Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (7 page)

So you think of a puppy being stoned and dying in pain, and you breathe that in. Then, it is no longer just a puppy. It is your connection with the realization that there are puppies and people suffering unjustly like that all over the world. You immediately extend the practice and breathe in the suffering of all the people who are suffering like that animal.

It is also possible to start with the puppy or your uncle or yourself and then gradually extend out further and further. Having started with the wish to relieve your sister’s depression, you could extend further and breathe in the depression of people who are somewhat “neutral”—the ones to whom you are not that close but who also don’t cause you fear or anger. You breathe in the depression and send out relief to all those “neutral” people. Then, gradually, the practice moves to people you actually
hate,
people you consider to be your enemies or to have actually harmed you. This expansion evolves by doing the practice. You cannot fake these things; therefore you start with the things that are close to your heart.

It’s useful to think of tonglen practice in four stages:

1. Flashing openness
   
2. Working with the texture, breathing in dark, heavy, and hot and breathing out white, light, and cool
   
3. Working with relieving a specific, heartfelt instance of suffering
   
4. Extending that wish to help everyone
   

The main thing is to really get in touch with fixation and the power of klesha activity in yourself. This makes other people’s situations completely accessible and real to you. Then, when it becomes real and vivid, always remember to extend it out. Let your own experience be a stepping stone for working with the world.

Bringing All That We Meet to the Path

T
ODAY’S SLOGAN IS
“When the world is filled with evil, / Transform all mishaps into the path of bodhi.” The word
bodhi
means “enlightenment.” This is the basic statement of lojong altogether: how to use the unwanted, unfavorable circumstances of your life as the actual material of awakening. This is the precious gift of the lojong teachings, that whatever occurs isn’t considered an interruption or an obstacle but a way to wake up. This slogan is very well suited to our busy lives and difficult times. In fact, it’s designed for that: if there were no difficulties, there would be no need for lojong or tonglen.

Bodhisattva
is another word for the awakening warrior, the one who cultivates bravery and compassion. One point this slogan is making is that on the path of the warrior, or bodhisattva, there is no interruption. The path includes all experience, both serene and chaotic. When things are going well, we feel good. We delight in the beauty of the snow falling outside the windows or the light reflecting off the floor. There’s some sense of appreciation. But when the fire alarm rings and confusion erupts, we feel irritated and upset.

It’s all opportunity for practice. There is no interruption. We would like to believe that when things are still and calm, that’s the real stuff, and when things are messy, confused, and chaotic, we’ve done something wrong, or more usually someone
else
has done something to ruin our beautiful meditation. As someone once said about a loud, bossy woman, “What is that woman doing in my sacred world?”

Another point about this slogan is that part of awakening is to cultivate honesty and clear seeing. Sometimes people take the lojong teachings to mean that if you’re not to blame others but instead to connect with the feelings beneath your own story line, it would be wrong to say that someone has harmed you. However, part of honesty, clear seeing, and straightforwardness is being able to acknowledge that harm has been done. The first noble truth—the very first teaching of the Buddha—is that there is suffering. Suffering does exist as part of the human experience. People harm each other—we harm others and others harm us. To know that is clear seeing.

This is tricky business. What’s the difference between seeing that harm has been done and blaming? Perhaps it is that rather than point the finger of blame, we raise questions: “How can I communicate? How can I help the harm that has been done unravel itself? How can I help others find their own wisdom, kindness, and sense of humor?” That’s a much greater challenge than blaming and hating and acting out.

How can we help? The way that we can help is by making friends with our own feelings of hatred, bewilderment, and so forth. Then we can accept them in others. With this practice you begin to realize that you’re capable of playing all the parts. It’s not just “them”; it’s “us”
and
“them.”

I used to feel outrage when I read about parents abusing their children, particularly physically. I used to get righteously indignant—until I became a mother. I remember very clearly one day, when my six-month-old son was screaming and crying and covered in oatmeal and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was pulling on me and knocking things off the table, thinking, “I understand why all those mothers hurt their children. I understand perfectly. It’s only that I’ve been brought up in a culture that doesn’t encourage me that way, so I’m not going to do it. But at this moment, everything in me wants to eradicate completely these two sweet little children.”

So lest you find yourself condescendingly doing tonglen for the other one who’s
so
confused, you could remember that this is a practice where compassion begins to arise in you because you yourself have been there. You’ve been angry, jealous, and lonely. You know what it’s like and you know how sometimes you do strange things. Because you’re lonely, you say cruel words; because you want someone to love you, you insult them. Exchanging yourself for others begins to occur when you can see where someone is because you’ve been there. It doesn’t happen because you’re better than they are but because human beings share the same stuff. The more you know your own, the more you’re going to understand others.

When the world is filled with evil, how do we transform unwanted situations into the path of awakening? One way is to flash absolute bodhichitta. But most of the techniques have to do with relative bodhichitta, which is to say, awakening our connection with the soft spot, reconnecting with the soft spot, not only through the stuff we like but also through the messy stuff.

People have plenty of reasons to be angry. We have to acknowledge this. We are angry. But blaming the other doesn’t solve anything.

Ishi had plenty of reasons to be angry. His whole tribe had been killed, methodically, one by one. There was no one left but him. But he wasn’t angry. We could learn a lesson from him. No matter what’s happening, if we can relate to the soft spot that’s underneath our rage and can connect with what’s there, then we can relate to the enemy in a way in which we can start to be able to exchange ourself for other. Some sense of being able to communicate with the enemy—heart to heart—is the only way that things can change. As long as we hate the enemy, then we suffer and the enemy suffers and the world suffers.

The only way to effect real reform is without hatred. This is the message of Martin Luther King, of Cesar Chavez, of Mother Teresa. Gerald Red Elk—a close friend and teacher who was a Sioux elder—told me that as a young man he had been filled with hatred for how his people had been, and continue to be, treated. Because of his hatred, he was alcoholic and miserable. But during the Second World War, when he was in Europe, something in him shifted; he saw that he was being poisoned by his hatred. He came back from the war, and for the rest of his life he tried to bring back the sense of spirit and confidence and dignity of the young people in his tribe. His main message was not to hate but to learn to communicate with all beings. He had a very big mind.

Another slogan says, “All dharma agrees at one point.” No matter what the teachings are—shamatha-vipashyana instruction, lojong instruction, any instruction of sanity and health from any tradition of wisdom—the point at which they all agree is to let go of holding on to yourself. That’s the way of becoming at home in your world. This is not to say that ego is sin. Ego is not sin. Ego is not something that you get rid of. Ego is something that you come to know—something that you befriend by not acting out or repressing all the feelings that you feel.

Whether we’re talking about the painful international situation or our painful domestic situation, the pain is a result of what’s called ego clinging, of wanting things to work out on our own terms, of wanting “me-victorious.”

Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view, with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your own way. You’d just like to have a little peace; you’d like to have a little happiness, you know, just “gimme a break!”

But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what’s outside your room grows. Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

To begin to develop compassion for yourself and others, you have to unlock the door. You don’t open it yet, because you have to work with your fear that somebody you don’t like might come in. Then as you begin to relax and befriend those feelings, you begin to open it. Sure enough, in come the music and the smells that you don’t like. Sure enough, someone puts a foot in and tells you you should be a different religion or vote for someone you don’t like or give money that you don’t want to give.

Now you begin to relate with those feelings. You develop some compassion, connecting with the soft spot. You relate with what begins to happen when you’re not protecting yourself so much. Then gradually, like Ishi, you become more curious than afraid. To be fearless isn’t really to overcome fear, it’s to come to know its nature. Just open the door more and more and at some point you’ll feel capable of inviting all sentient beings as your guests.

It helps to realize that the Nelson Mandelas and Mother Teresas of the world also know how it feels to be in a small room with the windows and doors closed. They also know anger and jealousy and loneliness. They’re people who made friends with themselves and therefore made friends with the world. They’re people who developed the bravery to be able to relate to the shaky, tender, fearful feelings in their own hearts and therefore are no longer afraid of those feelings when they are triggered by the outside world.

When you begin to practice this way, you’re so honest about what you’re feeling that it begins to create a sense of understanding other people as well. A young man told this story in a discussion group during a lojong training weekend. He had gone into a bar in Los Angeles to play pool. Before starting to play, he put his brand-new leather jacket down on a chair. When he finished playing, it wasn’t there. The four other people in the bar were just sitting there looking at him with big smug smiles on their faces. They were really big guys. He felt extremely small and powerless. He knew that they had taken his jacket and that it wouldn’t be wise to confront them because he was small and outnumbered. He felt humiliated and helpless.

Then, as a result of having worked with this practice, it occurred to him that he could feel empathy for people in the world who had been laughed at, scorned, and spat upon because of their religion or the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or their nationality, or for whatever reason. He found himself empathizing with all the people throughout time who had found themselves in humiliating situations. It was a profound experience for him. It didn’t get him his jacket back; it didn’t solve anything. But it opened his heart to a lot of people with whom he had not before had any sense of shared experience.

This is where the heart comes from in this practice, where the sense of gratitude and appreciation for our life comes from. We become part of a lineage of people who have cultivated their bravery throughout history, people who, against enormous odds, have stayed open to great difficulties and painful situations and transformed them into the path of awakening. We
will
fall flat on our faces again and again, we
will
continue to feel inadequate, and we can use these experiences to wake up, just as they did. The lojong teachings give us the means to connect with the power of our lineage, the lineage of gentle warriorship.

Drive All Blames into One

I
’D LIKE TO TALK A BIT
about another slogan, “Drive all blames into one.” When we say, as in a previous slogan, “When the world is filled with evil,” we mean, “When the world is filled with the results of ego clinging.” When the world is filled with ego clinging or with attachment to a particular outcome, there is a lot of pain. But these painful situations can be transformed into the path of bodhi. One of the ways to do that is to drive all blames into one. To see how this works, let’s look at the result of blaming others.

I had someone buy me the
New York Times
on Sunday so I could look at the result of people blaming others. In Yugoslavia, there’s a very painful situation. The Croats and the Serbs are murdering each other, raping each other, killing children and old people. If you asked someone on either side what they wanted, they would say they just want to be happy. The Serbs just want to be happy. They see the others as enemies and they think the only way to be happy is to eradicate the source of their misery. We all think this way. And then if you talked to the other side, they would say that they want the same thing. This is true in Israel with the Arabs and the Jews. This is true in Northern Ireland with the Protestants and the Catholics. The same is true everywhere, and it’s getting worse. In every corner of the world, the same is true.