Start Where You Are

Drive All Blames into One
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You can take this slogan beyond what we think of
as “blame” and practice applying it simply to the gen-
eral sense that something is wrong. When you feel
that something is wrong, let the story line go and
touch in on what’s underneath. You may notice that
when you let the words go, when you stop talking to
yourself, there’s something left, and that something
tends to be very soft. At first it may seem intense and
vivid, but if you don’t recoil from that and you keep
opening your heart, you find that underneath all of
the fear is what has been called shaky tenderness.
The truth of the matter is that even though there
are teachings and practice techniques, still we each
have to find our own way. What does it really mean to
open? What does it mean not to resist? What does it
mean? It’s a lifetime journey to find the answers to
these questions for yourself. But there’s a lot of sup-
port in these teachings and this practice.
Try dropping the object of the blame or the object
of what you think is wrong. Instead of throwing the
snowballs out there, just put the snowball down and
relate in a nonconceptual way to your anger, relate to
your righteous indignation, relate to your sense of
being fed up or pissed off or whatever it is. If Mor-
timer or Juan or Juanita walks by, instead of talking to
yourself for the next four days about them, you would
stop talking to yourself. Simply follow the instruction
that you’re given, notice that you are talking to your-
self, and let it go. This is basic shamatha-vipashyana
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Drive All Blames into One

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instruction—that’s what it means by dropping the
object. Then you can do tonglen.
If you aren’t feeding the fire of anger or the fire of
craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn’t
have anything to feed on. It peaks and passes on. It’s
said that everything has a beginning, middle, and
end, but when we start blaming and talking to our-
selves, things seem to have a beginning, a middle,
and no end.
Strangely enough, we blame others and put so
much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is
because we’re afraid that this anger or sorrow or lone-
liness is going to last forever. Therefore, instead of re-
lating directly with the sorrow or the loneliness or the
anger, we think that the way to end it is to blame it on
somebody else. We might just talk to ourselves about
them, or we might actually hit them or fire them or
yell. Whether we’re using our body, speech, mind—
or all three—whatever we might do, we think, curi-
ously enough, that this will make the pain go away.
Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.
“Drive all blames into one” is saying, instead of al-
ways blaming the other, own the feeling of blame,
own the anger, own the loneliness, and make friends
with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can
place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cra-
dle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be
gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and cre-
ate an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s
Drive All Blames into One
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necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong
everything is—or how right everything is, for that
matter.
I challenge you to experiment with dropping the
object of your emotion, doing tonglen, and seeing if
in fact the intensity of the so-called poison lessens. I
have experimented with this, because I didn’t believe
that it would work. I thought it couldn’t possibly be
true, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while
it seemed to me that it didn’t work. But as my trust
grew, I found that that’s what happens—the intensity
of the klesha lessens, and so does the duration. This
happens because the ego begins to be ventilated.
This big solid me—”I have a problem. I am lonely. I
am angry. I am addicted”—begins somehow to be
aerated when you just go against the grain and own
the feelings yourself instead of blaming the other.
The “one” in “Drive all blames into one” is the ten-
dency we have to want to protect ourselves: ego
clinging. When we drive all blames into this ten-
dency by owning our feelings and feeling fully, the
ongoing monolithic ME begins to lighten up, be-
cause it is fabricated with our opinions, our moods,
and a lot of ephemeral, but at the same time vivid and
convincing, stuff.
I know a fifteen-year-old Hispanic guy from Los
Angeles. He grew up in a violent neighborhood and
was in gangs from the age of thirteen. He was really
smart, and curiously enough, his name was Juan. He
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