Start Where You Are

Compassionate Action
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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 extreme and lashed out. For the
first time, I felt I had experienced what it meant to
exchange oneself for other. When you’ve been there
you know what it feels like, and therefore you can
give something that you know will open up the space
and cause things to keep flowing. You can give some-
thing that will help someone else connect with their
own insight and courage and gentleness, rather than
further polarize the situation.
“Drive all blames into one” is a pivotal slogan
because usually driving blames into other comes
from the fact that we’ve been hurt and therefore
want to hurt back. It’s that kind of logic. Therefore
the exchange—putting ourselves in someone else’s
shoes—doesn’t come from theory, in which you try
to imagine what someone else is feeling. It comes
from becoming so familiar and so openhearted and
so honest about who you are and what you do that
you begin to understand humanness altogether and
you can speak appropriately to the situation.
The basic ground of compassionate action is the
importance of working with rather than struggling
against, and what I mean by that is working with your
own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the
unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you
relate to it based on having worked with loving-kind-
ness for yourself. Then there is no condescension.
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This nondualistic approach is true to the heart be-
cause it’s based on our kinship with each other. We
know what to say, because we have experienced clos-
ing down, shutting off, being angry, hurt, rebellious,
and so forth, and have made a relationship with those
things in ourselves.
This is not about problem resolution. This is a
more open-ended and courageous approach. It has to
do with not knowing what will happen. It has nothing
to do with wanting to get ground under your feet. It’s
about keeping your heart and your mind open to
whatever arises, without hope of fruition. Problem
solving is based first on thinking there is a problem
and second on thinking there is a solution. The con-
cepts of problem and solution can keep us stuck in
thinking that there is an enemy and a saint or a right
way and a wrong way. The approach we’re suggesting
is more groundless than that.
A key slogan is “Change your attitude, but remain
natural” or “Change your attitude and relax as it is.”
In order to have compassionate relationships,
compassionate communication, and compassionate
social action, there has to be a fundamental change
of attitude. The notion “I am the helper and you are
the one who needs help” might work in a temporary
way, but fundamentally nothing changes, because
there’s still one who has it and one who doesn’t. That
dualistic notion is not really speaking to the heart.
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As expressed in the lojong teachings, that funda-
mental change of attitude is to breathe the undesir-
able in and breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the
attitude that is epidemic on the planet is that if it’s
unpleasant we push it away and if it’s pleasant we
hold tight and grasp it.
This change in attitude doesn’t happen overnight;
it happens gradually, at our own speed. If we have
the aspiration to stop resisting those parts of our-
selves that we find unacceptable and instead begin
to breathe them in, this gives us much more space.
We come to know every part of ourselves, with no
more monsters in the closet, no more demons in the
cave. We have some sense of turning on the lights
and looking at ourselves honestly and with great
compassion.
We could begin to get the hang of changing our at-
titude on an everyday level: when things are delight-
ful and wonderful we give our pleasure away on the
outbreath, sharing it with others. That also allows for
enormous space—not just for us, but for everyone.
When we do this, all of our inner obstacles that keep
us from connecting with our inherent freshness and
openness begin to dissolve. This is the fundamental
change of attitude—this working with pain and
pleasure in a revolutionary and courageous way.
When we work with pain by leaning into it and
with pleasure by giving it away, it doesn’t mean that
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