Start Where You Are

Abandon Any Hope of Fruition
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there’s a dispute about what it’s going to be. The food
is sometimes good and sometimes terrible; it’s just a
very uncomfortable place. The reason it’s uncomfort-
able is that you can’t get away from yourself there.
However, the more people make friends with them-
selves, the more they find it a nurturing and support-
ive place where you can find out the buddhaness of
your own self as you are right now, today. Right now
today, could you make an unconditional relationship
with yourself? Just at the height you are, the weight
you are, the amount of intelligence that you have, the
burden of pain that you have? Could you enter into
an unconditional relationship with that?
Giving up any hope of fruition has something in
common with the title of my previous book, The Wis-
dom of No Escape. “No escape” leaves you continually
right in the present, and the present is whatever it is,
whatever mood you happen to be in, whatever
thoughts you happen to be having. That’s it.
Whether you get meditation instruction from the
Theravada tradition or the Zen tradition or the Vajra-
yana tradition, the basic instruction is always about
being awake in the present moment. What they don’t
tell you is that the present moment can be you, this
you about whom you sometimes don’t feel very good.
That’s what there is to wake up to.
When one of the emperors of China asked Bod-
hidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from
India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer
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was, “Lots of space, nothing holy.” Meditation is
nothing holy. Therefore there’s nothing that you
think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of
“sin.” There’s nothing that you can think or feel that
gets put in the category of “bad.” There’s nothing that
you can think or feel that gets put in the category of
“wrong.” It’s all good juicy stuff—the manure of wak-
ing up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the
art of living in the present moment.
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1 7
Compassionate Action
H
o w d o w e h e l p
? How do we create a saner
world or a saner domestic situation or job situ-
ation, wherever we may be? How do we work with
our actions and our speech and our minds in a way
that opens up the space rather than closes it down?
In other words, how do we create space for other
people and ourselves to connect with our own wis-
dom? How do we create a space where we can find
out how to become more a part of this world we are
living in and less separate and isolated and afraid?
How do we do that?
It all starts with loving-kindness for oneself, which
in turn becomes loving-kindness for others. As the
barriers come down around our own hearts, we are
less afraid of other people. We are more able to hear
what is being said, see what is in front of our eyes,
and work in accord with what happens rather than
struggle against it. The lojong teachings say that the
way to help, the way to act compassionately, is to ex-
change oneself for other. When you can put yourself
in someone else’s shoes, then you know what is
needed, and what would speak to the heart.
I recently received a letter from a friend in which
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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 began to compose this letter in
my mind, this very dharmic letter that I was going to
write back to her using all the teachings and all the
lojong logic to tell her off. Because of the style of our
relationship, she would have been intimidated by a
dharmic letter, but it wouldn’t have helped anything.
It would have further forced us into these roles of
being two separate people, each of us believing in our
roles more and more seriously, that I was the one who
knew it all and she was the poor student. But on that
day when I had spent so much energy composing this
letter, just by a turn of circumstance, something hap-
pened to me that caused me to feel tremendous lone-
liness. I felt sad and vulnerable. In that state of mind,
I suddenly knew where my friend’s letter had come
from—loneliness and feeling left out. It was her at-
tempt to communicate.
Sometimes when you’re feeling miserable, you
challenge people to see if they will still like you when
you show them how ugly you can get. Because of how
I myself was feeling I knew that what she needed was
not for somebody to dump back on her. So I wrote a
very different letter from what I had planned, an ex-
tremely honest one that said, “You know, you can
dump on me all you like and put all of your stuff out
there, but I’m not going to give up on you.” It wasn’t a
wishy-washy letter that avoided the issue that there