We are living in an age of groundlessness. Ambiguity, unpredictability, and uncertainty arrive daily—sometimes hourly. It's natural to want solid ground, something to hold on to. But according to Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön, that search itself may be the problem. The real work is not finding something to grasp, but growing your capacity to be at home in freefall.
Why We Avoid Groundlessness
When asked how we might find ground in these groundless times, Chödrön reframes the question entirely. She resists the language of "finding ground" because it assumes ground is the goal. Instead, she offers a different word: equanimity. Equanimity is not a rock to stand on. It's a steadiness that comes from learning to live without one.
"The way to find some kind of equanimity is to grow your capacity for the queasiness, the fear, the anxiety, the uncomfortableness that comes along with the times we're living in," Chödrön explains. "Instead of trying to find something to hold on to, you become more and more comfortable, more at home, more able to hold free fall."
This inversion is central to her teaching. Most of us operate on the opposite principle: we encounter discomfort and we flee. We avoid the queasiness. We don't sit with the anxiety. We grasp for certainty, for control, for anything solid. And in doing so, Chödrön observes, "our ability to hold them, our ability to live from that place diminishes." Each time we turn away from a difficult feeling, we train ourselves to be less capable of holding it next time.
Alice in Wonderland as a Role Model
Chödrön reaches for an unexpected image to illustrate this capacity: Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Alice doesn't grab at the walls or scream or fight the descent. She simply falls. She doesn't know where she'll land. She waits to see. And at one point in her life, Chödrön says, Alice was a role model to her precisely because of this quality—the willingness to fall without grasping, to move through uncertainty without needing to control the outcome.
The teaching is stark in its simplicity: "We shy away from these feelings and in the process of that, our ability to hold them diminishes. And the way to become more comfortable, more at ease in a shifting, changing world, which has always been the case, actually, is to make friends with the feelings that are evoked by nothing to hold on to."
Making friends with fear, anxiety, and queasiness is not passivity or resignation. It's an active practice of turning toward rather than away, of meeting difficulty with curiosity instead of rejection.
Does the Feeling Ever Change?
A crucial question arises: after years of practice, after consistently turning toward these uncomfortable feelings, does the queasiness itself transform? Chödrön's answer is precise and nuanced.
The capacity does grow. "Less and less things evoke queasiness," she says. "What used to cause panic and anxiety, doesn't." This is not because the practice numbs you or makes you dissociate. It's because your threshold has genuinely expanded. You can hold more. You can tolerate more. Your nervous system learns that it can survive what it once thought would destroy it.
But—and this is essential—the queasiness never entirely disappears. "There's always your edge," Chödrön observes. "I think until you die, until full enlightenment, whatever, there's always some kind of edge that you haven't quite reached yet or something." This is not a failure of practice. It's the nature of growth itself. As soon as you expand into one zone of comfort, life presents you with a new frontier of fear.
The promise, then, is not the absence of difficulty. "Ideally, in the course of your life, you want to reach all those edges so that the feeling of being completely at home in your body, completely home in this world, in all situations increases." The felt sense of home-ness expands even as new edges appear.
When Fear Becomes a Wake-Up Bell
What changes most profoundly is not the feeling itself but your relationship to it. When Chödrön reaches one of her edges now and the queasiness arrives, it no longer signals danger to avoid. Instead, it functions as a wake-up bell—a reminder to open and be receptive.
"When I reach them and the queasy feeling happens, it's almost like a wake-up bell going off," she says. "It's a reminder to open and be receptive. Instead of reacting, you respond." The distinction between reacting and responding is everything. A reaction is automatic, contracted, defended. A response is conscious, spacious, available.
Where once the queasiness might have triggered panic and the instinct to run, Chödrön now encounters it with something close to delight. "The queasiness comes or the anxiety comes or just the tightening comes. And then that's like a reminder. It's almost like wonderful. Oh, great, you know. This is happening, I can work with this. I can train with this."
The dread hasn't stopped. Her response to it has. And this shift—from reactivity to responsiveness, from contraction to openness—is the fruit of the practice. It represents a fundamental rewiring of how the nervous system relates to difficulty.
A Practice for the Body
Chödrön offers a simple, embodied practice for those wanting to work with their own difficulty. The practice does not ask you to think your way through fear or to logic it away. Instead, it brings you back into direct contact with the feeling itself.
"Go to your body, full embodiment and find the place where the terror is happening," she instructs. "Find the place where the dread is happening. The kind of place that's triggering all the habitual patterns of running away, of closing down." This localization is crucial. Fear and anxiety are not abstract. They live in the body. They have a location—a tightness in the chest, a knot in the belly, a constriction in the throat.
Once you've found that place, the next step is not to fight it or force it away. Instead, "have a sense of tenderness, warmth, extended to that very feeling, like making friends with that feeling. Like it's okay, it's okay, it's okay." The word tenderness recurs in Chödrön's teaching because it names exactly what's needed: not toughness or detachment, but warmth directed toward the very part of yourself that's suffering.
This is not self-pity or self-indulgence. It's the recognition that the frightened, contracted part of you is not an enemy. It's a part of yourself that's been trying to protect you, even if its methods are no longer serving. Meeting it with tenderness is how you invite it to relax.
The Humility Built In
Chödrön includes a caution worth holding: "You don't want to brag in this life because you never know what's coming next." This is not false modesty. It's a recognition that spiritual practice is not a ladder you climb to safety. There is no permanent arrival. The edges keep coming. Life keeps surprising us. The practice is to keep meeting each edge with the same openness, the same tenderness, the same willingness to fall without grasping.
Yet within that uncertainty lives a profound freedom. "No matter how far you get into it, there's always the opportunity to just pause and reflect and shift from contracted to more expansive." The ability to pause, to notice contraction, and to choose expansion—this capacity grows with practice and never stops growing.
Where to go from here
The teaching points inward and downward—into the body, into the specific felt sense of where fear lives. Begin there. Notice what you habitually avoid. Track the small contractions, the tightenings, the moments when you turn away from discomfort. Then, gently, experiment with turning back toward it. Find the physical location of the feeling. Breathe into it. Extend tenderness toward it. Not once, but repeatedly, until turning toward becomes as natural as the turning away once was. In doing so, you're not transcending groundlessness. You're learning to dance in it.
