Confidence

Confidence Plot Summary

Introduction

I'll never forget that moment in the meditation hall. As others sat with serene expressions, my inner tube man was flailing wildly. The teacher had just instructed us to "hold your seat" through whatever arose during our practice, and my mind was having none of it. Thoughts raced: "I'm not doing this right. Everyone else looks so peaceful. When will this end?" My confidence shattered with each passing minute as I struggled against the winds of my own mind. What does it truly mean to "hold your seat" in life? This question forms the heart of a journey that explores how we might develop genuine confidence amidst life's inevitable challenges. The eight worldly winds - pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and insignificance, success and failure - blow through every human life, often leaving us feeling unmoored and insecure. Yet within these very challenges lies the path to discovering an unshakable foundation. Through compassion, awareness, connection to lineage, and the transformative practice of windhorse, we can learn to stay present even when everything within us wants to run, hide, or defend. This exploration isn't about achieving perfection or transcending humanity; rather, it's about embracing our vulnerability and discovering that our greatest power emerges precisely when we stop trying to escape our human experience.

Chapter 1: Taking Your Seat: The True Nature of Confidence

The Buddhist teacher sat cross-legged at the front of the room, her presence both formidable and gentle. "I'm not here. This isn't happening," she quoted from the Radiohead song, then smiled. "That's exactly what mindfulness is not." The room filled with knowing laughter. She continued, "When I listen to that song, I feel simultaneous tenderness for the boy in me, longing to press the reset button on the Nintendo console of life itself, and tenderness for the adult in me, who knows that life is no game." This tension between wanting to disappear and needing to show up fully for our lives gets to the heart of what confidence truly means. It's not the swagger of certainty, but rather the courage to remain present even when uncertainty floods our experience. The dictionary defines confidence as "firm trust." Self-confidence, then, is firm trust in yourself - not just in specific abilities like public speaking or artistic talent, but in your capacity to navigate your own mind through whatever arises. Many people approach mindfulness practice hoping to reduce stress or increase gratitude, but just beneath these initial attractions lurk questions of self-confidence and self-worth. When conversations about Buddhism shift beyond meditation mechanics to living a more awakened life, they almost always turn to working with insecurity, trusting ourselves, and feeling into our own power. We end up talking about trusting our choices, our speech, our thoughts, and most deeply, trusting that we'll be capable of navigating the unknown. Self-confidence is a tender topic that makes most voices grow quieter when discussing it openly. Even extroverts who thrust themselves into public visibility experience strange vulnerabilities. Discussing confidence feels like walking a tightrope with uncomfortable associations on both sides - admitting insecurity on one side, risking appearing arrogant on the other. This tightrope is further complicated in spiritual circles by the belief that true spirituality should signal the death of ego and transcendence of human needs, especially for validation. The Buddhist teachings help transform this tightrope into a cushion - a wobbly one, but a seat nonetheless - from which we can navigate life with greater presence and compassion. "Take your seat" is a powerful instruction that extends far beyond meditation posture. It grants permission to take up space with confidence, to own our capabilities without self-diminishment. It reminds us: You are here. This is happening. You belong here. You get a spot. This spot is yours. Claim it.

Chapter 2: Pleasure and Pain: Finding Balance in Sensory Experience

The taste of caramel versus a bite of rotten fish, the smell of jasmine flowers versus city garbage on a hot July day, the panoramic sight of a mountain summit versus a bleak layer of prefabricated concrete. Is there any experience that can make us lose our center more quickly than the "carrot" of pleasure and the stick of "pain"? These forces are wired directly into our nervous systems, our first and foremost inheritance from the ancestry of our human lineage. Dr. Richard Davidson's neuroscience team once conducted fascinating experiments to track how Buddhist meditation affects the brain's pain receptors. Participants were wired up to observe their brain activity during a thirty-second period broken into three ten-second intervals: anticipation of pain, direct experience of pain (a safe but painful burning sensation), and reflection after the pain ceased. For people with little meditation experience, the entire thirty seconds were rough. They anxiously anticipated the pain, experienced it intensely, and then ruminated on it afterward. The most surprising results came from master meditator Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. As might be expected, his pain receptors showed minimal activity during the anticipation and reflection phases - he neither braced against the coming pain nor dwelled on it afterward. But during the actual painful sensation, his pain receptors spiked higher than the control group of non-meditators. When it was time to feel pain, his tens of thousands of hours of practice led him to feel pain even more than others did. "I should've known that would happen," Dr. Davidson remarked, "because his sense gates are so open." This runs counter to how we often imagine mindfulness working. "Feel pain more!" isn't exactly a slogan that would sell meditation apps. But this is precisely what happens with practice. When the winds of pain blow through, a mindful practitioner really feels the lived experience. They take their seat and hold it, letting pain blow through fully rather than numbing out or running away. After a month-long meditation retreat, one practitioner described drinking a Coca-Cola: "Everything in this world is four times brighter, louder, faster, sweeter than it needs to be because they're only expecting us to pay one-quarter the attention." Our nervous systems evolved to highlight threats and pleasures for survival purposes, but in our modern world, these signals are constantly exploited. The technology of the 2020s gives us unprecedented ability to microdose dopamine at all hours while anxiety about the world ransacks our bodies and steals our sleep. A classic Buddhist teacher named Shantideva referred to the mindless pursuit of pleasure as "licking honey from a razor blade." The razor blade represents the truth of impermanence that lies at the bleeding edge of every pleasant experience. We mistake momentary hits of pleasure for lasting salvation, some final escape from our personal and collective restlessness. This is the foundation of addiction in all its forms. The most evolved relationship to pleasure and pain in the Tantric Buddhist tradition is called "one taste" - a state where we appreciate both equally with deep curiosity, no longer favoring one over the other. Whatever arises - pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral - we experience it fully, recognizing that these experiences simply remind us of the beauty of being alive.

Chapter 3: Praise and Blame: Navigating External Feedback

"You look beautiful!" | "Oh, you're wearing that?" "You're such a considerate roommate." | "You never wash a single damn dish." "You really killed it." | "You totally blew it." Praise and blame. Compliment and criticism. This second pairing of the winds of hope and fear can reveal vulnerability and fragility more directly than any other human experience. Unlike pleasure and pain, which course through the body whenever our senses are open, praise and blame happen in the context of social interactions. Because we're deeply relational beings, the feedback we get from and give to others is intimately tied to our feeling of self-worth. One Buddhist teacher received feedback from a friend and colleague who was Black and queer. The colleague wrote, "Because you have yourself in the 'good white guy' category, you sometimes think you know more than you actually do about the lived experience of those with different embodiments." The feedback stung, striking a painful chord because it called into question something the teacher prided himself on - being a good listener. He found himself wanting to respond defensively: "I've been working on this tendency, really hard, for over twenty years! It's so confusing! I'm never sure whether to listen or speak!" But instead of reacting defensively, he breathed into the discomfort, thanked his colleague, and contemplated what the feedback revealed about how he showed up in the community. This exemplifies holding one's seat during the winds of criticism - feeling the impact fully without either dismissing it or being destroyed by it. Why does criticism hurt so much? Why does it deflate us? The old playground chant should go "Sticks and stones may break my bones (temporarily), but words will ruin my self-regard for lifetimes." Praise and blame operate on our nervous system much like physical pleasure and pain. From an evolutionary perspective, they're tied to our place in a group. Criticism makes our "seat" feel less safe within our community, while praise and affirmation reassure us of our belonging. There's also a third discomfort related to praise and criticism: the space in between, not knowing what someone thinks of us. This uncertainty can cause as much stress as harsh criticism. We try so hard to hold onto certainty about where we stand that we might even say things like "You must hate me, don't you?" - because knowing we're hated can feel more comforting than floating in uncertainty. Rather than trying to become invulnerable to feedback, we can learn practices for receiving it more skillfully: preparing for the discomfort, pausing to remember our negativity bias, knowing who to ask for feedback and why, observing our own experience as the principal witness, and practicing accepting compliments with a simple "thank you" instead of deflecting. Similarly, we can learn to give feedback more effectively by questioning whether our feedback is helpful, speaking to behaviors rather than identities, remembering others' negativity bias, and letting go of results. The most mature approach to feedback reminds us that praise and criticism are experiences that don't stop with the physical body. They extend to our sense of who we are, to our relationships, and to the groups in which we seek acceptance. By remembering our inherent sensitivity as humans, we can take our seat more mindfully amid the winds of social feedback.

Chapter 4: Fame and Insignificance: The Quest for Recognition

"She's got 34,000 Instagram followers. There were three people at her birthday party." This overheard comment captures the strange relationship many now have with visibility and recognition. The third pairing of worldly winds points to our longing to be recognized, to gain visibility in the world, and to avoid obscurity and unimportance. The Disney movie Coco introduced the idea that a person dies twice. The first death occurs when the body dies, but the second death - the final one - happens when none of your descendants remembers you well enough to make an offering for you on their familial altar. When all memories of you fade from the living, that's when you're truly gone. This fear of being forgotten completely - what we might call insignificance - drives much of our relationship with fame and recognition. One Buddhist teacher described an unexpected encounter with this dynamic. After a dharma talk, a waitress recognized his colleague Sharon Salzberg in a restaurant. The waitress enthusiastically described how she listened to Sharon's guided meditations to help with anxiety and sleep. "Have you ever thought about just how many people listen to your voice?" she asked Sharon. "Have you ever thought about how many people listen to your voice...in bed?" The question highlighted the strange intimacy created when someone becomes known for their work. For the first time in history, a person can keep statistical track of how many people are following and liking their public activities. The ability to earn a living is now often related to the reach of one's social media presence or "platform." When a book publisher considers publishing your work, they don't just decide whether it's good enough on its merits - they want to know how many followers you have and what connections you can leverage to get the book in front of readers. But is the past always there to support you? When we invoke lineage, we often want to cherry-pick only the worthy ancestors, crossing out the problematic ones. One Zen teacher observed: "You carry it all with you. Not just the good." She spoke of a Zen practice of chanting the names of teachers who came before, and of once wishing she could simply skip certain names on the list, but realizing it was impossible to do so. We can't "move on" from our lineage, because our historical inheritance is woven into us. It might be updated, changed, or transformed, but it can't be erased. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we carry our lineage with us. You can decide to take time out from talking to your parents, for example, but you can't fire them from being your parents. There's no way to say this except straightforwardly: not only will we all die, but there will be a time on this earth when nobody will know that we even existed. In the end, the cosmos is laughing at every last one of us. Even if you turned out to be one of the very rare people whose "brand" survives for thousands of years, you'd almost definitely be misremembered. The practice that helps us work with this reality is contemplating aloneness - sitting quietly and considering what it's like to be alive when nobody is watching you. This contemplation brings both sadness at the evaporation of opportunities to share ourselves meaningfully, and also freedom from taking ourselves too seriously. The second death is both sad and liberating.

Chapter 5: Success and Failure: Beyond the Comparative Mind

A Buddhist teacher was thrilled when a prestigious publisher agreed to publish his second book. He got off the phone with his agent and had one of those "Mama, I made it!" moments. He called his mother to share the news, then turned off his phone and wandered around his native city for a few glorious hours. His inner tube man was shooting upward, headwinds abounding. He had arrived at a feeling of settledness, safely rooted to this earth, not needing any more confirmation from the witnessing eyes of the world. A few hours later, he turned his phone back on. The first notification told him that his college friend Ben Lerner had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, one of the highest honors, well, anywhere. His initial reaction wasn't magnanimous joy for a friend whose work he respected, but an oddly embarrassing feeling of deflation. His inner tube man went limp, as if his own moment of validation earlier in the day had happened to another person in another lifetime. This story illustrates the insidious power of what Buddhists call "comparative mind." Who's your Ben Lerner? Who's Ben Lerner's Ben Lerner? And whose Ben Lerner are you? We all have at least one person against whose perceived success we measure ourselves, and we're often the object of someone else's comparison. As shared narratives, rivalries are the stuff of legend: LeBron James meets Michael Jordan, Jackson Pollock meets Willem de Kooning, Rihanna meets Beyoncé. Our culture gives us precious few ways to define "doing well" that aren't comparative. What is a fulfilling career? "Maybe it's whatever career my most impressive friend from school is having?" What is a healthy romantic relationship? "Maybe it's a better relationship than my parents had?" The problem with comparing yourself to Better You is that the grounds for being enough keep shifting. If you lose five pounds, Better You needs you to lose five more. If you get a million dollars, Better You needs two million. Comparative mind is based on a mindset embedded in our dominant culture: scarcity. The political economists who created the philosophies undergirding our current system based them directly on the assumption of a scarcity of material goods. The philosophy is simple: human desire is unlimited, resources are finite. These thinkers framed systems that exploited human competitiveness and fear of scarcity, seeing no path for society other than constant competition and comparison. This scarcity mentality requires both collective and personal work to uproot. We can practice noticing comparative mind at work, extracting the nugget of wisdom that lies at its center. The wisdom is that envy always shows us something we long for. When comparison becomes a fixation, it obscures our own positive desire for fulfillment by entangling it with our perception of another person's experience. Beyond comparing ourselves to others, we also need to reframe our relationship with failure. What does it feel like to fail at something you set out to do? To fail a test? To not get the job? To get fired? To have a shitty meditation session? To forget to meditate entirely? The answer, embedded in every pairing of hope and fear, is the same: Failure hurts. Sometimes it hurts a little, sometimes it hurts a lot. We need to practice acknowledging, rather than dismissing, the gorgeous ouch and heartbreak of that moment. The beauty of failure is the insight that comes from being present with something not working out. When you fail, your entire identity gets put on the line. But if you take the approach that there's no permanent identity to begin with, momentary failure never signals a permanent defeat. You press the reset button and learn to run it back. Each failure becomes a growth opportunity, and loss becomes a chance not only to grieve the hopefulness that wasn't fulfilled but also to assess what wasn't working, and then to simply show up and try again.

Chapter 6: Compassion: The Foundation of Authentic Confidence

In 2014, Kevin Durant won the NBA's Most Valuable Player award, effectively naming him the best basketball player on the planet for that year. His acceptance speech ran an unusual twenty-six minutes as he took extra time to directly acknowledge every last one of his teammates and team staff. After twenty-four minutes of thanking pretty much every human he'd ever worked with, KD turned to his mother, Wanda, who had single-parented him and his siblings through poverty. Growing emotional, he said: "I don't think you know what you did." Then, addressing the assembled guests: "When something good happens to you...I tend to look back at what got me here." It was unique to hear a professional athlete describe being the best in the world as something that "happened to him," rather than something he accomplished. He closed by telling his mother, "You're the real MVP." This moment illustrates a profound truth: if we want anything good to happen, we must realize our good fortune depends on other people. Nobody accomplishes anything alone, ever. Practicing compassion opens our eyes to these interconnections and helps us remember we're part of a larger network of beings all trying to achieve well-being and fulfill aspirations. Seeing our labor as interwoven with others' efforts gives necessary context to our personal path. Compassion is the first support for working with confidence because it allows us to see our struggles, actions, and lives in a larger context. When striving to achieve outcomes, we tend to develop tunnel vision, growing increasingly myopic and self-involved. The drive for success can obscure the experiences of those around us. When we get myopic, we become claustrophobic and reactive, making it harder to hold our seat. The individualistic worldview that dominates our culture relies on the pretense that one person conquers all obstacles through Herculean efforts. But even courage is a trait we learn from those around us. People are often surprised to learn that the Buddha did not teach himself to meditate - he studied with two learned meditation teachers whose work he reinterpreted and expanded. No one is self-made. The more emphatically a person attributes all their success to individual effort, the more unacknowledged support usually lies behind their facade. In classic Buddhism, compassion practice (tonglen) involves three aspects: empathy, care, and agency. Empathy is the ground floor - simply putting yourself in another's shoes. Care involves developing genuine concern for their well-being. Agency is the revolutionary part - taking action to help. Without action, we're left with the vacuity of the "thoughts and prayers" model of compassion. Many people suffer from compassion fatigue, especially in our technological age when we know far more about global suffering than ever before. We often operate on a highly moralistic idea of compassion that makes us feel forever deficient. If compassion is framed only as putting others before yourself, then any moment spent on self-care feels like moral failure. But the bodhisattva relates to compassion not as a moral imperative but as a perceptual experience - a feeling of connection. Compassion meditation explicitly instructs students to begin by directing compassion inward, toward our own struggles, before extending it to others. The most mature articulation of compassion is "equalizing self and other" - seeing that true interconnectedness exists without boundaries. When self and other are equalized, everyone is included in care, and all the countless "shoulds" evaporate. As one teacher put it: "No one who has ever touched liberation could possibly want anything other than liberation for everyone."

Chapter 7: Awareness: Finding Power in Present Moment

"I come to consciousness in the back of the ambulance. This is the third time this has happened to me in the past year or so, but this time the disorientation is worse." A Buddhist teacher had experienced another grand mal seizure during sleep. After the physical convulsions ended, he entered what's called the postictal state - a period where someone who just had a seizure can appear awake and acting intentionally, but they aren't. For twenty to thirty minutes, he called out for his mother, stumbled around muttering to himself, and ignored his daughter's tears. When EMTs arrived, he reacted like they were predators, hiding under bedcovers and even biting one's wrist when they tried to help him. "A seizure," his specialist later explained, "is like an electrical storm in the brain that causes a reboot." The part that reboots first is the limbic system, which controls our earliest evolutionary response to threats: freezing, fleeing, or fighting without context. For the first time in his adult life, this meditation teacher had the humbling experience of looking like he was awake while having no recognition of his actions. This Buddhist practitioner was pure amygdala, a goblin of samsara. Coming to awareness isn't always pleasant, even if it eventually leads in a helpful direction. Initial moments of clear seeing aren't always eureka moments with shining halos of insight. They're usually painful precisely because of the disorientation that comes with recognizing we've previously been unconscious. The recognition of a blind spot can be shocking and induce defensiveness. It's embarrassing to realize you've been in zombie mode. King Ashoka lived approximately three hundred years after Siddhartha. He began his reign as a bloodthirsty tyrant who led his armies into savage war. As he surveyed bodies piled on the battlefield, already feeling queasy about the carnage carried out in his name, Ashoka caught sight of a Buddhist monk walking across the battlefield. The juxtaposition of the atrocities and the monk's gentle, unshakable demeanor led to a spark of awareness. From that moment, the tyrant changed course completely, eventually becoming a Buddhist and pacifist who created some of the world's first veterinary hospitals. What gets glossed over in this tale is Ashoka's grappling with shame. That moment of coming to awareness must have sparked difficult feelings in the mighty king. As he ruled after his change of heart, one of his edicts read, "His Majesty feels profound sorrow and regret" for his conquests. This dawn of recognition - this moment of "Where have I been? What have I participated in?" - brings up what we might call the shame of awareness. The realization that some aspect of truth scares or humbles you is one of the most important moments in developing an awakened mind. Coming back to awareness is necessary for what meditation teachers sometimes call a fresh start. We have to reframe our view to see that awareness is always a mark of progress and therefore basically good, even if the experience beheld by awareness provokes difficult emotions. What is awareness itself? Simply put, it's not a "thing." It can't be reified or turned into an object. It can't be dissected or analyzed sufficiently with words or symbols. Awareness is the space that holds all mental experience, rather than any particular experience that arises in that space. When awareness recognizes itself and relaxes into being what it is, it can hold space for any mental or bodily experience with clarity, much like the galaxy accommodates planets, stars, and meteors. With the confidence that awareness is more spacious than any experience that might arise within it, we can eventually view even the hardest experiences with curiosity. Anger, jealousy, shame, and anxiety become meaningful objects floating through the galaxy of awareness. There's more than enough room for all the feels. Ultimate confidence comes from awareness recognizing itself - that's when you can start holding your seat, no matter what's going on.

Chapter 8: Windhorse: Transforming Challenge into Energy

We know by now that the winds of the world - pleasure, pain, praise, criticism, fame, insignificance, success, failure - will never stop blowing. Instead of just learning to deal with them, what if we could harness their energy and turn the winds into a power source? What if we could corral the energy of fear and hope and use it to remind ourselves that we are alive? This is the practice of windhorse. Windhorse (lung-ta in Tibetan) incorporates ideas from Confucian thought and Indigenous Tibetan shamanism. Wind represents the forces of life - the eight worldly winds and any other energy that moves through us. Horse represents our ability to harness and ride those energies. The practice is based on joining heaven and earth through our humanity. Earth is the physical world, but more metaphorically, it represents practicality and details. Heaven isn't the afterlife; it's the arena of creativity and a wider vision of what might be possible. Humanity's job is to unify these principles. We are called to anchor ourselves deeply to earth while remaining open to the vast possibilities the cosmos offers. Parenthood illustrates this earth-heaven dynamic perfectly. It begins with one heavenly moment but consists mostly of earthbound details: making sure a growing person safely navigates the world. You might have grand notions of raising mentally healthier, more enlightened humans, but parenthood is mostly about diaper changes, sleep deprivation, appointments, meal preparations, and the delicate negotiations required to put a coat on a resistant toddler. It's an endless earth dance, and if you don't feel resourced enough to befriend these minutiae, you'll suffer mightily. Even something as mundane as doing taxes can be transformed through this practice. Rather than getting bogged down in resentment about limited political and financial agency, you can look up and remember the vision of democracy as an act of shared generosity. You can contemplate the lovely public park near your house, your parents' Medicare coverage, your postal worker, your child's public school. These contemplations allow you to raise your gaze and experience something beyond numerical anxieties. That's heaven. Then you can address the details with a tiny infusion of aspiration rather than a cloud of claustrophobia. Windhorse meditation is a brief practice that takes only minutes. You begin by taking your seat and claiming your spot on earth. Then you feel earth beneath you, providing embodiment and grounding, followed by opening to the spacious quality of heaven. Next, you join heaven and earth at the heart center, focusing entirely on this energetic center for a few seconds. You then soften and feel your genuine heart, noting whatever emotion is present without overanalyzing. Finally, you radiate confidence from the heart center in all directions. This practice reminds us that confidence isn't about hardening against life's winds but transforming them into energy for our journey. The winds blow constantly, but through windhorse, we learn to ride them rather than being blown off course. By rousing windhorse daily, we develop the resilience to take our seat fully in this world, showing up for whatever challenges and opportunities arise with both practical groundedness and visionary aspiration.

Summary

The journey through life's eight worldly winds reveals a profound truth: confidence isn't about avoiding or conquering these forces, but learning to hold our seat amidst them. As we've seen through stories of meditation practitioners facing pain, writers receiving criticism, basketball stars acknowledging their mothers, and even seizure patients regaining consciousness, true confidence emerges not from escaping our humanity but from embracing it fully. The four powers - compassion, lineage, awareness, and windhorse - offer practical pathways to transform our relationship with life's inevitable challenges. Perhaps the most liberating insight is that confidence isn't a destination but a practice. It doesn't require perfection or the absence of vulnerability - quite the opposite. Our capacity to stay present with our experiences, to acknowledge our interdependence with others, to recognize the spaciousness of awareness, and to transform challenges into energy - these are the foundations of genuine confidence. We don't need to disappear from our lives or transcend our humanity. We simply need to remember: You are here. This is happening. Take your seat. The winds will continue to blow, but with practice, we can learn not just to withstand them but to ride them, transforming hope and fear into the power to show up fully for this precious human life.

About Author

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Ethan Nichtern

Ethan Nichtern is a senior Buddhist teacher. He is the author of The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path (FSG Books, North Point, 2015) and One City: A Declaration of Interdependence (Wisdom Publications, 2007). He is also the founder and former director of The Interdependence Project, an organization dedicated to Buddhist-inspired meditation and psychology, transformational activism, mindful arts, and meaningful media. He teaches and lectures around the world and is based in New York City.

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