Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Mindful of Death
     … that we have this opportunity to train the mind, to see it more clearly, to develop skillful qualities and drop unskillful ones. That would be the proper reason for treasuring this breath as it comes in, this breath as it goes out, and the next one, and the next one, however many you get. You want to appreciate each one for the opportunities it … 
  3. Virtues & Values
     … If a skillful quality arises in the mind, again, you don’t simply watch it come and go, and think that that’s insight. You try to develop it; you try to maintain it. You protect it. And as you protect it, it protects you. Of course, as you’re developing good qualities inside, other people will benefit. The less greed, aversion, anger, and … 
  4. Death World
     … It’s because of heedfulness that we think about being skillful in out actions, as we think about the consequences of what we’re doing. There’s a passage when he talks about how we can give rise to desire, aversion, delusion very easily if we don’t think about the consequences of those things. We should stop and think: “What will be the … 
  5. Dealing with the Hindrances
     … You look inside to see how the mind is processing things, how it’s fabricating things, and what the results are, whether they’re skillful or not. When the Buddha was teaching Rahula about the practice as a whole, the image he used was of a mirror. You look at your actions as a mirror to see what’s going on in the mind … 
  6. Feeding on the Breath
     … Even if we do them in a skillful way, there’s still some stress and suffering, but it’s a lot less. And it can actually provide the path that we want. When we get the mind to settle down, we’ve got the form of the body. We’ve got the feeling that comes when we stay with the breath, the feeling of … 
  7. The Right Place to Look
     … You can’t make them skillful, which is what’s required to put an end to suffering. It’s something that each person has to develop for him or herself alone. So here you are with yourself. As for the things you see out in the world, the potentials for all the harm that people do, a lot of those are in us as … 
  8. Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away
     … In other words, using a skillful thought to drive out a non-skillful one. Thinking of yourself as being young, looking in a mirror and seeing a dead snake wrapped around your neck: Have a similar sense of disgust with the thoughts that are pulling you away. Then there’s the image of a person seeing something he doesn’t want to see, so … 
  9. An Island of Certainty
     … So it’s good to practice that skill now, even though we haven’t reached the point of being on the threshold of awakening the way the Buddha was on that night. We can practice the skill, learning how to see things that are happening in the body and the mind simply as that: events, right here, right now. That knowledge you can take … 
  10. Enjoying the Path
     … You begin to see that there are certain ways of breathing that are associated with skillful states of mind, and others that are associated with unskillful states of mind. The relationship goes back and forth. Sometimes it’s the breath that encourages the skillful or unskillful state, and sometimes it’s the state that encourages a particular way of breathing. So you can get … 
  11. Your Main Foundation
     … either seeing a story as really fascinating and wanting to follow through with it, or realizing that it’s not a very skillful story and learning how to separate yourself out from it. That’s one of the ways in which these different ways of analyzing mental phenomena are helpful. When you can see mental phenomena simply as mental phenomena, and not as a … 
  12. Gather Around the Breath
     … You’re trying to generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities, and this is one of them—to get the mind still, focused on the breath. The breath is your anchor in the present moment, so that you can see what the mind is doing in the present moment. As long as you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the … 
  13. Old Movies & New
     … Some other movies that are useful to think about are the skills you’ve developed in the past, issues that you had to work hard at to master, but you finally did. Those are useful because they give you lessons in how to approach meditation: how discipline can pay off, how things might not look like they’re going to work out in the … 
  14. Faith in the Buddha
     … Again, this is something you can’t prove ahead of time but you will find, if you take it on faith and practice in line with it, that if you act with skillful intentions, you’re going to get good results; on unskillful intentions, you’re going to get bad results. And these results last not only into this lifetime but also into future … 
  15. Learning from Sensual Desire
     … That would exclude nibbana—taking it as the end of dhammas—but everything else, skillful and unskillful, comes from desire. We have this mass of desires and thoughts and intentions that we’ve got to train, so we use the whole citta—the whole mind, the whole heart—to train the heart and the mind. Citta is usually translated as “mind,” but there are … 
  16. The Raft of Jhana
     … To get into jhana we have to learn how to take the language of our comments, the way we frame issues, how we interact with our thoughts, and the ways in which we evaluate things, and make them more skillful. This is one of the reasons why right speech is a factor of the path. It’s going to give you practice in how … 
  17. Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad
     … The Third Tetrad November 28, 2015 One of the hardest but also one of the most necessary parts of developing meditation as a skill is, at the end of each session, to reflect on at what point in the session the mind was most settled, with the greatest sense of ease; when it was quietest, the most alert, so that you can remember to … 
  18. This Fathom-Long Body
     … And because it’s a construct, you can learn how to construct it in skillful or unskillful ways. This is what you’re doing as you’re meditating: trying to construct it skillfully. When you focus on the breath, you actually do get a sense of being one with the breath. You begin to have a sense that your sense of “I” is located … 
  19. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … You can learn from them, you can follow their guidance, you can follow their example, but ultimately it comes from sitting down and really taking on your defilements, taking on your weaknesses, taking on your doubts, by strengthening the skillful qualities in your mind. As those are strengthened, you find you really can depend on them more and more. So the reason we have … 
  20. The Power of Attention
     … As he said, if we couldn’t develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones, there’d be no point in his teaching. But we can—and if we didn’t benefit from developing skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones, he wouldn’t have taught that, either. But we can. So think of your meditation as training in exercising your freedom in the most beneficial … 
  21. Inner Wealth
     … This is a good thing to believe, because if you don’t believe it, you tend not to make the effort that’s needed in order to develop more skillful actions. As a result, your actions don’t become wealth at all. They just become more scattershot. Sometimes they weigh you down. We believe in karma not just because it’s a good thing … 
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