The search for solid ground, security, certainty, and something to hold onto is itself the source of suffering, because that ground does not exist. Relaxing into the fundamental groundlessness of experience, rather than scrambling to escape it, is where genuine freedom begins.
When fear, anger, or craving arises, the practice is to refrain from the habitual escape (lashing out, numbing, storylines) and instead stay present with the raw bodily sensation underneath. This gap between stimulus and reaction is where the compulsive momentum of a pattern can dissolve rather than be reinforced.
Giving up hope of a better self or a fixed solution is not despair but relief, because hope and fear are two sides of the same resistance to the present. Abandoning the hope that circumstances will finally make us okay lets us meet life as it actually is.
Painful circumstances are reframed not as interruptions to a spiritual life but as the precise material that wakes us up and softens us. The moments things fall apart are treated as tests that can heal rather than problems to be fixed and forgotten.
Chödrön recounts being asked how to work with fear, to which her teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche answered that the instruction is to move closer to it: step into it, relate to it directly, get to know fear thoroughly rather than trying to conquer or avoid it. The counsel was not to overcome fear but to become intimate with it.