Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

suffering ceases when we let go of trying to maintain the huge ME at any cost. This is what we practice in meditation. When we let go of the thinking and the story

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

That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that.

aversion to it. We want permanence; we expect permanence.

from this limited way of relating to impermanence. They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change. Acknowledging this truth doesn’t mean that we’re looking on the dark side. What it means

and that is us. The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly

noses. It’s a lifetime’s journey to relate honestly to the immediacy of our experience and to respect ourselves enough not to judge it. As we become more wholehearted in this journey of gentle honesty, it comes as a shock to realize how much we’ve blinded ourselves to some of the ways in which we cause harm.

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,

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. We have a certain life, and whatever life we’re in is a vehicle for waking up.

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.

little jumpy, jittery movements. 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

Refraining—not habitually acting out impulsively—has something to do with giving up the entertainment mentality. Through refraining, we see that

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 i...

with whatever arises, without picking and choosing. 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

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.

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

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 emotion as a way to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else.

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 reminder to experience each moment completely new and fresh. We can always return

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, limiting us to the world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up very dissatisfied.

curious—to train in dissolving the barriers that we erect between ourselves and the world—is the best use of our human lives.

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. Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh. For a warrior-in-training, egolessness is a cause of joy rather than a cause of fear.

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.

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.

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’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting

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.

The safest and most nurturing place to begin working this way is during sitting meditation. 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.

“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

gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disgrace. A more practical approach is to get to know them intimately, see how they hook us, see how they color our perception of reality, see how they aren’t all that solid. Then the eight worldly dharmas become the means for growing wiser as well as kinder and more content.

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

seriousness about everything in our lives—including practice—this goal-oriented, we’re-going-to-do-it-or-else attitude, is the world’s greatest killjoy. There’s no sense of appreciation because we’re so solemn about everything. In contrast, a joyful mind is very ordinary and relaxed. So lighten up. Don’t make such a big deal.

state of mind keeps getting popped. In addition to a sense of humor, a basic support for a joyful mind is curiosity, paying attention, taking an interest in the world around you. Happiness is not required, but being curious without a heavy judgmental attitude

the sense of gratitude for the preciousness of human birth and the opportunity to practice.

wakefulness for your own future. You’re cultivating innate fundamental wakefulness by aspiring to let go of the habitual way you proceed and doing something different. You’re the only one who can do this. Life is precious and it’s brief and you can use

and just seek heaven.” Instead, 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

that human beings use for relating to troubling habits such as laziness, anger, or self-pity. I call these the three futile strategies—the strategies of attacking,

fully experiencing whatever you’ve been resisting—without exiting in your habitual ways. Become inquisitive about your habits. Practice touching in with the fundamental tenderness and groundlessness of your being before it hardens into habit. Do this with the clear intention that your ego-clinging diminish and that your wisdom and compassion increase.

unknown. What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you

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.

lasting happiness the only way to get it was to step out of my cocoon. When I asked her how to bring happiness to others she said, “Same instruction.” This is the reason that I work with the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity: the best way to serve ourselves is to love and care for others.

The aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities train us in not holding back, in seeing our biases

But we start with what’s familiar. The instruction for cultivating limitless maitri is to first find the tenderness that we already have. We touch in with our gratitude or appreciation—our current ability

of awakening bodhichitta, so also is nurturing our ability to feel compassion. Compassion, however, is more emotionally challenging than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain. It definitely requires the training of a warrior.

yogi Patrul Rinpoche suggests imagining beings in torment—an animal about to be slaughtered, a person awaiting execution. To make it more immediate, he recommends imagining ourselves in their place. Particularly painful is his image of a mother with no arms watching as a raging river

gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion; to let fear soften us rather than

Recognizing this, we begin with a practice that is fairly easy. We cultivate bravery through making aspirations. We make the wish that all beings, including ourselves and those we dislike, be free of suffering and the root of suffering.

of another being. We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience—our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has

wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness

AS WE CULTIVATE our garden, the conditions become more conducive to the growth of bodhichitta. We begin to feel joy. It comes from not giving up on ourselves, from mindfully sticking with ourselves and beginning to experience our great warrior spirit.

we can do this as a three-step aspiration practice: “May I not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering. May you not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering. May we not be separated from the great happiness

strength of basic goodness. To do this, however, we start with conditioned examples of good fortune such as health, basic intelligence, a supportive environment—the fortunate conditions that constitute a precious human birth. For the awakening warrior, the greatest advantage is to find ourselves in a time when it is possible to hear and practice the bodhichitta teachings. We can practice the first step of the aspiration by learning