Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Construction Techniques
     … And he found his goal not by giving up on goals, but by getting very skilled in these processes of fabrication and understanding them. Where did he understand them? He understood them in the present moment, at the moment where they start. And he taught a technique. Again, if the present moment were totally a given, you wouldn’t need much of a technique … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Defilements as Not-self
     … He says that you should take that desire you have for happiness and honor it, knowing that there’s a skillful way that you can do it: It’s not selfish, it’s not self-serving, or if it is self-serving, it’s serving yourself as you’re serving others. So first you have to overcome that resistance to wishing yourself well. This … 
  18. The Path is Fabricated
     … abandoning unskillful qualities; developing skillful ones in their place. This is what we’re doing as we’re on the path. And it actually applies to all the factors of the path. We’re developing right view; developing right resolve. With right speech and right action, right livelihood, we’re abandoning unskillful forms of speech, action, livelihood. With right mindfulness and right concentration, we … 
  19. The Reality of Your Thoughts
     … So even though there are some constraints on what we could possibly think and possibly do at any one time, those constraints don’t prevent us from doing what’s skillful. So always try to look for that: What’s the skillful way of dealing with this? A particular thought or a particular emotion comes up: “Is this worth pursuing or is this worth … 
  20. Trading Up
     … You have to learn it by developing patience, and a big aid is finding out where your skills are, where your strengths are. You may be weak in some areas, but you’ve got your strengths, and those are the things you lean on as you try to develop more persistence, more patience, more tenacity, more endurance. If all you can think about are … 
  21. Being Reliable
     … You know what unskillful actions can lead to and what skillful actions can lead to. Do your best to follow the skillful path. When you have a clear sense of what’s right, what’s wrong, where suffering comes from, where the end of suffering comes from, you have to dig up the appropriate resources inside. They’re there. It’s not the case … 
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