Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön

otherwise we can’t see. Traditional lojong teachings say it another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders.
    “Be grateful to everyone” is a way of saying that we can learn from any situation, especially if we practice this slogan with awareness. The people and situations in our lives can remind us to catch neurosis as neurosis—to see when we’ve pulled the shades, locked the door, and crawled under the covers.

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    Obstacles as Questions
    O BSTACLES OCCUR at the outer and inner levels. At the outer level the sense is that something or somebody has harmed us, interfering with the harmony and peace we thought was ours. Some rascal has ruined it all. This particular sense of obstacle occurs in relationships and in many other situations; we feel disappointed, harmed, confused, and attacked in a variety of ways. People have felt this way from the beginning of time.
    As for the inner level of obstacle, perhaps nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. Perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive. It keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us: Where are we separating ourselves from reality? How are we pulling back instead of opening up? How are we closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter?

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    Six Ways to Be Lonely
    U SUALLY WE REGARD loneliness as an enemy. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we rest in the middle of it, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a cooling loneliness that turns our usual fearful patterns upside down. There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness:
     
Less desire is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to change our mood.
Contentment means that we no longer believe that escaping our loneliness is going to bring happiness or courage or strength.
Avoiding unnecessary activities means that we stop looking for something to entertain us or to save us.
Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back to the present moment with compassionate attention.
Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are, without trying to make them okay.
Not seeking security from one’s discursive thoughts means no longer seeking the companionship of constant conversation with ourselves.

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    Thoroughly Processed
    U NDERSTANDING HOW our emotions have the power to run us around in circles helps us discover how we increase our pain, how we increase our confusion, how we cause harm to ourselves. Because we have basic goodness, basic wisdom, basic intelligence, we can stop harming ourselves and harming others.
    Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don’t buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive—we leave things minute. They don’t keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes through learning to pause for just a moment and not doing the same thing again and again out of impulse. Simply to pause instead of immediately filling up the space transforms us. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.
    The result is that we cease to cause harm. We begin