Start Where You Are

Doing something different. The second difficulty is to
do something different. Even if you see what you do,
can you then do something different? If you’re jeal-
ous, can you snap your fingers and no longer be
jealous? We all know it’s more difficult than that.
You’re sitting there and your boyfriend is sitting
across the room with somebody else having a really
good time, and you’re getting more jealous and furi-
ous by the minute. There’s a little bird on your shoul-
der who says, “OK, here’s your big chance. You could
use this to wake up.” And you say, “Forget it! He’s re-
ally a creep. I want to be mad at him. He deserves my
anger.” Now the little bird is jumping up and down,
saying, “Hey, hey, hey, hey! Don’t you remember?
Don’t you remember?” You’re saying, “I don’t believe
this stuff! I am right to be jealous, and he is horrible!”
There you are. The little bird jumps up to the other
shoulder and pulls on your earlobe and says, “Come
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on, come on! Give yourself a break. Get to know this
stuff. Drop the story line.” “Forget it!” you say. Boy are
you stubborn.
That’s what I find about myself. Even when we’re
given the methods for how to give ourselves a break,
we are so stubborn. If you think smoking is hard to
give up, try giving up your habitual patterns. It leaves
you with the same kind of queasy feeling that you
have when giving up any other addiction.
So instead of “liberating yourself by examining and
analyzing,” the habitual response to seeing yourself
clearly is to take the wrong medicine: you inflame the
jealousy, you wallow more in self-pity, you speed up
the frivolity. Usually we do this by talking to our-
selves. It’s like a bellows fanning a fire. We just sit
there, and we have fantasies about our boyfriend
leaving the party with our friend, or we talk to our-
selves about how it’s hopeless and how we always feel
like this and how it’s never going to get better.
Do something different, such as tonglen. Anything
different would help, anything that’s not habitual.
For example, you could go up and take a cold shower
and sing at the top of your lungs, or drink a glass of
water from the wrong side, like you do when you are
trying to get rid of hiccups.
Continuing that way. But even if you see what you do
and even if you do something different, the third dif-
ficulty is that it’s difficult to continue that way, to cut
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the habitual pattern as a way of life. So whenever you
see yourself spinning off in some kind of habitual
way, you could aspire to catch yourself and to do
something different as a way of cultivating compas-
sion for yourself and compassion for others. But don’t
be surprised or give up when it’s difficult.
A slogan that encourages practicing the three diffi-
culties is “Two activities: one at the beginning, one at
the end.” At the beginning of your day when you
wake up, express your aspiration: “May I practice the
three difficulties. May I see what I do. When it hap-
pens, may I do something different, and may that be
a way of life for me.” At the beginning of your day,
using your own language, you could encourage your-
self to keep your heart open, to remain curious, no
matter how difficult things get. Then at the end of
the day when you’re just about to go to sleep, review
the day. Rather than using what happened as ammu-
nition for feeling bad about yourself, about how the
whole day went by and you never once remembered
what you had aspired to do in the morning, you can
simply use it as an opportunity to get to know your-
self better and to see all the funny ways in which you
trick yourself, all the ways in which you’re so good at
zoning out and shutting down. If you feel like you
don’t want to practice the three difficulties anymore
because it’s like setting yourself up for failure, gener-
ate a kind heart toward yourself. Reflecting over just
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one day’s activities can be painful, but you may end
up respecting yourself more, because you see that a
lot happened; you weren’t just one way. As Carl Jung
said at the end of his life, “I am astonished, disap-
pointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, de-
pressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and
cannot add up the sum.”
So that’s the big squeeze. Although you listen to all
these teachings, and you have all these practices as a
support, somehow it has to become real for you. It
has to be digested by you. The teachings and prac-
tices are like orange juice concentrate—that thick or-
ange stuff in the can—and life is like the water. You
have to mix it all together. Then you have good orange
juice that you can bring out in a big pitcher for every-
one to drink. And even though it came out of a can,
you know that it’s truly freshly squeezed.
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2 1
High-Stakes Practice
P
o g o s a i d
, “We have met the enemy and they
are us.” This particular slogan now appears a lot
in the environmental movement. It isn’t somebody
else who’s polluting the rivers—it’s us. The cause of
confusion and bewilderment and pollution and vio-
lence isn’t really someone else’s problem: it’s some-
thing we can come to know in ourselves. But in order
to do that we have to understand that we have met the
friend and that is me. The more we make friends with
ourselves, the more we can see that our ways of shut-
ting down and closing off are rooted in the mistaken
thinking that the way to get happy is to blame some-
body else.
It’s a little uncertain who is “us” and who is “them.”
Bernard Glassman Sensei, who does a lot of work
with the homeless in New York, said that he doesn’t
work with the homeless because he’s such a great guy
but because going into the areas of society that he
has rejected is the only way to make friends with the