Doubts we have

Sogyal Rinpoche said: " Our minds are riddled and confused with doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to human evolution than desire and attachment. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely sophisticated and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego's desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge. (...) destructive forms of doubt leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by.
Our contemporary education, then, indoctrinates us in the glorification of doubt, has creates in fact what could almost be called a religion or theology of doubt, in which to be seen to be intelligent we have to be seen to doubt everything, to always point to what's wrong and rarely to ask what's right or good, cynically to denigrate all inherated spiritual ideals ans philosophies, or anything that is done in simple goodwill or with innocent heart."



Part 2. - page 123 from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Cope with.....

In counselling and therapy very often psychotherapists try to help us coping with stress, with difficult situations, with other problems.
But when we think longer about the verb cope, we have to assume that coping with a problem mean to tolerate it, learn how to deal with it, and not to SOLVE it.
When you cope with problem, on the assumption that the problematic situation is unchangeble and unsoluble, so from the very beginning use loose, you defeat, you don't win.
When we have a problem, we want to solve it. We don't want to tolerate it all our life.
All course, there are situations which are unchangeble, when we can't modify past and change it. For example, the death of someone close. We can't change it, we can't solve "the problem", because there isn't any. Only what we can do, is to change our attitute, our approach to whole situation. We can learn how to cope with our emotions, how to transform them is something positive.
How do you solve the problems and how do you cope with some stressful situations?
In San Diego I know one very good Istitute, where you CAN SOLVE your problems in 10 sessions. Chad Hybarger use brief strategic approach in his Family Therapy Institute in El Cajon (California).
In Italy there are many good private practices with the General Center in Arezzo (Toscany) - Centro di Terapia Strategica.

Meditation

Sogyal Rinpoche said: " When I teach meditation, I often begin by saying:

Bring your mind home. And release. And relax.

Quietly sitting, body still, speech silent, mind at peace, let thoughts and emotions, whatever rise, come and go, without clinging to anything.(...) Imagine a man who comes home after a long, hard day's work in the fields, and sinks into his favorite chair in front of the fire. He has been working all day and he knows that he has achieves what he wanted to achieve; there is nothing more to worry about, nothing left unaccomplished, and he can let go completely of all his cares and concerns, content, simply, to be.

• create the right inner environment of the mind.
• don't question or doubt whether you are in the "correct" state of not.There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefullness, and unshakable certainty.
• meditation is not something that you can "do", it is something that has to happen spontaneously, only when we have perfected the practice of meditation

The Posture
There is a connection between the posture of the body and the attitude of the mind. Mind and body are interrelated, and meditation arises naturally once your posture and attitude are inspired.

Sit, then, as if you were a mountain, with all the unshakable, steadfast majesty of the mountain. A mountain is completely natural and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that batter it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its picks. Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise and fly and soar.
Keep your back straight, like an arrow, so the prana - the inner energy will flow easily through the subtle channels of the body, and your mind will find its true state of rest.

Part 1. (Fragment from Chapter V-"The Tibetan Book of living and Dying".