Open To Doubt. . . It’s natural to have doubt. The key, however, is whether we use our questions as fuel to seek out answers. You too are most likely on intimate terms with doubt. Although your circumstances are probably not as extreme as this man’s, you may be just as caught in its feverish grip. It is not wise to underestimate the power of doubt, for it is one of the major infections of modern life. It often moves stealthily, gradually worming its way into your nervous system. Once doubt is established, it creates chaos in your mind. Because there is a tendency to identify with it, you become a person of doubt. The ensuing uncertainty can then lead to indecisiveness, powerlessness, or a feeling of being separated from your Self. The Buddha taught that doubt is one of five hindrances that arise in the mind, clouding your judgment, limiting your ability to act, and causing great emotional disquiet. Use your mindfulness practice to recognize doubt as just doubt. Label it as a thought that is generating emotions and bodily sensations, and see how it starts to proliferate into many other thoughts and stories. Once you start to see doubt clearly, it breaks up the solidity of the experience and becomes much less formidable a mind-state. With mindfulness you come to see that all your doubts are waves of uncertainty about what is true now or in the future, which manifest as words, images, and bodily sensations. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it this way: “We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. . . . we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. . . . Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.  Rilke is suggesting that we open to and trust in the mystery of life, even in those moments of our deepest, darkest doubts. Peace and Love, Jim #doubt #thedailybuddha Buy Me A Coffee – A Easy Way To support The Daily Buddha! The Daily Buddha – Support The Server The Daily Buddha  – Web The Daily Buddha – YouTube The Daily Buddha – Facebook