Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

Try to live that way and see what happens. You’ll come up against all your doubts and fears and hopes, and you’ll grapple with that. When you start to live that way—with that sense of “what does this really mean?”—you’ll find it quite interesting. After a while, you forget that you’re even asking the question. You just practice meditation or you just live your life, and you have insight—a fresh take on what is true.

REFRAINING IS very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. It’s the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on. It’s the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there’s a gap.

Refraining—not habitually acting out impulsively—has something to do with giving up the entertainment mentality. Through refraining, we see that there’s something between the arising of the craving—or the aggression or the loneliness or whatever it might be—and whatever action we take as a result. There’s something there in us that we don’t want to experience, and we never do experience, because we’re so quick to act. The practice of mindfulness and refraining is a way to get in touch with basic groundlessness—by noticing how we try to avoid it.

IT’S HELPFUL to always remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It’s definitely not meant to repress anything, and it’s not intended to encourage grasping, either.

As meditators we might as well stop struggling against our thoughts and realize that honesty and humor are far more inspiring and helpful than any kind of solemn religious striving for or against anything.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

TO REVERSE EGO’S LOGIC, we practice the warrior slogans of Atisha, a Tibetan teacher who lived in the eleventh century.

If we work with the slogans, they will become like our breath, our eyesight, our first thought. They will become like the smells we smell and the sounds we hear. We can let them permeate our whole being. That’s the point. These slogans aren’t theoretical or abstract. They are about who we are and what is happening to us. They are completely relevant to how we experience things, how we relate with whatever occurs in our lives. They are about how to relate with pain and fear and pleasure and joy, and how those things can transform us fully and completely. When we work with the slogans, ordinary life becomes the path of awakening.

That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings.

Traditional teachings on the forces of Mara describe the nature of obstacles and how human beings habitually become confused and lose confidence in their basic wisdom mind. The teachings on the four maras provide descriptions of some very familiar ways in which we try to avoid what is happening.

Devaputra mara involves seeking pleasure. Any obstacle we encounter has the power to pop the bubble of reality that we have come to regard as secure and certain. When we’re threatened that way, we can’t stand to feel the edginess, the anxiety, the heat of anger rising, the bitter taste of resentment. Therefore, we reach for whatever we think will blot it out. We try to grasp something pleasant. The way to turn this arrow into a flower is to open our hearts and look at how we try to escape. We can use pleasure-seeking as an opportunity to observe what we do in the face of pain.

Skandha mara has to do with how we try to recreate ourselves when things fall apart. We return to the solid ground of our self-concept as quickly as possible. Trungpa Rinpoche used to call this “nostalgia for samsara.” When things fall apart, instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can use it as an opportunity to be open and inquisitive about what has just happened and what will happen next. That is how to turn this arrow into a flower.

Klesha mara is characterized by strong emotions. Instead of letting feelings be, we weave them into a story line, which gives rise to even bigger emotions. We all use emotions to regain our ground when things fall apart. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using heavy emo...

Yama mara is rooted in the fear of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. We want to hold on to what we have. We want every experience to confirm us and congratulate us and make us feel completely together. We say the yama mara is fear of death, but it’s actually fear of life. We can turn this arrow into a flower by using the desire to control as a remi...

Moving into our experience—whether it’s the opening experience of love and compassion or the closing-down experience of

THE SECOND MARK of existence is egolessness, sometimes called no-self.

Egolessness means that the fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is painfully limiting.

That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem. Self-importance is like a prison for us, limiting us to the world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up very dissatisfied.

We have two alternatives: either we take everything to be sure and real, or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality, or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we er...

In the most ordinary terms, egolessness is a flexible identity. It manifests as inquisitiveness, as adaptability, as humor, as playfulness. It is our capacity to relax with not knowing, not figuring everything out, with not being at all sure about who we are, or who anyone else is, either. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fre...

OPENNESS doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well. We can’t cultivate fearlessness without compassionate inquiry into the workings of ego.

With mindfulness as our method we start to get curious about what’s going on. For quite a long time, we just see it clearly. To the degree that we’re willing to see our indulging and our repressing clearly, they begin to wear themselves out. Wearing out is not exactly the same as going away. Instead, a wider, more generous, more enlightened perspective arises.

How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation. Up come all these thoughts, but rather than squelch them or obsess with them, we acknowledge them and let them go. Then we come back to just being here. After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax. We see our story line, drop it, and come back to the freshness of the present moment.