Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

For those of us with a hunger to know the truth, painful emotions are like flags going up to say, “You’re stuck!” We regard disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, jealousy, and fear as moments that show us where we’re holding back, how we’re shutting down. Such uncomfortable feelings are messages that tell us to perk up and lean into a situation when we’d rather cave in and back away.

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.

In cultivating loving-kindness, we learn first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves. Rather than nurturing self-denigration, we begin to cultivate a clear-seeing kindness. 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.

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.

MEDITATION PRACTICE is a formal way in which you can get used to lightening up. I encourage you to follow the instructions precisely, but within that form to be gentle. Let the whole thing be soft. Breathing out, touch your breath as it goes. Sense the breath going out into big space and dissolving. You’re not trying to clutch or catch that breath, you’re simply relaxing outward with it. There’s no particular instruction about what to do during the in-breath—there’s nothing to hold on to until the next out-breath.

Labeling our thoughts during meditation practice is a powerful support that reconnects us with the fresh, open, unbiased dimension of our mind. When we become aware that we are thinking, we say to ourselves, “thinking,” with an unbiased attitude and with tremendous gentleness. Then we return our focus to the breath. We regard the thoughts as bubbles and the labeling like touching them with a feather. There’s just this light touch—“thinking”—and they dissolve back into the space. Even if you still feel anxious and tense when the thoughts go, simply allow that feeling to be there, with space around it. Just let it be. When thoughts come up again, see them for what they are. It’s no big deal. You can loosen up and lighten up.

Saying “thinking” is an interesting point in the meditation practice. It’s the point at which we can consciously train in gentleness and in developing a nonjudgmental attitude. Loving-kindness is unconditional friendliness. So each time you say to yourself “thinking,” you are c...

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. This is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are all the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but we’re stuck here in this cocoon. Moment after moment, we’re deciding that we would rather stay in that cocoon than step out into that big space. Life in our cocoon is cozy and secure. We’ve gotten it all together. It’s safe, it’s predictable, it’s convenient, and it’s trustworthy.

We fear losing our illusion of security—that’s what makes us anxious. We fear being confused and not knowing which way to turn. We want to know what’s happening. 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.

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. If we learn to sit still like a mountain in a hurricane, unprotected from the truth and vividness and the immediacy of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way. When we stop resisting and let the weather simply flow through us, we can live our lives completely. It’s up to us.

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.

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.

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.

Slogan: “All activities should be done with one intention” BREATHING IN, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. 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. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.

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.

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...

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.

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. So we ask ourselves, “What happens when I feel I can’t handle what’s going on? What are the stories I tell myself? What repels me and what attracts me? Where do I look for strength and in what do I place my trust?” The first thing that takes place in meditation is that we start to see what’s happening. Even though we still run away and we still indulge, we see what we’re doing clearly. We acknowledge our aversions and our cravings. We become familiar with the strategies and beliefs we use to fortify our cocoon. 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.

We suffer not because we are basically bad or deserve to be punished but because of three tragic misunderstandings. First, we expect that what is always in the process of change should be graspable and predictable. Because we mistake what is impermanent to be permanent, we suffer. Second, we proceed as if we are separate from everything else, as if we are a fixed identity, when our true situation is egoless. Because we mistake the openness of our being for a solid, irrefutable self, we suffer. Third, we look for happiness in all the wrong places. The Buddha called this habit “mistaking suffering for happiness.” We become habituated to reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment. Thus we become less and less able to reside with even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. What begins as a slight shift of energy—a minor tightening of our stomach, a vague indefinable feeling that something bad is about to happen—escalates into addiction.

Start Where You Are WHAT WE’RE WORKING with in basic meditation practice—and more explicitly in tonglen practice—is the middle ground between acting out and repressing. We learn to see our thoughts of hatred, lust, poverty, loathing, whatever they might be. We learn to identify the thoughts as “thinking,” let them go, and begin to contact the texture of energy that lies beneath them. We gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let those thoughts go, not rejecting them, not repressing them. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what’s underneath the story line of craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about ourselves, underneath all that hopelessness and despair. We can begin to feel the energy of our heart, our body, our neck, our head, our stomach—what’s underneath the story lines. We find that there’s something extremely soft, which is called bodhichitta. If we can relate directly with that, then all the rest is our wealth. In postmeditation, when the poisons of passion, aggression, or ignorance arise, the instruction is to drop the story line. Instead of acting out or repressing, we use the poison as an opportunity to feel our heart, to feel the wound, and to connect with others who suffer in the same way. We can use the poison as an opportunity to contact bodhichitta. In this way, the poison already is the medicine. When we don’t act out and we don’t repress, our passion, our aggression, and our ignorance become our wealth. We d...

Recognize Suffering DISAPPOINTMENT, embarrassment, and all the places where we cannot feel good are a sort of death. We’ve just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we’re on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death. Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It’s actually a sign of health that when we meet the place we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. But usually we don’t take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us. Things like disappointment and anxiety are messages telling us that we’re about to go into unknown territory. When we get what we don’t want, when we don’t get what we do want, when we become ill, when we’re getting old, when we’re dying—when we see any of these things in our lives—we can recognize suffering as suffering. Then we can be curious, notice, and be mindful of our reactions. Our suffering is so grounded in our fear of impermanence. Our pain is so rooted in our lopsided view of reality. Who ever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable. They can be celebrated. They are ordinary. Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasu...

Slogan: “Change your attitude, but remain natural” 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...

Loving-Kindness and Tonglen 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. By practicing tonglen, you develop your sympathy for others. You begin to understand them better. Your own pain is like a stepping-stone that makes your heart bigger. It starts with creating space in which to relate directly to specific suffering—yours or someone else’s. You expand the practice to understand that suffering is universal, shared by us all. Lest we condescendingly do tonglen for the other one who’s so confused, remember: this is a practice where compassion begins to arise because we’ve been in the other one’s shoes. We’ve been angry, jealous, and lonely. We do strange things when we’re in pain. Because we’re lonely, we say cruel words; because we want someone to love us, we insult them. Exchanging self for other, or tonglen, begins when we can see where someone is because we’ve been there. It doesn’t happen...

Tigers above, tigers below. This is the predicament we are always in. We are born and sooner or later we die. Each moment is just what it is. Resentment, bitterness, and holding a grudge prevent us from seeing and hearing and tasting and delighting. This might be the only moment of our life, this might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could feel depressed about this or we could finally appreciate it. We could delight in the preciousness of every single moment.

HOLDING ON TO BELIEFS limits our experience of life. That doesn’t mean that beliefs or opinions or ideas are a problem. It’s the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and opinions, that causes the problems. Using your belief system this way creates a situation in which you choose to be blind instead of being able to see, to be deaf instead of being able to hear, to be dead rather than alive, asleep rather than awake.

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. Compassionate action, being there for others, being able to act and speak in a way that communicates, begins with noticing when we start to make ourselves right or make ourselves wrong.

All activities should be done with the intention of communicating. This is a practical suggestion: all activities should be done with the intention of speaking so that another person can hear you, rather than using words that cause the barriers to go up and the ears to close. In this process we also learn how to listen and how to look. You can practice making your actions, your speech, and your thoughts inseparable from this yearning to communicate from the heart. Everything you say can further polarize the situation and convince you of how separate you are. On the other hand, everything you say and do and think can support your desire to communicate, to move closer and step out of this myth of isolation and separateness that we’re all caught in.

Thoroughly Processed UNDERSTANDING HOW our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others. Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive—we leave things minute. They don’t keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes through learning to pause for just a moment and not doing the same thing again and again out of impulse. Simply to pause instead of immediately filling up the space transforms us. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves and others. Anything can come up, anything can walk into our house. We can find a dinosaur sitting on our living room couch, and we don’t freak out. We have been thoroughly processed by coming to know ourselves with honest, gentle mindfulness.

Three Methods for Working with Chaos THERE ARE THREE very practical ways for relating with difficult circumstances as the path of awakening and joy: no more struggle, poison as medicine, and regarding everything that arises as the manifestation of wisdom. The first method is epitomized by meditation instruction. Whatever arises in our minds we look at directly, call it “thinking,” and go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the breath. When we encounter difficulties in our lives, we can continue to train in this way. We can drop the story line, slow down enough to just be present, let go of the multitude of judgments and schemes, and stop struggling. Second, we can use poison as fuel for waking up. In general, this idea is introduced to us with tonglen. Instead of pushing difficult situations away, we can use them to connect with other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain. As one slogan puts it, “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of enlightenment.” The third method for working with chaos is to regard whatever arises as the manifestation of awakened energy. We can regard ourselves as already awake; we can regard our world as already sacred. This view further encourages us to use everything in our lives as the basis for attaining enlightenment. The world we find ourselves in, the person we think we are—these are our working bases. This charnel ground called life is the manifestation of wisdom. This wisdom is the bas...

DRIVE ALL BLAMES into one” is saying, instead of always blaming the other, own the feeling of blame, own the anger, own the loneliness, and make friends with it.

In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.

In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience. “This very moment is the perfect teacher” is really a most profound instruction. Just seeing what’s going on—that’s the teaching right there. We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom. It’s available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.

Inviting Your Unfinished Business YOU CAN BRING all of your unfinished karmic business right into tonglen practice. In fact, you should invite it in. Suppose that you are involved in a horrific relationship: every time you think of a particular person you feel furious. That is very useful for tonglen! Or perhaps you feel depressed. It was all you could do to get out of bed today. You’re so depressed that you want to stay in bed for the rest of your life; you have considered hiding under your bed. That is very useful for tonglen practice. The specific fixation should be real, just like that. You may be formally doing tonglen or just having your coffee, and here comes the object of your fury. You breathe that in. The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion. The technique is that you do not blame the object; you also don’t blame yourself. Instead, there is just liberated fury—hot, dark, and heavy. Experience it as fully as you can. Breathe the anger in; remove the object; stop thinking about him. In fact, he was just a useful catalyst. Now you own the anger completely. You drive all blames into yourself. It takes a lot of bravery, and it’s extremely insulting to ego. In fact, it destroys the whole mechanism of ego. So you breathe in. Then, you breathe out sympathy, relaxation, and spaciousness. Instead of just a small, dark situation, you allow a lot of space for these feelings. Breathing out is like opening up your arms and just letting go. It’s fresh air. Then yo...

The four methods for holding our seat provide just such support for developing the patience to stay open to what’s happening instead of acting on automatic pilot. These four methods are: 1. Not setting up the target for the arrow. The choice is yours: you can strengthen old habits by reacting to irritation with anger, or weaken them by holding your seat. 2. Connecting with the heart. Sit with the intensity of the anger and let its energy humble you and make you more compassionate. 3. Seeing obstacles as teachers. Right at the point when you’re about to blow your top, remember that you’re being challenged to stay with edginess and discomfort and to relax where you are. 4. Regarding all that occurs as a dream. Contemplate that these outer circumstances, as well as these emotions, as well as this huge sense of ME, are passing and essenceless like a memory, like a movie, like a dream. That realization cuts through panic and fear.

Patience is not learned in safety. It is not learned when everything is harmonious and going well. When everything is smooth sailing, who needs patience? If you stay in your room with the door locked and the curtains drawn, everything may seem harmonious, but the minute anything doesn’t go your way, you blow up. There is no cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies willingness to be alive rather than seek harmony.

Standing in the checkout line at the market, I might notice the defiant teenager in front of me and make the aspiration, “May he be free of suffering and its causes.” In the elevator with a stranger, I might notice her shoes, her hands, the expression on her face. I contemplate that just like me she doesn’t want stress in her life. Just like me she has worries. Through our hopes and fears, our pleasures and pains, we are deeply interconnected.

When we realize that the path is the goal, there’s a sense of workability. Everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path. Everything is workable.

Heightened Neurosis WE MIGHT ASSUME that as we train in bodhichitta our habitual patterns will start to unwind—that day by day, month by month, we’ll be more open-minded, more flexible, more of a warrior. But what actually happens with ongoing practice is that our patterns intensify. This is called “heightened neurosis.” It just happens. We catch the scent of groundlessness, and despite our wishes to remain steady, open, and flexible, we hold on tight in very habitual ways. For example, we may develop a new self-critical story line based on spiritual ideals. The warrior training becomes just one more way to feel that we never measure up. Or we use our training to increase our sense of being special, to build up our self-image and increase our arrogance and pride. Or perhaps we sincerely wish to surrender our useless baggage, but in the process, we use the teachings themselves to distance ourselves from the chaotic, unsettling quality of our lives. We try to use our spiritual training to avoid the queasy feeling in our gut. The point is that we will bring our habitual ways of gluing ourselves together right into bodhichitta practice, right into the training in ungluing. But because of our practice, we can start to look compassionately at what we do. What is happening to us psychologically? Do we feel inadequate? Do we continue to believe in our same old dramas? Are we using spirituality to bypass what scares us? It’s easy not to see where we are still seeking ground in the ...