Start Where You Are

Abandon Any Hope of Fruition

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In Boston there’s a stress-reduction clinic run on
Buddhist principles. It was started by Dr. Jon Kabat-
Zinn, a Buddhist practitioner and author of Full Cat-
astrophe Living. He says that the basic premise of his
clinic—to which many people come with a lot of
pain—is to give up any hope of fruition. Otherwise
the treatment won’t work. If there’s some sense of
wanting to change yourself, then it comes from a
place of feeling that you’re not good enough. It comes
from aggression toward yourself, dislike of your pres-
ent mind, speech, or body; there’s something about
yourself that you feel is not good enough. People
come to the clinic with addictions, abuse issues, or
stress from work—with all kinds of issues. Yet this
simple ingredient of giving up hope is the most im-
portant ingredient for developing sanity and healing.
That’s the main thing. As long as you’re wanting to
be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight,
or whatever it might be, somehow you’re always going
to be approaching your problem with the very same
logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good
enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never un-
winds itself when you’re trying to improve, because
you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that
caused all the pain to start.
There’s a life-affirming teaching in Buddhism,
which is that Buddha, which means “awake,” is not
someone you worship. Buddha is not someone you
aspire to; Buddha is not somebody who was born
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more than two thousand years ago and was smarter
than you’ll ever be. Buddha is our inherent nature—
our buddha nature—and what that means is that if
you’re going to grow up fully, the way that it happens
is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that
you already have. It’s not like some intelligence that’s
going to be transplanted into you. If you’re going to be
fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the
childhood feeling that you always need to protect
yourself or shield yourself because things are too
harsh. If you’re going to be a grown-up—which I
would define as being completely at home in your
world no matter how difficult the situation—it’s be-
cause you will allow something that’s already in you
to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you allow it to
come out, instead of all the time shielding it and pro-
tecting it and keeping it buried.
Someone once told me, “When you feel afraid,
that’s ‘fearful buddha.’” That could be applied to
whatever you feel. Maybe anger is your thing. You
just go out of control and you see red, and the next
thing you know you’re yelling or throwing something
or hitting someone. At that time, begin to accept the
fact that that’s “enraged buddha.” If you feel jealous,
that’s “jealous buddha.” If you have indigestion, that’s
“buddha with heartburn.” If you’re happy, “happy
buddha”; if bored, “bored buddha.” In other words,
anything that you can experience or think is worthy
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Abandon Any Hope of Fruition

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of compassion; anything you could think or feel is
worthy of appreciation.
This teaching was powerful for me; it stuck. I
would find myself in various states of mind and vari-
ous moods, going up and down, going left and right,
falling on my face and sitting up—just in all these dif-
ferent life situations—and I would remember, “Bud-
dha falling flat on her face; buddha feeling on top of
the world; buddha longing for yesterday.” I began to
learn that I couldn’t get away from buddha no matter
how hard I tried. I could stick with myself through
thick and thin. If one would enter into an uncondi-
tional relationship with oneself, one would be enter-
ing into an unconditional relationship with buddha.
This is why the slogan says, “Abandon any hope of
fruition.” “Fruition” implies that at a future time you
will feel good. There is another word, which is
open—to have an open heart and open mind. This is
oriented very much to the present. If you enter into
an unconditional relationship with yourself, that
means sticking with the buddha right now on the
spot as you find yourself.
Because it’s a monastery, there’s nothing you can
do at Gampo Abbey that’s fun, unless you like to
meditate all the time or take walks in nature, but
everything gets boring after awhile. There’s no sex
there, you can’t drink there, you also can’t lie. Occa-
sionally we’ll see a video, but that’s rare and usually