Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change

Key Concepts

The First Commitment: Committing to Not Cause Harm

“In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it’s because we’ve chosen to rekindle it.” (p. 11)

“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.” (p. 29)

“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.” (p. 30)

“Refraining from harmful speech and action is outer renunciation; choosing not to escape the underlying feelings is inner renunciation.” (p. 31)

The Second Commitment: Committing to Take Care of One Another

“The commitment to take care of one another, the warrior commitment, is not about being perfect. It’s about continuing to put virtuous input into our unconscious, continuing to sow the seeds that predispose our heart to expand without limit, that predispose us to awaken.” (p. 91)

The Third Commitment: Committing to Embrace the World Just as It Is

“The attitude of the third commitment is that we live in a world that is intrinsically good, intrinsically awake, and our path is to realize this. Simply put, the practice at this stage is to turn toward your experience, all of it, and never turn away.” (p. 102)

“It’s a challenge to practice staying present when we’re despondent or distressed or overwhelmed, when our backs are against the wall. But right then, when we’re in a tight spot, we have the ideal situation for practice.” (p. 119)

 Quotables

“This refers, I think, to an essential choice that confronts us all: whether to cling to the false security of our fixed ideas and tribal views, even though they bring us only momentary satisfaction, or to overcome our fear and make the leap to living an authentic life.” (p. 4)

“When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for this is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.” (p. 6)

“When we don’t like someone—they’re not on our wavelength, so we don’t want to hang out with them—it’s generally because they challenge our fixed identity.” (p. 9)

“It isn’t the content of our movie that needs our attention, it’s the projector. It isn’t the current story line that’s the root of our pain; it’s our propensity to be bothered in the first place.” (p. 16)

“A MEAN WORD or a snide remark, a disdainful or disapproving facial expression, aggressive body language—these are all ways that we can cause harm.” (p. 51)

“With the commitment to not cause harm, we move away from reacting in ways that cause us to suffer, but we haven’t yet arrived at a place that feels entirely relaxed and free. We first have to go through a growing-up process, a getting-used-to process.” (p. 52)

“Our attachment to gain and loss also keeps us running in the rat race. ...For instance, the money we have and the money we don’t have preoccupy both the rich and the poor—and just about everyone in between—in countries all over the world.” (p. 55)

“The eight worldly concerns are, at bottom, just an outdated mechanism for survival. In that sense, we’re still functioning at a very primitive level, completely at the mercy of hope and fear. The mechanism of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure kept us from being eaten, kept us from freezing to death in winter, kept us figuring out how to get food and how to clothe ourselves. This worked well for our ancestors, but it isn’t working very well for us now. In fact, we continually overreact when it’s hardly a life-or-death matter. We behave as if our very existence were threatened, when all that’s at stake is maybe a late charge.” (p. 60)

“Making the second commitment means holding a diversity party in our living room, all day every day, until the end of time.” (p. 67)

“If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that’s endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn’t inherent in the place but in your state of mind.” (p. 78)

“Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.” (p. 83)

“But imagine what the world would be like if we could come to see our likes and dislikes as merely likes and dislikes, and what we take to be intrinsically true as just our personal viewpoint.” (p. 108)

“There’s not a drop of rain or a pile of dog poop that appears in your life that isn’t the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn’t a doorway to sacred world. But it’s up to you whether your life is a mandala of neurosis or a mandala of sanity.” (p. 111)