Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

The third noble truth says that 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 line, we’re left just sitting with the quality and the…

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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

You may notice that the whole day went by and you never once remembered what you had aspired to do in the morning. Rather than using that as ammunition for feeling bad about yourself, use it as an opportunity to get to know yourself better. Use it to see all the funny ways in which you trick yourself, all the ways in which you’re so good at zoning

WE CANNOT be in the present moment and run our story lines at the same time.

A WOMAN IS RUNNING from tigers. She runs and she runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. She comes to the edge of a cliff. She sees a vine there, so she climbs down and holds on to it. Then she looks down and sees that there are tigers below her as well. At the same time, she notices a little mouse gnawing away at the vine to which she

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.

Whatever discomfort you feel becomes useful. “I’m miserable, I’m depressed. Okay. Let me feel it fully so that nobody else has to feel it, so that others could be free of it.” It starts to awaken your heart because you have this aspiration to say, “This pain can be of benefit to others because I can be courageous enough to feel it fully so no one e

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. Th

If you’re walking down the street and far in the distance—so far that you can’t possibly do anything about it—you see a man beating his dog, then you can do tonglen for the dog and the man. At the same time, you’re doing it for your own heartbreak, for all the animals and people who are abusing and abused, and for all the people like you who are wa

“Doing something different” is anything that interrupts our strong tendency to spin out. We can let the story line go and connect with the underlying energy, do on-the-spot tonglen, remember a slogan, or burst into song—anything that doesn’t reinforce our crippling habits.