Pema Chodron – Start Where You Are
An inspiring and challenging read highlighting how to enhance the relationship we have with ourselves and the world around us. Whilst focussed largely on the spiritual nature of this journey, it offers insights and many practices that awaken compassion and soften the heart.
Her premise is largely an Eastern one, based on the notion that there is no need for self-improvement. That’s just society’s way of telling you “you are not worthy.”
However, you are: the only thing you need to do is accept yourself with all of your weaknesses and flaws. In the end, the thing that matters is your happiness, peacefulness, and wellbeing; not the societally designated rewards of money and status.
“If we are willing to stand fully in our own shoes and never give up on ourselves. then we will be able to put ourselves in the shoes of others and never give up on them. True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.”
The practices in this book are designed to enable both men and women to develop trust in their awakened hearts. Chodron outlines the holistic mediation practices of “taking in and sending out.”
Phased meditative interaction facilitates the decluttering of troubled (claustrophobia and anxiety) aspects of everyday life and the reprocessing of them into light and cooling components (spaciousness and freedom) through the breathing in of pain and distress and the exhalation of kindness and a lightened load.
If you want to achieve peacefulness and lead a kinder life, then you need to use practices to guide yourself to that destination:
• Shamatha-Vipashyana meditation: a particular type of meditation aimed at helping you achieve tranquillity and insight;
• Tonglen: a breathing practice during which you breathe in the suffering of your fellow human beings and breath out compassion and recognition;
• Lojong: a mind-training exercise based on a set of 59 slogans.
Chodron advises always working both with the immediate suffering of one being and with the universal suffering of all. In this way, your practice is both heartfelt and visionary. Tonglen meditation, according to her, is a way to “let ourselves feel what it is to be human” and by doing so to widen our circle of compassion.
Chodron believes that we must always start our journey where we are, no matter where that may be, with what is presenting itself in our lives. If that is anger, hatred, resentment, impatience, and greed, then stay with that.
There is no place to run to, no place to hide or wait to get to, we have everything we need right here to begin the journey to living.
