Our habitual way of being can feel like a constant reaching for certainty and control.
We’ve learned to treat uncertainty as a problem – something to be resolved, managed, or at least gotten through. And yet the ground keeps shifting. The “not-knowing” doesn’t go away, and the anxiety around it continues to accumulate.
How can we find a way of being in the world where uncertainty – rather than being a source of stress – becomes our friend?
Jaya Rudgard has taught around this theme for years, and she brings a key distinction to it. On one hand, there’s a not-knowing that comes from being disconnected: adrift, scattered, unmoored from experience.
But there’s a radically different not-knowing that arises when we’re deeply, attentively present. The body settles. Life flows. Responses become wiser and kinder – not because contradictions are resolved, but because understanding has shifted.
In this Day of Practice, Jaya guides us in discovering what becomes possible when we let go of looking for certainty in the wrong places. Together, we’ll practice attending deeply to the flow of experience and investigating the mind’s often unquestioned beliefs, including the assumption (often stressful) that we should know more than we do.
As we orient our attention more wisely, there is a natural realignment of what we place our trust in. Gradually, we can learn to untangle ourselves from confusion and embrace the “don’t-know mind” with greater confidence and ease.
