Free Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön

working at that store for fifteen years.
    With the first commitment we begin to build confidence in our ability to embrace the raw, edgy, unpredictable energy of life. With the second commitment we step further into groundlessness as a source of awakening rather than a source of dread, as a path to fearlessness rather than a threat to our survival. If we haven’t already been training in relaxing with fundamental uneasiness, then making thesecond commitment can be terrifying, because we’re moving deeper into this open-ended, undefined territory called benefiting others.
    Committing to benefit others is traditionally called the path of the bodhisattva, the path of the hero and heroine, the path of the spiritual warrior whose weapons are gentleness, clarity of mind, and an open heart. The Tibetan word for warrior, pawo for a male warrior or pawmo for a female warrior, means “the one who cultivates bravery.” As warriors in training, we cultivate the courage and flexibility to live with uncertainty—with the shaky, tender feeling of anxiety, of nothing to hold on to—and to dedicate our lives to making ourselves available to every person, in every situation.
    The commitment to take care of one another is often described as a vow to invite all sentient beings to be our guest. The prospect can be daunting. It means that everyone will be coming to our house. It means opening our door to everyone, not just to the people we like or the ones who smell good or the ones we consider “proper” but also to the violent ones and the confused ones—to people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, to people speaking all different languages, to people with all different points of view. Making the second commitment means holding a diversity party in our living room, all day every day, until the end of time.
    Initially, most of us are in no way ready to commit to all of that—we are in no way ready to leap into that much groundlessness without reservation. But if we have a longing to alleviate suffering, what can we do? For one thing, we can invite everybody and open the door to them all, but open the door only briefly at first. We open it only for as long as we’re currently able to and give ourselves permission to close it whenwe become too uncomfortable. However, our aspiration is always to open the door again and to keep it open for a few seconds longer than the time before.
    When we practice this way, the results may be surprising. In opening the door gradually, not trying to throw it open all at once, we get used to the shaky feeling we experience when people we can’t quite handle start coming to the party. Rather than thinking, I have to open the door completely or I’m not doing it right, we start with the strong intention to keep opening that door, and bit by bit, we tap into a reservoir of inner strength and courage that we never knew we had.
    Opening the door reflects our intention to remove our armor, to take off our mask, to face our fears. It is only to the degree that we become willing to face our own feelings that we can really help others. So we make a commitment that for the rest of our lives, we’ll train in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of our own reactivity, our own survival mechanisms, our own propensities to be hooked.
    It’s not that we won’t ever experience those feelings again. Fundamental uneasiness will continue to arise over and over, but when it does, we won’t overreact to it, we won’t let it rule our life. I once asked Dzigar Kongtrül about this, and he said, “Yes, I still have those feelings, but they don’t catch me.” He is, it seems, no longer afraid of fear.
    Those raw feelings can even inspire us to action. When an interviewer asked the Dalai Lama if he had any regrets, he replied that yes, he did: he felt responsible for the death of an elderly monk who had come to him for guidance. When the interviewer asked how he had dealt with that feeling of regret, how he had gotten rid of