Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

With tonglen and slogan practice we start to taste the flavor of what we fear and move toward what we habitually avoid. To further stretch our limits and open our hearts, we practice expanding the four limitless qualities—loving-kindness (maitri in Sanskrit), compassion, joy, and equanimity—by aspiring to extend them to others.

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have. Pema’s teachings encourage us to experiment with becoming comfortable with uncertainty, then see what happens. What we call uncertainty is actually the open quality of any given moment. When we can be present for this openness—as it is always present for us—we discover that our capacity to love and care for others is limitless.

“Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

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.

Sometimes we feel good and strong. Sometimes we feel inadequate and weak. But like mother-love, maitri is unconditional; no matter how we feel, we can aspire that we be happy. We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being. 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.

WHEN WE START to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.

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. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

Each situation, each thought, each word, each feeling, is just a passing memory.

The mind is always seeking zones of safety, and these zones of safety are continually falling apart. Then we scramble to get another zone of safety back together again. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara—the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

IN THE BUDDHA’S first teaching—called the four noble truths—he talked about suffering. The first noble truth says that it’s part of being human to feel discomfort. Nothing in its essence is one way or the other. All around us the wind, the fire, the earth, the water, are always taking on different qualities; they’re like magicians. We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. 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. Traditionally it’s said that the cause of suffering is clinging to our narrow view, which is to say, we are addicted to ME. We resist that we change and flow like the weather, that we have the same energy as all living things. When we resist, we dig in our heels. We make ourselves really solid. Resisting is what’s called ego.

It’s painful to face how we harm others, and it takes a while. It’s a journey that happens because of our commitment to gentleness and honesty, our commitment to staying awake, to being mindful. Because of mindfulness, we see our desires and our aggression, our jealousy, and our ignorance. We don’t act on them; we just see them. Without mindfulness, we don’t see them and they proliferate.

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. Insight comes suddenly, as though you’ve been wandering around in the dark and someone switches on all the lights and reveals a palace. It’s been there all along. It feels as if we’ve discovered something that no one else ever knew, and yet it’s completely straightforward and simple.

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.

Allen Ginsberg used the expression “surprise mind.” You sit down and—wham!—a rather nasty surprise arises. So be it. This part is not to be rejected but compassionately acknowledged as “thinking” and let go. Then—wow!—a very delicious surprise appears. Okay. This part is not to be clung to but compassionately acknowledged as “thinking” and let go. The surprises are endless. Mila-repa, the twelfth-century Tibetan yogi who sang wonderful songs about the proper way to meditate, said that the mind has more projections than there are dust motes in a sunbeam and that even hundreds of spears couldn’t put an end to that. 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.

MOVING AWAY from our experience, moving away from the present moment with all our habits and strategies, always adds up to restlessness, dissatisfaction, unhappiness. The comfort that we associate with concretizing and making things solid is so transitory, so short-lived.

This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted, and shaky—that’s called liberation.

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,

In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world—is the best use of our human lives.

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.

On the cushion, we begin to get the hang of not indulging or repressing and of what it feels like to let the energy just be there. That is why it’s so good to meditate every single day and continue to make friends with our hopes and fears again and again. This sows the seeds that enable us to be more awake in the midst of everyday chaos. It’s a gradual awakening, and it’s cumulative, but that’s actually what happens. We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

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. For example, you can hear the slogan “Always maintain only a joyful mind” and start beating yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy.

Happiness is not required, but being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude helps. If you are judgmental, you can even be curious about that. Curiosity encourages cheering up. So does simply remembering to do something different. We are so locked into this sense of burden—Big Deal Joy and Big Deal Unhappiness—that it’s sometimes helpful just to change the pattern. Anything out of the ordinary will help. You can go to the window and look at the sky, you can splash cold water on your face, you can sing in the shower, you can go jogging—anything that’s against your usual pattern. That’s how things start to lighten up.

we encourage ourselves to develop an open heart and an open mind to heaven, to hell, to everything. Only with this kind of equanimity can we realize that no matter what comes along, we’re always standing in the middle of a sacred space. Only with equanimity can we see that everything that comes into our circle has come to teach us what we need to know.

What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you react when you’re not measuring up to your image of yourself, everybody is irritating you because no one is doing what you want, and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict? At these times it helps to remember that you’re going through an emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed. It’s as if the rug has been pulled out from under you. Tuning in to that groundless feeling is a way of remembering that basically, you do prefer life and warriorship to death.

With all the messy stuff, no matter how messy it is, just start where you are—not tomorrow, not later, not yesterday when you were feeling better—but now. Start now, just as you are.

WE CANNOT be in the present moment and run our story lines at the same time. Experiment with this for yourself, and watch how it changes you. Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear. In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present, without a reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

THE FUNDAMENTAL change of attitude is to breathe the undesirable in and breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the attitude that is epidemic on the planet is to push it away if it’s painful and to hold on to it tightly if it’s pleasant. The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against. What I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff. Then when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having worked with loving-kindness for yourself. This nondualistic approach is true to the heart because it’s based on our kinship with each other. We know what to say without condescension to someone else who is suffering, because we have experienced closing down, shutting off, being angry, hurt, or rebellious, and have made a relationship with those things in ourselves. This change in attitude doesn’t happen overnight; it happens gradually, at our own speed. If we have the aspiration to stop resisting those parts of ourselves that we find unacceptable and instead begin to breathe them in, this gives us much more space. We come to know every part of ourselves, with no more monsters in the closet, no more demons in the cave. We have some sense of turning on the lights and looking at ourselves honestly and with great compassion. This is the fundamental change of attitude—this working with pain and pleasure in a revolutionary and courageous way.

THE THINGS that drive us nuts have enormous energy. That is why we fear them. For example, you are timid: you are afraid to look someone in the eye. It takes a lot of energy to maintain that. It’s the way that you hold yourself together. In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that pattern completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it with the out-breath. Then you might better understand that when other people look grim, perhaps it isn’t because they hate you but because they also feel timid. In this way, tonglen practice is a practice of making friends with yourself as well as a practice of compassion for others.

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’.

IN THE BUDDHIST teachings, the messy emotional stuff is called klesha, which means poison. There are three main poisons: passion, aggression, and ignorance. We could talk about these in different ways—for example, we could also call them craving, aversion, and couldn’t care less. Addictions of all kinds come under the category of craving, which is wanting, wanting, wanting—feeling that we have to have some kind of resolution. Aversion encompasses violence, rage, hatred, and negativity of all kinds, as well as garden-variety irritation. And ignorance? Nowadays, it’s usually called denial.

DOING TONGLEN throughout the day can feel more natural than doing it on the cushion. For one thing, there is never any lack of subject matter. Daily-life practice is never abstract. As soon as uncomfortable emotions come up, we train ourselves in breathing them in and dropping the story line. At the same time, we extend our thoughts and concern to other people who feel the same discomfort, and we breathe in with the wish that all of us could be free of this particular brand of confusion. Then, as we breathe out, we send ourselves and others whatever kind of relief we think would help.

Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the good-heartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

So when we say, “I take refuge in the Buddha,” that means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. I am awake; I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it’s sewed up tight, where it’s going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied. You have to do it alone. The basic instruction is simple: Start taking off that armor. That’s all anyone can tell you. No one can tell you how to do it because you’re the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.

The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you’re always standing in the middle of a sacred circle. It’s no small affair, whether you’re brushing your teeth or cooling your food or wiping your bottom. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it now.

IT’S DARING not to shut anyone out of our hearts, not to make anyone an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t define someone as completely right or completely wrong anymore. Life is more slippery and playful than that. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.

HOW IS THERE going to be less aggression on the planet rather than more? Bring this question down to a personal level: How do I learn to communicate with somebody who is hurting me or hurting others? How do I communicate so that the space opens up and both of us begin to touch in to some kind of basic intelligence that we all share? How do I communicate so that things that seem frozen, unworkable, and eternally aggressive begin to soften up and some kind of compassionate exchange begins to happen? Begin with being willing to feel what you are going through. Be willing to have a compassionate relationship with the parts of yourself that you feel are not worthy of existing. If you are willing through meditation to be mindful not only of what feels comfortable but also of what pain feels like, if you even aspire to stay awake and open to what you’re feeling, to recognize and acknowledge it as best you can in each moment, then something begins to change.

The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, now you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life. Your life gives you everything you need to learn how to open further.

More than to expect thanks, it would be helpful just to expect the unexpected; then you might be curious and inquisitive about what comes in the door. We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake. On the other hand, it’s good to express our gratitude to others. It’s helpful to express our appreciation of others. But if we do that with the motivation of wanting them to like us, we can remember this slogan. We can thank others, but we should give up all hope of getting thanked in return. Simply keep the door open without expectations.

Each paramita has the ability to take us beyond our fear of letting go. Through paramita training we learn to be comfortable with uncertainty.

When we practice generosity we become intimate with our grasping. Practicing the discipline of not causing harm, we see our rigidity and desire to control. Practicing patience helps us train in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed. In joyful exertion we let go of our perfectionism and connect with the living quality of every moment. Meditation is how we train in coming back to being right here. And the inquiring mind of prajna—seeing things just as they are—is the key to this training, because without prajnaparamita, or unconditional bodhichitta, the other five activities can be used to give us the illusion of gaining ground.

As we work with patience, we discover our longing to speed.

THE ESSENCE of generosity is letting go.

When we feel unhappy, when we feel inadequate, we get stingy; we hold on tight. Generosity is an activity that loosens us up. By offering whatever we can—a dollar, a flower, a word of encouragement—we are training in letting go.

There are so many ways to practice generosity. The main point isn’t so much what we give, but that we unlock our habit of clinging. A traditional practice is simply to offer an object that we cherish from one hand to the other. A woman I know decided that whatever she was attached to she’d give away. One man gave money to people begging in the streets every day for six months after the death of his father. It was his...

Giving practice shows us where we’re holding back, where we...

The discipline is to find the balance between not too tight and not too loose—between not too laid-back and not too rigid.

The opposite of patience is aggression—the desire to jump and move, to push against our lives, to try to fill up space. The journey of patience involves relaxing, opening to what’s happening, experiencing a sense of wonder.