Unpacking Uncertainty
Shift from emotional storytelling to sensory awareness—without forcing a tidy conclusion.
Uncertainty permeates our lives today, often leaving us feeling unsettled and seeking comfort. Rather than offering a soothing exercise, I want to share a practical strategy that has profoundly helped me navigate periods of uncertainty and overwhelm.
One of the most powerful applications of mindful awareness I’ve experienced is learning to relate to our feelings as sensations rather than automatically navigating them as personal stories to resolve.
When we focus on our emotions as stories, we become fixated on resolving them quickly. But when solutions aren’t readily available, this mindset can leave us feeling trapped and helpless.
Instead of fixating on who or what caused our feelings, or how to make them disappear, the key is to develop perceptual clarity and equanimity — a kind of internal hands-off stance that sounds conceptual but actually feels visceral.
We naturally resist the ambiguity of unpleasant emotions, but this resistance often intensifies our discomfort.
This exercise isn’t about forcing ourselves to enjoy difficult emotions or approve of what caused them. It’s about reducing our resistance, letting these feelings run their course, and making conscious choices about how to respond.
Unpleasant feelings are not the enemies of mindfulness—they are messengers carrying important information, even if it’s hard to receive. These emotions can reveal when our safety or values are under threat.
Uncertainty is an inevitable part of being alive.
By being willing to investigate the very elements of uncertainty, we empower ourselves to inhabit our lives more fully—even in the absence of the certainty we crave.
Exercise
Instead of trying to accept uncertainty, get curious about its composition. If you’re not feeling uncertain right now, use this as practice for future ambiguous situations.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Worrying
Waiting to find out what happens next
Exhausted by bad news
Click above to listen to the attention exercise.
Settle in. Find a comfortable, stable position. Explore how your body feels right now with your eyes open or closed. To the best of your ability, allow your body to feel however it feels.
Explore sensations related to uncertainty. Take a brief inventory of emotional feelings by scanning for the following emotional flavors, one at a time. If you detect a particular flavor, focus on its location and intensity instead of what it means or how to get rid of it.
uncertainty
anger
fear
sadness
embarrassment
hopelessness
Pick one to examine for a bit longer. Where do you feel it? Can you detect its shape? Does it have discernible boundaries: a top, bottom, front, back, or sides? As you observe it, does it stay the same or change in any way?
Explore neutral and pleasant sensations. Let any unpleasant feelings percolate in the periphery of your awareness as you detect and savor pleasant and emotionally neutral sensations in your body.
Zoom out to feel the whole body at once. Use the remaining practice time to stay in touch with your entire body. Breathe through the complex blend of sensations. Whatever degree of equanimity you can muster is more than enough.
“Not knowing is something that is undervalued in our culture. Most of us are conditioned to believe that not knowing isn’t a very worthy trait.
When you take a test at school, for example, and you don’t know the answer, you feel anxious, like you’ve done something wrong, and you feel stress as you try to remember and you try to know.
But in the context of spiritual inquiry, we actually let go of trying to know. We let go of conceptual certainty.
Right now, you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing—not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything.
If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and a mysterious openness dawns within you.
Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility.”
~ Adyashanti, from Falling into Grace
