Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

these teachings tell us that by cultivating mindfulness and awareness, we can realize our inherent wealth and share it with others.

bodhichitta, awakens when we no longer shield ourselves from the vulnerability of our condition, from the basic fragility of existence.

We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort.

Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment—over and over again.

Gradually, we become more aware about what causes happiness as well as what causes distress. Without loving-kindness for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, to genuinely feel it for others.

But loving-kindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness.

The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.

WHAT KEEPS US unhappy and stuck in a limited view of reality is our tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort.

samsara—the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

The first noble truth says that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort.

We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid. And so we suffer.

The second noble truth says that resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

Resisting is what’s called ego.

The third noble truth says that suffering ceases when we let go of trying to maintain the huge ME at any cost.

The essence of the fourth noble truth is that we can use everything we do to help us to realize that we’re part of the energy that creates everything.

When we stop resisting and let the weather simply flow through us, we can live our lives completely.

the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction.

impermanence. That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence.

THE DHARMA—the Buddha’s teaching—is about letting go of the story line and opening to what is: to the people in our life, to the situations we’re in, to our thoughts, to our emotions.

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.

The practice of mindfulness and refraining is a way to get in touch with basic groundlessness—by noticing how we try to avoid it.

Moving into our experience—whether it’s the opening experience of love and compassion or the closing-down experience of resentment and separation—brings us an enormous sense of freedom: the freedom of nothing solid.

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.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.

Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer.

Because we mistake the openness of our being for a solid, irrefutable self, we suffer.

Because we mistake what always results in suffering to be what will bring us happiness, we remain stuck in the repetitious habit of escalating our dissatisfaction.

BEING ABLE to lighten up is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet.

Only with equanimity can we see that everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.

Compassion, however, is more emotionally challenging than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain.

This is how all the four limitless qualities—love, compassion, joy, and equanimity—evolve from limited to limitless: we practice catching our

mind hardening into fixed views and do our best to soften. Through softening, the barriers come down.

YOU CAN CULTIVATE the four limitless qualities of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity by learning to relax where you are.

We can be where we are and at the same time leave wide open the possibility of being able to expand far beyond where we are now in the course of our lifetime.

Expansion never happens through greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open that your capacity, my capacity, the capacity of all beings, is limitless.

fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

That light touch of acknowledging what we’re thinking and letting it go is the key to touching in with the wealth of bodhichitta.

anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present, without a reference point, experiences groundlessness.

that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against.

Exchanging self for other, or tonglen, begins when we can see where someone is because we’ve been there. It doesn’t happen because we’re better than they are but because human beings share the same stuff. The more we know our own, the more we’re going to understand others’.

your own experience of pleasure and pain becomes the way that you recognize your kinship with all sentient beings.

Each moment is just what it is.

We could delight in the preciousness of every single moment.

HOLDING ON TO BELIEFS limits our experience of life.

When you catch yourself grasping at beliefs or thoughts, just see what is.

Mindfulness trains us to be awake and alive, fully curious, about now.

The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle.