Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

by Pema Chödrön

combination of mindfulness and appreciation connects us fully with reality and brings us joy. When we extend attention and appreciation toward our environment and other people, our experience of

Without this fourth boundless quality the other three are limited by our habit of liking and disliking, accepting and rejecting.

and aversion. We allow ourselves to open the door just a crack if that’s all that we can presently do and we allow ourselves to shut the door when necessary. Cultivating equanimity is a work in progress. We aspire to spend our lives training in the loving-kindness

with the place where we feel equanimity, we can then formally train in cultivating it by practicing the three-step practice: “May I dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice. May you dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice. May all beings enjoy the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.” It is always fine

staying with the soft spot and use our biases as stepping-stones for connecting with the confusion of others. Strong emotions are useful in this regard. Whatever arises, no matter how bad it feels, can be used to extend our kinship to others who suffer the same kind of aggression or craving—who, just like

a bigger perspective can emerge. In the moment that we choose to abide with the energy instead of acting it out or repressing it, we are training in equanimity, in thinking bigger than right and wrong. This is how all the four limitless qualities—love,

greediness or pushing or striving. It happens through some combination of learning to relax where you already are and, at the same time, keeping the possibility open

fearlessness. How do we do that? Certainly the sitting practice of meditation is one way, because through it we come to know ourselves so completely and with such gentleness. Tonglen (sending-and-taking)

you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

amazed to see how I had been subtly using sitting meditation to try to avoid bei...

pain anymore. When we do tonglen, we invite the pain in. Tonglen takes courage to do, and interestingly enough, it also gives us a lot of courage, because we let it penetrate our armor. It’s a practice that allows

bodhichitta. In fact, it’s because we are tender and deeply touched that we do all this shielding. It’s because we have this genuine heart of sadness to begin with that we even start shielding. In tonglen practice we become willing to begin to expose this most tender part

actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to feel pain in its many guises. You breathe in for yourself, in the sense that pain is a personal and real experience, but simultaneously there’s no doubt that you’re developing

in a jealous rage and you have the courage to breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else, the arrow you feel in your heart will tell you that there are people all over the world who are feeling exactly what you’re feeling. This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race,

By the same token, if you feel some sense of delight—if you connect with what for you is inspiring, opening, relieving, relaxing—you breathe it out, you give it away, you send it out to everyone else. Again, it’s very personal. It starts with your feeling of delight, your feeling of connecting with a bigger

that’s real to you. For example, you can breathe in the hot, dark, constricted feeling of sadness that you feel, and breathe out a light, cool sense