Start Where You Are

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coat and the hat and it’s cold, but we know that we
have to do it, and we teeter on the edge of the nest
and we take off. Then we find out for ourselves that
everything has to go. You just can’t fly when you are
wearing socks and shoes and coats and pants and
underwear. Everything has to go.
Marpa the Translator was Milarepa’s teacher. He
walked all the way from Tibet to India three times in
order to get the teachings. Once when he was re-
turning from India, he was with a companion whom
he met every so often to compare who was getting 
the most teachings. His companion became jealous
because he felt that Marpa was getting more. When
they were in a boat in the middle of a turbulent river,
his friend took all of the texts that Marpa had col-
lected and threw them overboard. Talk about an
opportunity for tonglen! Marpa didn’t exactly feel
friendly toward this man. But he realized when he got
back to Tibet that he had understood something
about all of those teachings in all of those books. He
really didn’t need it all written down. He had under-
stood something; he had digested something. The
teachings and himself had become one.
Each of us has also understood something, and
that’s what we’ll take away from our study and prac-
tice of these teachings. These are things that are
going to be part of our being now, part of the way that
we see things and hear things and smell things.
We try so hard to hang on to the teachings and “get
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it,” but actually the truth sinks in like rain into very
hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soften up
slowly at our own speed. But when that happens,
something has fundamentally changed in us. That
hard earth has softened. It doesn’t seem to happen by
trying to get it or capture it. It happens by letting go;
it happens by relaxing your mind, and it happens by
the aspiration and the longing to want to communi-
cate with yourself and others. Each of us finds our
own way.
The very last slogan is “Train wholeheartedly.” You
could say, “Live wholeheartedly.” Let everything stop
your mind and let everything open your heart. And
you could say, “Die wholeheartedly, moment after
moment.” Moment after moment, let yourself die
wholeheartedly.
I have a friend who is extremely ill, in the final
stages of cancer. The other night Dzongzar Khyentse
Rinpoche telephoned her, and the very first words he
said were, “Don’t even think for a moment that you’re
not going to die.” That’s good advice for all of us; it
will help us to live and train wholeheartedly.
These teachings are elusive, even though they
seem so concrete: if it hurts, breathe in it; if it’s pleas-
ant, send it out. It isn’t really something that you fi-
nally and completely “get.” We can read Trungpa
Rinpoche’s commentaries on mind training and read
the text by Jamgön Kongtrül. We can read them and
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try to apply them to our lives, and we can let them
continually haunt us, haunt us into understanding
what it really means to exchange oneself for others.
What does that really mean? And what does it mean
to be a child of illusion? What does it mean to drive
all blames into oneself or to be grateful to everyone?
What is bodhichitta, anyway? Trying to speak these
teachings to you is—for me—a chance to digest
them further. Now you are going to find yourself
speaking them and living them and digesting them.
May you practice these teachings and take them to
heart. May you make them your own and spread
them to others.