Comfortable with Uncertainty — 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion is the daily-reader compilation of Pema Chödrön's earlier teaching books, published by Shambhala in 2002. The book is structured as 108 short stand-alone passages (the number tracks the traditional length of a Tibetan retreat) drawn primarily from When Things Fall Apart, The Wisdom of No Escape, and Start Where You Are, and re-edited for the daily-reading format. The selections concentrate on the operational core of Chödrön's teaching — the lojong slogans, the practice of tonglen, the analysis of shenpa as the moment of being hooked by aversion or craving — rather than on the doctrinal exposition that appears more explicitly in the longer source volumes.
Reception
Comfortable with Uncertainty is the most-gifted of Pema Chödrön's titles and the volume Shambhala Publications has positioned, in its 108-passage format, as the bedside or daily-reading companion to the longer works. Within the Shambhala lineage the book is read as a serviceable digest of the three source volumes for readers who prefer the daily-passage format; readers who arrive at Chödrön through this book and then go back to the originals report (in the Lion's Roar and Tricycle review record) that the longer chapters of When Things Fall Apart in particular do work that the short excerpts cannot. Critics in the Tibetan academic tradition have noted, as with Start Where You Are, that the very compressed lojong-slogan passages can over-extract Chekawa's text from its explicit emptiness-and-bodhicitta framework; the book's pastoral function inside Western convert Buddhism, however, has remained essentially unchallenged.
Frequently asked
What is Comfortable with Uncertainty about?
A daily-reader anthology compiled from Pema Chödrön's earlier teaching books — primarily When Things Fall Apart, The Wisdom of No Escape, and Start Where You Are. The 108 short stand-alone passages (the number follows the traditional length of a Tibetan retreat) concentrate on the operational core of Chödrön's teaching: the lojong slogans, the practice of tonglen, and the concept of shenpa — the moment of being hooked by aversion or craving.
What is shenpa and why does the book focus on it?
Shenpa is a Tibetan term that Chödrön translates as "the urge" or "the hook" — the moment of being grabbed by an emotion before one acts on it. In the book's compressed passages, shenpa is presented as the point of entry into lojong practice: recognising and staying with that hooked feeling, rather than acting it out or suppressing it, is what allows the mind-training tradition to work.
How does this book differ from Chödrön's longer teaching books?
Comfortable with Uncertainty is a daily-reader compilation rather than a sustained argument. It is drawn from When Things Fall Apart, The Wisdom of No Escape, and Start Where You Are, re-edited into 108 stand-alone passages for the daily-reading format. The shorter form foregrounds the practical core — slogans, tonglen, shenpa — while the longer books contain more context, narrative, and doctrinal exposition around the same material.