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These days, when our world is deluged by stories of grief and loss, I’m reminded of a famous Buddhist teaching story: One day, a woman who cannot accept the sudden death of her child brings her son’s body to the Buddha. She asks the Enlightened One to revive her son. The Buddha understands the mother’s predicament. He tells her he can do this, but first she must bring him a mustard seed from a home in which no one has lost a loved one. Desperate to restore her child, the mother went knocking door to door, inquiring. At the first house, an elder had died; at the second, a child. After many doors, the bereaved woman realized the dead outnumber the living; no one escapes loss. This realization became the first stage of her awakening and her acceptance of mortality.

As humans, we love and suffer when those we love die. How do we embrace these two profound realities and maintain our emotional balance? How do we keep the embers of faith in the future lit when we’re hobbled by life’s unpredictable unfolding? Uncertainty seeds anxiety. The emotional centers of our brain respond to uncertainty as a threat. When faced with the unknown, evolution has programmed stress hormones to flood our nervous system. Below the level of consciousness, uncertainty evokes survival fears and damages our trust in reliability.1

We live at a time of fragile stability. Here and around the globe, families, communities, and countries are experiencing the chaos of a world in turmoil. Yet despite the plaguing challenges, we have the capacity to discover sanctuaries of emotional refuge. We may, in fact, have an inborn inclination to turn toward........

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