Comfortable With Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön Page A

to know ourselves thoroughly and to respect ourselves and others. Anything can come up, anything can walk into our house. We can find a dinosaur sitting on our living room couch, and we don’t freak out. We have been thoroughly processed by coming to know ourselves with honest, gentle mindfulness.

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    Commitment
    R ECENTLY I TAUGHT a weekend program in a kind of New Age spiritual shopping mart. Mine was one of about seventy different workshops being presented. The people in the parking lot or at lunch would say to each other, “Oh, what are you taking this weekend?” I hadn’t encountered anything like that for a long time.
    Once I was shopping around for a spiritual path myself. In order to stop, I had to hear my teacher Chögyam Trungpa say that shopping around is an attempt to find security, an attempt to find a way to always feel good about yourself. You can hear the dharma from many different places, but you are uncommitted until you encounter a particular way that rings true in your heart and you decide to follow it. In order to go deeper, there has to be a wholehearted commitment. You begin the warrior’s journey when you choose one path and stick to it. Then you let it put you through your changes. Without a commitment, the minute you really begin to hurt, you’ll just leave or you’ll look for something else.
    The question always remains: To what are we really committed? Is it to playing it safe and manipulating our life and the rest of the world so that it will give us security and confirmation? Or is our commitment to exploring deeper and deeper levels of letting go? Do we take refuge in small, self-satisfied actions, speech, and mind? Or do we take refuge in warriorship, in taking a leap, in going beyond our usual safety zones?

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    Three Methods for Working with Chaos
    T HERE ARE THREE very practical ways for relating with difficult circumstances as the path of awakening and joy: no more struggle, poison as medicine, and regarding everything that arises as the manifestation of wisdom.
    The first method is epitomized by meditation instruction. Whatever arises in our minds we look at directly, call it “thinking,” and go back to the simplicity and immediacy of the breath. When we encounter difficulties in our lives, we can continue to train in this way. We can drop the story line, slow down enough to just be present, let go of the multitude of judgments and schemes, and stop struggling.
    Second, we can use poison as fuel for waking up. In general, this idea is introduced to us with tonglen. Instead of pushing difficult situations away, we can use them to connect with other people who, just like us, often find themselves in pain. As one slogan puts it, “When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps into the path of enlightenment.”
    The third method for working with chaos is to regard whatever arises as the manifestation of awakened energy. We can regard ourselves as already awake; we can regard our world as already sacred. This view further encourages us to use everything in our lives as the basis for attaining enlightenment.
    The world we find ourselves in, the person we think we are—these are our working bases. This charnel ground called life is the manifestation of wisdom. This wisdom is the basis of freedom and also the basis of confusion. In every moment, we make a choice: Which way do we go? How do we relate with the raw material of our existence?

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    On-the-Spot Equanimity
    A N ON-THE-SPOT equanimity practice is to walk down the street with the intention of staying as awake as possible to whomever we meet. This is training in being emotionally honest with ourselves and becoming more available to others. As we pass people we simply notice whether we open up or shut down. We notice if we feel attraction, aversion, or indifference, without adding anything extra like self-judgment. We might feel compassion toward someone who looks depressed, or cheered up by someone who’s smiling to