Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change Read Online Free PDF Page A

based on a genuine trust in our basic goodness. We trust that we’re fundamentally openhearted and open-minded and that when we’re not confounded by our emotions, we know what will help and what will hurt.
    When you come from the view that you’re fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed, as you see yourself speak or act out, as you see yourself repress, you will have a growing understanding that you’re not a bad person who needs to shape up but a good person with temporary, malleable habits that are causing you a lot of suffering. And then, in that spirit, you can become very familiar with these temporary but strongly embedded habits. You can see them so clearly and so compassionately that you don’t continue to strengthen them.
    The process of seeing your habits clearly is sometimes compared to having a big, blank canvas, then taking a paintbrush and making a dot on it. The empty canvas represents basic goodness, your basic unfettered nature; the dot represents a habit. It can be a very small dot, but against the empty canvas it really stands out. From this perspective, you can see very clearly whether you spoke or acted, or didn’t speak or didn’t act. So you can begin to train inknowing what you’re doing when you’re doing it—and in being kind to yourself about your speech and actions. You rejoice when you’re able to acknowledge that you’re caught in an old pattern and when you catch yourself before you speak or act out. We all carry around trunk loads of old habits, but very fortunately for us, they’re removable. They don’t have to weigh us down permanently. Refraining is very powerful because it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge when we’re caught and then to get unstuck.
    Each time we don’t refrain but speak or act out instead, we’re strengthening old habits, strengthening the kleshas, and strengthening the fixed sense of self. We’re keeping the whole mechanism of suffering going. But when we refrain, we’re allowing ourselves to feel the underlying uncertainty—that edgy, restless energy—without trying to escape. The escape routes are there, but we’re not using them. We’re getting in touch with the feeling of fundamental uneasiness and relaxing with it rather than being run around by our thoughts and emotions. We’re not trying to eradicate thoughts; we’re just training ourselves not to be so enmeshed in them. Dzigar Kongtrül has a sign on the front door of his retreat cabin that reads, “Don’t believe everything you think.” That’s the basic idea here.
    As we become more conscious of our thoughts and emotions and look at them with kindhearted interest and curiosity, we begin to see how we armor ourselves against pain. And we see how that armor also cuts us off from the pain—and the beauty—of other people. But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves—particularly deep-seated feelings of “I’m not okay”—the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond our transitory thoughtsand emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go.
    The first commitment works with the causes of suffering and brings about the cessation of suffering by allowing us to see clearly what our escape routes are and enabling us not to take them. Science is demonstrating that every time we refrain but don’t repress, new neural pathways open up in the brain. In not taking the old escape routes, we’re predisposing ourselves to a new way of seeing ourselves, a new way of relating to the mysteriously unpredictable world in which we live.
    The Three Commitments aren’t moralistic—they have nothing to do with being a “good girl” or a “good boy.” They’re about opening ourselves to a vaster perspective and changing at the core. Understanding the first commitment and the basic premise of