That's so sad, Jason. Clearly you're a failure if your life doesn't resemble a Mentos commercial.

Bingo. Yes, Dark Night yogis generally need lots of instruction on skillful thoughts, views, effort, speech, livelihood, etc. because they didn't feel a need to take it so seriously earlier before their denial about suffering broke down. Now they do.

This point does not invalidate the usefulness of the other two trainings; it's just pointing out that Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness are only 2 spokes out of the wheel. The other 6 spokes matter just as much, and the book this community is built around simply doesn't teach very much about the Sila trainings. It wasn't designed as a Sila book, because there are already a ton of those out there.

However, so many people have treated MCTB as a general pragmatic dharma Bible instead of as the highly specialized treatise it is, and it may have been a bit of a design oversight not to more thoroughly cover tactics for coping healthily with the dark night. The book emphasizes that you should prevent bleedthrough, but doesn't tell you how to do it other than make formal resolutions. If formal resolutions don't work for you and you're practicing out of the book with no teacher, you're screwed!

Hi Mario,

I just finished writing a reply that took half an hour and it deleted itself as I went to post.
I'll try tomorrow. Don't feel like it now, obviously!

Is it tomorrow yet? I've just been for a walk.

I'd just ask you to assume, if you're happy to, that what feels right is right for you at this stage. If what I say feels right, do some more. If it doesn't feel right, leave it. Just do one minute of it. This isn't for people who can do vipassana comfortably for hours on end. It's for those who feel bad/wrong/sick when they do it. Those who feel worse.

There's nothing special about this. The essence is "be who you are". Not many people seem to do it, though. Or they do it incompletely.

Find your key issue(s). When do you feel most wrong/angry/anxious/sad/agitated/uncomfortable? When (if ever) do you feel inferior, not good enough? When you know that, visualize it happening for a moment and just ask "If I had to guess, what do other people think of me in this situation?". You might assume (probably incorrectly, but that's irrelevant because it's real for you) that they might think you're not 'x' enough, successful enough, handsome enough, clever enough, sane enough, happy enough, witty enough.... and so on. What's the one overriding issue? If there's no overriding issue, you may feel that you are just plain no good, unworthy, shameful in a general sense.

Say you never finished secondary school and you always feel like others think of you as stupid. When with others you might unconsciously compensate for this by standing a little taller, trying to use big words, using a special tone of voice. Whatever it is you do to feel more intelligent will have two unfortunate results: 1) you reinforce the belief that your real level of intelligence isn't acceptable, and 2) you repel people through your anxious vibe. You're pushing yourself to be something other than *this*. It feels so counter-intuitive at first to say "this is how I am. I didn't finish school. I'm not that clever. That's ok. It doesn't need fixing or changing" and as you say this, really fall into it, embody it, live it, walk the talk.

This part is really important - feedback from others -, because you can't learn self-esteem on your own. All along we've thought "I have to be other than what I am in order to be accepted or liked", but the opposite happened. As you tried harder, this willful vibration repelled most people except those with the same vibration, reinforcing to you that you need to be more than *this*. Then paradoxically, by relaxing into who/how/what you are right now, you'll find that people open up and reinforce that you are in fact more than acceptable just this way. Total strangers will smile broadly, high-5 you, buy you a drink, cross the road just to be near you.

I haven't answered a lot of those questions you asked but this is probably a better reply than my first one that got deleted.
When the self is accepted, then it's relatively easy to extend that acceptance out onto the weather, the traffic, work, the world and so on.

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Regarding the comments about advertisements: I model myself on the attitude of acceptance, not the fruit of that (the smiling, the happiness, the ease, the comfort and so on).

Here's an article that may be relevant to this thread:

http://www.tricycle.com/feature/psychology-awakening?page=0,0