Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your heart.

Meditation may be the only thing we do that doesn’t add anything to the picture.

For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what’s meant by compassion or patience. That’s what is meant by control.

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.

other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out.

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

We use our practice to reinforce the implication that if we just did the right things, we’d begin to connect with a bigger world, a vaster world, a world different from the one we’re in now.

THE TENDENCY to centralize into ourselves, to try to protect ourselves, is strong and all-pervasive. A simple way of turning it around is to develop our curiosity and our inquisitiveness about everything. This is another way of talking about helping others, but of course the process also helps us. We work on ourselves in order to help others, but a