Start Where You Are

Start Where You Are

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ing at that very moment. The main point is that the
suffering is real, totally untheoretical. It should be
heartfelt, tangible, honest, and vivid.
The fourth stage extends this wish to relieve suffer-
ing much further. You start with the homeless person
and then extend out to all those who are suffering
just as she is, or to all those who are suicidal like your
uncle or to all those who are feeling the jealousy or
addiction or contempt that you are feeling. You use
specific instances of misery and pain as a stepping
stone for understanding the universal suffering of
people and animals everywhere. Simultaneously, you
breathe in the pain of your uncle and of all the
zillions of other desperate, lonely people like him.
Simultaneously, you send out spaciousness or cheer-
fulness or a bunch of flowers, whatever would be
healing, to your uncle and all the others. What you
feel for one person, you can extend to all people.
You need to work with both the third and fourth
stages—with both the immediate suffering of one
person and the universal suffering of all. If you were
only to extend out to all sentient beings, the practice
would be very theoretical. It would never actually
touch your heart. On the other hand, if you were to
work only with your own or someone else’s fixation, it
would lack vision. It would be too narrow. Working
with both situations together makes the practice real
and heartfelt; at the same time, it provides vision and
a way for you to work with everyone else in the world.
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You can bring all of your unfinished karmic busi-
ness right into the practice. In fact, you should invite
it in. Suppose that you are involved in a horrific rela-
tionship: every time you think of a particular person
you get furious. That is very useful for tonglen! Or
perhaps you feel depressed. It was all you could do to
get out of bed today. You’re so depressed that you
want to stay in bed for the rest of your life; you have
considered hiding under your bed. That is very useful
for tonglen practice. The specific fixation should be
real, just like that.
Let’s use another example. You may be formally
doing tonglen or just sitting having your coffee, and
here comes Mortimer, the object of your passion, ag-
gression, or ignorance. You want to hit him or hug
him, or maybe you wish that he weren’t there at all.
But let’s say you’re angry. The object is Mortimer
and here comes the poison: fury. You breathe that in.
The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confu-
sion. The technique is that you do not blame Mor-
timer; you also do not blame yourself. Instead, there
is just liberated fury—hot, black, and heavy. Experi-
ence it as fully as you can.
You breathe the anger in; you remove the object;
you stop thinking about him. In fact, he was just a
useful catalyst. Now you own the anger completely.
You drive all blames into yourself. It takes a lot of
bravery, and it’s extremely insulting to ego. In fact, 
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it destroys the whole mechanism of ego. So you
breathe in.
Then, you breathe out sympathy, relaxation, and
spaciousness. Instead of just a small, dark situation,
you allow a lot of space for these feelings. Breathing
out is like ventilating the whole thing, airing it out.
Breathing out is like opening up your arms and just
letting go. It’s fresh air. Then you breathe the rage in
again—the black, heavy hotness of it. Then you
breathe out, ventilating the whole thing, allowing a
lot of space.
What you are actually doing is cultivating kindness
toward yourself. It is very simple in that way. You
don’t think about it; you don’t philosophize; you sim-
ply breathe in a very real klesha. You own it com-
pletely and then aerate it, allowing a lot of space
when you breathe out. This, in itself, is an amazing
practice—even if it didn’t go any further—because at
this level you are still working on yourself. But the
real beauty of the practice is that you then extend
that out.
Without pretending, you can acknowledge that
about two billion other sentient beings are feeling the
exact same rage that you are at that moment. They
are experiencing it exactly the way you are experienc-
ing it. They may have a different object, but the ob-
ject isn’t the point. The point is the rage itself. You
breathe it in from all of them, so they no longer have