Confusion

The beginning of 2010 I would like to start by presenting two metaphors:

1. Our mind is like a water. If we don't stir it, if we dont' intervene, don't change it, water will be clean, clear, undisturbed. If we want to change the nature and consistency of water, it becomes more mudded and stirred.
Like our mind during the meditation. Please, leave it like it is, don't control and change it - and the mind will become clear and peaceful.

2. I know one of the chinese strategems: Muddle the water to bring up the fish. It's a confusion technique used in therapy. Sometimes we are so sure about what we want from life and sometimes not. To find a fish - that's mean a problem, we have to make even bigger confusion. Maybe we won't find any fish or maybe we will find fish we didn't expect.
So confusion can be healpful too. Don't you think?

Ad 1. It's visualition used very often by Sogyal Rinpoche. It's help calm me down. ;)
Ad.2. One of the many metaphors used in Brief Stragetic Therapy.

Retreat in Lake Tahoe with Rigpa and Sogyal Rinpoche

For the first time I had pleasure to take part in retreat with Sogyal Ripoche and all retreatants - members of Rigpa USA. It was amazing event for me which changed my life. I met many wonderful people who were so kind, frank, real and compassioned. I really felt, like Sogyal Rinpoche had told, as a part of the big family. I had many interesting conversations about happiness, about our life expectations, about death...
And finally, My first live teaching with My Master who were speaking to me... It was evident..
Very important for me was part about meditation and about our Nature of Mind. I believe that during this teaching I touch my nature of mind and it was so moving.
Now, as I come back to Italy, I try to practice every day, I try to find peace inside me and bring my mind home...

Dziękuje Sogyal Rinpoche.

If you want to see some of His teachings:

And my View on Tahoe Lake

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

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".