Start Where You Are

Compassionate Action

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that our greatest obstacles are our greatest wealth.
From the point of view of wanting to stay cozy and
separate in your room, this work is extremely threat-
ening. Part of the path of compassionate action is to
begin to explore that notion of the inbreath and test
it, to see if it rings true for you.
Compassionate Action
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1 8
Taking Responsibility 
for Your Own Actions
W
h a t r e a l ly h e l p s
another person, anyway?
What really causes things to evolve in some
kind of natural spontaneous way? The next slogans
provide some direction. Each begins with the word
don’t. I like to call them the “naked truth” slogans.
Taking responsibility for your own actions is an-
other way of talking about awakening bodhichitta,
because part of taking responsibility is the quality of
being able to see things very clearly. Another part of
taking responsibility is gentleness, which goes along
with not judging, not calling things right or wrong,
good or bad, but looking gently and honestly at your-
self. Finally there is also the ability to keep going for-
ward. It’s been described before as letting go, but in
some sense at a personal level it’s that you can just
keep on going; you don’t get completely overwhelmed
by this identity as a loser or a winner, the abuser or the
abused, the good guy or the bad guy. You just see what
you do as clearly and as compassionately as you can
and then go on. The next moment is always fresh 
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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 behind a rock. They’ve set up a mirror on
one side of the path in front of the rock, down which
are walking a man and a woman. One Martian says to
the other: “Let’s see if it attacks its own image.”
It seems that we do attack our own image continu-
ally, and usually that image appears to be be “out
there.” We want to blame men or we want to blame
women or we want to blame white people or black
people, or we want to blame politicians or the police;
we want to blame somebody. There’s some tendency
to always put it out there, even if “out there” is our
own body. Instead of working with, there is the ten-
dency to struggle against. As a result, we become
alienated. Then we take the wrong medicine for our
illness by armoring ourselves in all these different
ways, somehow not getting back to the soft spot.
So today’s slogans present the great exposé. The first
one is “Don’t talk about injured limbs.” In other
words, don’t talk about other people’s defects. We all
get the same kind of satisfaction when we are all sit-
ting around the table discussing Mortimer’s bad
breath. Not only that, he has dandruff, and not only
that, he laughs funny; not only that, he’s stupid.
There is this peculiar security we get out of talking
Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions
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about other people’s defects. Sometimes we sugar-
coat it and pretend that we’re not really doing it. We
say something like, “Hi there. Did you know that
Juanita steals?” Then we say, “Oh no, I shouldn’t have
said that. Excuse me, that was really unkind for me to
say that, and I won’t say any more.” We’d love to go on
and on, but instead we say just enough to get people
against Juanita but not enough for them to disap-
prove of us for slandering her.
Then there’s “Don’t ponder others.” It’s talking about
putting down other people to build yourself up.
Maybe you only do it mentally. After all, you don’t
actually say these things out loud, because people
would disapprove, but in your mind you talk a lot
about Mortimer: how you hate how he dresses and
how he walks and how he stares coldly at you when
you try to smile. You say, “Now this is enough. I’ve
been criticizing Mortimer since the day I arrived
here. I’m going to try to make friends,” but Mortimer
just meets your sunny false smile with an icy stare. So
you continue to ponder Mortimer’s awful ways as you
sit here on the cushion, and you very seldom label it
“thinking” or breathe it in. It doesn’t occur to you to
exchange yourself for Mortimer, and you certainly
don’t feel grateful to him.
The next is “Don’t be so predictable,” which has also
been translated as, “Don’t be so trustworthy.” It’s an
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Taking Responsibility for Your Own Actions

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interesting one. It’s getting at how predictable we are,
as everybody in the advertising world knows. They
know exactly what to put on those billboards and
those ads to make us want to buy their products.
Even intelligent people like ourselves are sometimes
magnetized by this propaganda because we’re so pre-
dictable.