Start Where You Are

was, “Lots of space, nothing holy.” Meditation is nothing holy. Therefore there’s nothing that you think or feel that somehow ge ...

17 Compassionate Action H ow do we help? How do we create a saner world or a saner domestic situation or job situ- ation, wherev ...

she dumped all over me and told me off. My first re- action was to be hurt and my second reaction was to get mad, and then I beg ...

had been a confrontation and that I had been hurt by it. On the other hand, it wasn’t a letter in which I went to the other extr ...

This nondualistic approach is true to the heart be- cause it’s based on our kinship with each other. We know what to say, becaus ...

As expressed in the lojong teachings, that funda- mental change of attitude is to breathe the undesir- able in and breathe the d ...

we “grin and bear it.” This approach is a lot more playful than that—like dancing with it. We realize that this separateness tha ...

is basically about making a commitment to become a refugee, which in essence means that rather than al- ways trying to get secur ...

Refraining from outrageous conduct. The second basic principle is to refrain from outrageous conduct. If you have this ideal of ...

in his eyes; she never had any sense of him as a per- son. It was all for display, and it hurt. So that’s part of the point of t ...

“Abandon poisonous food” and “Don’t make gods into demons” are warnings that only you know whether what you are doing is good pr ...

holding on to themselves, and that someone is prob- ably you. If you begin to work with the greater defilements, or the major st ...

that our greatest obstacles are our greatest wealth. From the point of view of wanting to stay cozy and separate in your room, t ...

18 Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions W hat really helpsanother person, anyway? What really causes things to evolve in s ...

and open. You don’t have to get frozen in an identity of any kind. A Gary Larson cartoon shows two Martians who are hiding behin ...

about other people’s defects. Sometimes we sugar- coat it and pretend that we’re not really doing it. We say something like, “Hi ...

interesting one. It’s getting at how predictable we are, as everybody in the advertising world knows. They know exactly what to ...

the pitifulness of Pearl, and it keeps triggering a lot of stuff in you. Yet you don’t have the slightest interest in actually g ...

The next slogan, “Don’t bring things to a painful point,” in some way is saying the same thing. These are nuances of the human t ...

somehow open up the situation and work in an hon- est, fearless way with what’s going on. Instead we just give our burden to som ...