Start Where You Are: A Guide To Compassionate Living

The path includes all experience, both serene and chaotic.

Right in the pain there’s a lot of room, a lot of openness.

If you’re in a jealous rage and it occurs to you to actually breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else – if you get in touch with the arrow in your heart – it’s quite accessible to you at that very moment that there are people all over the world feeling exactly what you’re feeling.

The moral of the story is, when the resistance is gone, so are the demons.

Simply letting go of the story line is what it takes, which is not that easy.

So the first point is that we are completely interrelated. What you do to others, you do to yourself. What you do to yourself, you do to others.
Start where you are.

When you exchange yourself for others in the practice of tonglen, it becomes increasingly uncertain what is out there and what is in here.

What you do for yourself – any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself – will affect how you experience your world.

By acting out or repressing we invite suffering, bewilderment, or confusion to intensify.

Acting out and repressing are the main ways that we shield our hearts, the main ways that we never really connect with our vulnerability, our compassion, our sense of the open, fresh dimension of our being.