VanessaJ’s Reviews > Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion > Status Update

How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation.

After a while, that’s how we relate with hope and fear in our daily lives. Out of nowhere, we stop struggling and relax.

How we stay in the middle between indulging and repressing is by acknowledging whatever arises without judgment, letting the thoughts simply dissolve, and then going back to the openness of this very moment. That’s what we’re actually doing in meditation.

“All activities should be done with one intention”…Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.

In any case, the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them, but really they are like dream images. They are like an illusion—not really all that solid. They are, as we say, just thinking.

The third noble truth says that suffering ceases when we let go of trying to maintain the huge ME at any cost.

The second noble truth says that resistance is the fundamental operating mechanism of what we call ego, that resisting life causes suffering.

We also change like the weather. We ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We fail to see that like the weather, we are fluid, not solid. And so we suffer.

“Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

A warrior accepts that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.

The root of suffering is resisting the certainty that no matter what the circumstances, uncertainty is all we truly have.