. This emphasizes the point that you really do have a choice. You’re not stuck with whatever comes up in the mind. Lots of different things could come up, and you learn to choose the things that are most skillful. That’s an important lesson in kamma right there. There are lots of different potentials that could … 
  17. The Bright Tunnel
     … But if you try to look at it without any tools, without any skills, though, it can seem overwhelming. This is why we have the path of practice. You work on the precepts so that when you come to the issue of suffering, you don’t carry around a lot of guilt, a lot of denial. These two things really get in the way … 
  18. Mundane Right View
     … basic principle of mundane right view is the principle of karma, that actions do yield results, and that those results are determined by the quality of the intention behind the action. Skillful intentions lead to pleasant results; unskillful ones lead to unpleasant results. Ajaan Fuang once said that this is a principle you have to believe in if you’re going to practice meditation … 
  19. Friendship
     … As with any skill, it often begins by just playing around, but you come to see that it really does have an important impact. It’s like learning to play the guitar. You get your first guitar, you pick it up and play with it, and it doesn’t sound all that good. But it’s fun to try this, try that. After a … 
  20. Equanimity & More
     … As the Buddha pointed out, there are skillful and unskillful forms of equanimity. So do your best to develop the kind of equanimity that really is skillful. That gets you focused.
  21. A Poker Mind
     … This is a skill you’re going to need to develop. So work at it outside of the meditation, too. When I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, he would test me to see if my concentration was getting better. He would say things that he knew would usually get me upset. And in the beginning, I didn’t realize what was happening and I … 
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