Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

Relative bodhichitta is the courage and compassion to investigate our tender heart, to stay with it as much as we can, and gradually to expand it.

With a daily practice of sitting meditation, we become familiar with our natural openheartedness. We begin to stabilize and strengthen ourselves in it.

With tonglen and slogan practice we start to taste the flavor of what we fear and move toward what we habitually avoid.

The basis for all these practices is the cultivation of maitri, an unconditional loving-kindness with ourselves that says, “Start where you are.”

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.

experiment with becoming comfortable with uncertainty, then see what happens.

Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is.

Bodhichitta is a Sanskrit word that means “noble or awakened heart.”

Based on a deep fear of being hurt, we erect protective walls made out of strategies, opinions, prejudices, and emotions.

This tenderness for life, 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.

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

How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day?

When the flag goes up, we have an opportunity: we can stay with our painful emotion instead of spinning out.

Staying is how we get the hang of gently catching ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame, righteousness, or alienation.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don’t interrupt our patterns even slightly.

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.

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 genu...

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.

In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exist in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.

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.

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

BUDDHA’S first teaching—called the four noble truths—

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

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

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.

It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it.

But the dharma never tells us what is true or what is false. It just encourages us to find out for ourselves.

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.

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.

You might notice that when you feel uncomfortable you do things like pull your ear, scratch something even though it doesn’t itch, or straighten your collar. When you notice what you do, don’t try to change it. Don’t criticize yourself for whatever it is you’re doing. Just notice what it is.

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.

It’s definitely not meant to repress anything, and it’s not intended to encourage grasping, either. Allen Ginsberg used the expression “surprise mind.” You sit down and—wham!—a rather nasty surprise arises. So be it.

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.

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.

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.

Self-importance is like a prison for us, limiting us to the world of our likes and dislikes.

“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.

One kind of witness is everybody else giving you his or her feedback and opinions. This is worth listening to; there’s some truth in what people say. The principal witness, however, is you. You’re the only one who knows when you’re opening and when you’re closing.

You can use practice to bolster your sense of confidence, bolster your sense of being in the right place at the right time, of having chosen the right religion, and feeling “I’m on the side of the good and all’s right with the world.” That doesn’t help much. Using tonglen or any practice to feel like a hero, you’ll eventually come to feel like you’re in a battle with reality and reality is always winning. But you’re the one who knows.

This is the discovery of egolessness. It’s when all our usual schemes fall apart.

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

Buddhist teachings on hope and fear concerns what are known as the eight worldly dharmas. These are four pairs of opposites—four things that we like and become attached to and four things that we don’t like and try to avoid.

becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disgrace, and gain and loss—is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.