Start Where You Are

Teachings for Life and Death
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Strong determination. The first strength is strong
determination. Rather than some kind of dogged
pushing through, strong determination involves con-
necting with joy, relaxing, and trusting. It’s determi-
nation to use every challenge you meet as an
opportunity to open your heart and soften, determi-
nation not to withdraw. One simple way to develop
this strength is to develop a strong-hearted spiritual
appetite. To do this, some kind of playful quality is
needed. When you wake up in the morning, you can
say: “I wonder what’s going to happen today. This may
be the day that I die. This may be the day that I un-
derstand what all these teachings are about.” The
Native Americans, before they went into battle,
would say, “Today is a good day to die.” You could also
say, “Today is a good day to live.”
Strong determination gives you the vehicle that
you need to find out for yourself that you have every-
thing it takes, that the fundamental happiness is
right here, waiting. Strong determination not to shut
anything out of your heart and not to close up takes a
sense of humor and an appetite, an appetite for en-
lightenment.
Familiarization. The next strength is familiarization.
What familiarization means is that the dharma no
longer feels like a foreign entity: your first thought
becomes dharmic. You begin to realize that all the
teachings are about yourself; you’re here to study
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yourself. Dharma isn’t philosophy. Dharma is basi-
cally a good recipe for how to cook yourself, how to
soften the hardest, toughest piece of meat. Dharma
is good instruction on how to stop cheating yourself,
how to stop robbing yourself, how to find out who you
really are, not in the limited sense of “I need” and
“I’m gonna get,” but through developing wakefulness
as your habit, your way of perceiving everything.
We talk about enlightenment as if it’s a big accom-
plishment. Basically, it has to do with relaxing and
finding out what you already have. The enlightened
“you” might be a slightly different “you” from the one
you’re familiar with, but it still has hair growing out of
its head, still has taste buds, and when it gets the flu,
snot comes out of its nose. Enlightened, however,
you might experience yourself in a slightly less claus-
trophobic way, maybe a completely nonclaustropho-
bic way.
Familiarization means that you don’t have to
search any further, and you know it. It’s all in the
“pleasantness of the presentness,” in the very dis-
cursive thoughts you’re having now, in all the emo-
tions that are coursing through you; it’s all in there
somehow.
Seed of virtue. The third strength is called the seed of
virtue. In effect, this is buddha nature or basic good-
ness. It’s like a swimming pool with no sides that
you’re swimming in forever. In fact, you’re made out
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of water. Buddha nature isn’t like a heart transplant
that you get from elsewhere. “It isn’t as if you’re try-
ing to teach a tree to talk,” as Rinpoche once said. It’s
just something that can be awakened or, you might
say, relaxed into. Let yourself fall apart into wakeful-
ness. The strength comes from the fact that the seed
is already there; with warmth and moisture it sprouts
and becomes visible above the ground. You find your-
self looking like a daffodil, or feeling like one, anyway.
The practice is about softening or relaxing, but it’s
also about precision and seeing clearly. None of that
implies searching. Searching for happiness prevents
us from ever finding it.