Start Where You Are

Start Where You Are
49

---

People everywhere feel pain—jealousy, anger, being
left out, feeling lonely. Everybody feels that exactly
the way you feel it. The story lines vary, but the un-
derlying feeling is the same for us all.
By the same token, if you feel some sense of de-
light—if you connect with what for you is inspiring,
opening, relieving, relaxing—you breathe it out, you
give it away, you send it out to everyone else. Again,
it’s very personal. It starts with your feeling of delight,
your feeling of connecting with a bigger perspective,
your feeling of relief or relaxation. If you’re willing to
drop the story line, you feel exactly what all other
human beings feel. It’s shared by all of us. In this way
if we do the practice personally and genuinely, it
awakens our sense of kinship with all beings.
The other thing that’s very important is absolute
bodhichitta. In order to do tonglen, we’ve first estab-
lished the ground of absolute bodhichitta because it’s
important that when you breathe in and connect
with the vividness and reality of pain there’s also
some sense of space. There’s that vast, tender, empty
heart of bodhichitta, your awakened heart. Right in
the pain there’s a lot of room, a lot of openness. You
begin to touch in on that space when you relate di-
rectly to the messy stuff, because by relating directly
with the messy stuff you are completely undoing the
way ego holds itself together.
We shield our heart with an armor woven out of
very old habits of pushing away pain and grasping at
50
Start Where You Are

---

pleasure. When we begin to breathe in the pain in-
stead of pushing it away, we begin to open our hearts
to what’s unwanted. When we relate directly in this
way to the unwanted areas of our lives, the airless
room of ego begins to be ventilated. In the same way,
when we open up our clenched hearts and let the
good things go—radiate them out and share them
with others—that’s also completely reversing the
logic of ego, which is to say, reversing the logic of suf-
fering. Lojong logic is the logic that transcends the
messy and unmessy, transcends pain and pleasure.
Lojong logic begins to open up the space and it be-
gins to ventilate this whole cocoon that we find our-
selves in. Whether you are breathing in or breathing
out, you are opening the heart, which is awakening
bodhichitta.
So now the technique. Tonglen practice has four
stages. The first stage is flashing openness, or flashing
absolute bodhichitta. The slogan “Rest in the nature
of alaya, the essence” goes along with this flash of
openness, which is done very quickly. There is some
sort of natural flash of silence and space. It’s a very
simple thing.
The second stage is working with the texture. You
visualize breathing in dark, heavy, and hot and
breathing out white, light, and cool. The idea is that
you are always breathing in the same thing: you are
essentially breathing in the cause of suffering, the
Start Where You Are
51

---

origin of suffering, which is fixation, the tendency to
hold on to ego with a vengeance.
You may have noticed, when you become angry or
poverty-stricken or jealous, that you experience that
fixation as black, hot, solid, and heavy. That is actu-
ally the texture of poison, the texture of neurosis and
fixation. You may have also noticed times when you
are all caught up in yourself, and then some sort of
contrast or gap occurs. It’s very spacious. That’s the
experience of mind that is not fixated on phenomena;
it’s the experience of openness. The texture of that
openness is generally experienced as light, white,
fresh, clear, and cool.
So in the second stage of tonglen you work with
those textures. You breathe in black, heavy, and hot
through all the pores of your body, and you radiate
out white, light, and cool, also through all the pores
of your body, 360 degrees. You work with the texture
until you feel that it’s synchronized: black is coming
in and white is going out on the medium of the
breath—in and out, in and out.
The third stage is working with a specific heartfelt
object of suffering. You breathe in the pain of a spe-
cific person or animal that you wish to help. You
breathe out to that person spaciousness or kindness
or a good meal or a cup of coffee—whatever you feel
would lighten their load. You can do this for anyone:
the homeless mother that you pass on the street, your
suicidal uncle, or yourself and the pain you are feel-
52