Start Where You Are

Loving-Kindness and Compassion
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1 5
Lighten Up
T
h e n e x t t w o s l o g a n s
—”Always maintain
only a joyful mind” and “If you can practice even
when distracted, you are well trained”—go hand in
hand. The first is saying that if you regard everything
that arises as fuel to wake up, you can remain cheer-
ful. The second is saying that you are well trained if
you can do that—use everything in your life to wake
yourself up rather than put yourself to sleep—no
matter what.
If you feel completely caught up and are spinning
off into a misery scenario, the slogan “If you can prac-
tice even when distracted, you are well trained” can
remind you to start to work with tonglen—to breathe
in the mishap or the misery as a way of developing
compassion for yourself and as a way of beginning to
understand other people’s pain as well. You can use
the distraction to bring yourself back to the present
moment, just as a horse rights itself after losing bal-
ance or skiers catch themselves just as they are about
to fall. Being well trained means you can catch your-
self and come back to the present.
When things are going well, that can also be a re-
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minder. Instead of habitually clinging to what’s de-
lightful, you could become accustomed to giving it
away, sending it out to others on the outbreath. This
enables you always to maintain a joyful mind. It be-
gins to ease away the burden of maintaining your own
private happiness as well as your usual load of un-
happy situations and minor irritations—the burden
of ego.
On the other hand, sending out the joyful stuff is
also difficult to do. As someone said, “I like doing the
outbreath with this idea of sharing. Sharing is really
nice, but giving it away? That means I wouldn’t have
it anymore.” The outbreath and sharing what’s pleas-
ant can be threatening. You don’t often feel willing to
share or give away that pleasure.
There’s a lot of joy as your burden begins to lessen,
and it comes from doing anything that begins to
change the pattern of fearing and wanting to resist
what’s unpleasant. Resistance is really what causes
the pain; more than the anger itself, or the jealousy it-
self, it’s resistance that causes the pain. Anything
that begins to lighten up that resistance helps us to
relax and open and celebrate.
Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation
where you can’t change the outer circumstances at
all, and you realize it all comes down to how you re-
late to things—whether you continue to struggle
against everything that’s coming at you or you begin
Lighten Up
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to work with things. “Always maintain only a joyful
mind” can be very helpful to remember in such a sit-
uation.
Anything that helps us not to be so desperate
about pleasure and not to fear its transitory nature 
is also introducing us to being at home in our world
and being able to help other people. In popular songs
you hear lines like “Freedom’s just another word for
nothing left to lose” or “I’ve got plenty of nothing 
and nothing’s plenty for me.” “Great bliss arising from
the experience of emptiness” is how it’s described in
traditional Tibetan texts, which sounds somewhat
remote from personal experience. However, all these
words are saying the same thing: we practice and 
we live in order to be able to relax and lighten up and
not make such a big deal about everything that hap-
pens—the successes and the failures, the rewards
and the punishments.
If your principal witness (in “Of the two witnesses,
hold the principal one”) is a judgmental authority fig-
ure, it might be hard to lighten up. Let’s say you’re
meditating, but there’s this other “you” standing be-
hind with a stick, saying, “You’re thinking again,
you’re always thinking! Whack! There goes the ton-
glen bell and you didn’t practice tonglen for even a
second! Smack!” You say to yourself, “I can’t do this.
I’m hopeless. Everybody else seems to be doing fine,
but I don’t seem to have any basic goodness.” Then
you beat yourself up and forget all about gentleness,
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