Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Generosity & Virtue as Skills
     … Again, it was probably because they didn’t have many manual skills, but also because they were lacking two really important skills, areas that we don’t tend to think of as being skills: the skills of generosity and the skills of virtue. These two skills teach patience and a lot of other good attitudes that you’re going to need as you meditate … 
  2. Skill
     … Everything in the practice is a question of skill or lack of skill. Even your views can either be skillful or unskillful. Your desires can be skillful or unskillful. Your likes and dislikes can be skillful or unskillful. How do you know? By checking to see what their results are. Look at everything in terms of cause and effect. That’s where the question … 
  3. The Riddle of Freedom
     … But one of the options open to you always is that you can choose to do the skillful thing. Whether it’s in terms of your thoughts, your words, or your deeds, there’s always a skillful option. It may not be easiest option, it may require a lot of sacrifice, but the skillful option is always there. And as you choose the skillful … 
  4. Skillful in Everything
    One of the most basic concepts in the Buddha’s teaching is the distinction between skillful and unskillful. Someone once complained to one of the Buddha’s students that the Buddha didn’t take positions on all the big issues of the time: “So, is the cosmos eternal? Is it not eternal? Is it finite? Is it infinite? And was there a God who … 
  5. Gratification
     … These things are often very hard, yet they’re the skills we need to develop if we don’t want to suffer. So a second level of skill is learning how to develop skills in areas where it’s hard. That means you have to learn how to talk yourself in the right way—one, to remind yourself how important the skill is, so … 
  6. Not Resolved on Self
     … How can you develop skillful qualities and how can you abandon unskillful qualities? This way, your attention gets focused on the skill and the qualities of mind that you bring to the skill. As you practice virtue, as you practice concentration, as you practice discernment, you want to develop each of these practices into a skill. Issues of self can get pushed off to … 
  7. The Precepts
     … And you take the skills that you’ve learned—not only in meditation, but also the skills you’ve learned about generosity, the skills you’ve learned about virtue—and you put them to use. And these are skills. We tend to think about the precepts as Sunday school rules, but they’re not. They’re skills that you develop. How can you go … 
  8. Right Effort
     … We’re trying to develop the same attitude toward effort that you’d apply when developing a skill. When you see the importance of the skill and begin to get a sense of mastering the skill, there’s a sense of joy that comes from that. You notice that with any skill. As you begin to sense that you’re becoming a better and … 
  9. The Karma of Not-self
     … Given that there are actions, what kind of action is selfing, what kind of action is not-selfing? When is it skillful, when is it not? What skills can you develop to foster a skillful sense of self and learn how to use the process of not-selfing in a skillful way as well?—so that ultimately you get to that state of happiness … 
  10. Questions in the Practice
     … Asking the question of skill adds another dimension as well. When you realize that you can develop more skillful ways of acting, more skillful ways of speaking, more skillful ways of thinking, you can work at mastering the processes of action so that they’ll have an positive impact on the shape of your life, the shape of your experience. Where does skill come … 
  11. To Know the Buddha
     … When he points us to where we can look to understand happiness, where we can look to understand suffering, what we can do to understand how we’re creating suffering and how we don’t have to, he’s teaching a skill. He illustrates his skills with analogies of other people who have skills: cooks who know how to “read the sign of their … 
  12. Expanding Your Skill Set
     … I may not yet be proficient in this particular area.” Still, you can look around, what are the skills do you have? Physical skills, mental skills, social skills: You want to expand your range. This is a really good skill to have, the general governing principle which is this ability to stay mindful, to be alert, because then you can judge the results of … 
  13. The Good Side of Kamma
     … So to survive in those days, you had to have a wide range of skills. Our problem nowadays is that most people come to meditation with very little experience with manual skills. They don’t have the psychology that comes from learning a skill. So if you do have a skill of some kind—a physical skill or manual skill—try to reflect back … 
  14. Protection in all Directions
     … If you were to ask the Buddha about skillfulness, the first thing he would say would be one of his categorical teachings: that skillful qualities should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. That’s true across the board. Then he would expand on that with what are called the ten kammapatha: You start with skillful actions from the body, then skillful speech … 
  15. Skills of Mindfulness, Skills of the Breath
  16. Skills to Make You Free
     … You just have to work at your skills to do this well. The issue of free will in Buddhism is never one of absolute free will. The more skills you have, the more freedom you have. So we’re working on developing the skills that we can bring to the present moment. This is an essential part of the teaching. The Buddha wasn’t … 
  17. Against Your Type
     … There’s a skill to bowing out, just as there’s a skill to fighting. Learn to develop a full range of skills. Instead of looking at yourself as a type of personality, see the issue more as a question of what range of skills you have, where your skills have not yet developed, and where they need more work. Because the fact that … 
  18. Happiness is a Skill
     … This is where a lot of the skill comes in. Look at Ajaan Lee’s teachings on breath meditation. Many of his analogies have to do with people with skills. Many of the Buddha’s analogies for the practice also have to do with people with skills. As you’re training the mind, it’s like developing any skill. You learn a few things … 
  19. Negotiating with the Committee
     … Each one is related to a particular skill set. Some of the skills may be really skillful and others are very crude. They may give a little hit of pleasure right now, but then there’s pain down the line. So it’s hard to really call them skills, but there was one point in your path where you got results from them, so … 
  20. Head & Heart
     … The skills here are the skills of a warrior. Sometimes the Buddha would illustrate the skills in meditation with the skills, say, of a musician or a cook, someone in a relatively peaceful place, but other times he would make comparisons with the skills of warriors, the skills you have to develop in battle, where there are definite dangers. You’re facing enemies: How … 
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