Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what’s happening. They come from opening your heart and not running away. Then your actions and speech accord with what needs to be done—for you and for the other person.

We train, as Trungpa Rinpoche said, in “not afraid to be a fool.” We cultivate a simple direct relationship with our being—no philosophizing, no moralizing, no judgments. Whatever arises in our mind is workable.

It’s like lying in bed before dawn and hearing rain on the roof. This simple sound can be disappointing because we were planning a picnic. It can be pleasing because our garden is so dry. But the flexible mind of prajna doesn’t draw conclusions of good or bad. It perceives the sound without adding anything extra, without judgments of happy or sad.

FRUITION” IMPLIES that at some future time you will feel good. One of the most powerful Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.

When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.

Doing tonglen for all sentient beings doesn’t have to be separate from doing it for yourself and your immediate situation. That’s a point we need to hear again and again. When you connect with your own suffering, reflect that countless beings at this very moment are feeling exactly what you feel. Their story lines are different but the feeling of pain is the same. When you do the practice for all sentient beings and for yourself at the same time, you begin to realize that self and other are not actually different.

If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities.

Traditional lojong teachings say it another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out.

The people and situations in our lives can remind us to catch neurosis as neurosis—to see when we’ve pulled the shades, locked the door, and crawled under the covers.

Any conclusions we might draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in unconditional openness, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on. This instruction—known as the Heart Sutra—is a teaching on fearlessness. To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear.

There is a simple practice we can do to cultivate forgiveness. First we acknowledge what we feel—shame, revenge, embarrassment, remorse. Then we forgive ourselves for being human. Then, in the spirit of not wallowing in the pain, we let go and make a fresh start. We don’t have to carry the burden with us anymore. We can acknowledge, forgive, and start anew. If we practice this way, little by little we’ll learn to abide with the feeling of regret for having hurt ourselves and others. We will also learn self-forgiveness. Eventually, at our own speed, we’ll even find our capacity to forgive those who have done us harm. We will discover forgiveness as a natural expression of the open heart, an expression of our basic goodness. This potential is inherent in every moment. Each moment is an opportunity to make a fresh start.

LIFE IS GLORIOUS, but life is also wretched. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, and energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others. We make ourselves a big deal and want life to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.