Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chödrön Page A

them, so they no longer have to have it. It doesn’t make your own rage any greater; it is just rage, just fixation on rage, which causes so much suffering.
    Sometimes, at that moment, you get a glimpse of why there is murder and rape, why there is war, why people burn down buildings, why there is so much misery in the world. It all comes from feeling that rage and acting it out instead of taking it in and airing it. It all turns into hatred and misery, which pollutes the world and obviously perpetuates the vicious cycle of suffering and frustration. Because you feel rage, therefore you have the kindling, the connection, for understanding the rage of all sentient beings. First you work with your own klesha; then you quickly extend that and breathe it all in.
    At that point, simultaneously, it is no longer your own particular burden; it is just the rage of sentient beings, which includes you. You breathe that in, and you breathe out a sense of ventilation, so that all sentient beings could experience that. This goes for anything that bothers you. The more it bothers you, the more awake you’re going to be when you do tonglen.
    The things that really drive us nuts have enormous energy in them. That is why we fear them. It could even be your own timidity: you are so timid that you are afraid to walk up and say hello to someone, afraid to look someone in the eye. It takes a lot of energy to maintain that. It’s the way you keep yourself together. In tonglen practice, you have the chance to own that completely, not blaming anybody, and to ventilate it with the outbreath. Then you might better understand why some other people in the room look so grim: it isn’t because they hate you but because they feel the same kind of timidity and don’t want to look anyone in the face. In this way, the tonglen practice is both a practice of making friends with yourself and a practice of compassion.
    By practicing in this way, you definitely develop your sympathy for others, and you begin to understand them a lot better. In that way your own pain is like a stepping stone. Your heart develops more and more, and even if someone comes up and insults you, you could genuinely understand the whole situation because you understand so well where everybody’s coming from. You also realize that you can help by simply breathing in the pain of others and breathing out that ventilation. So tonglen starts with relating directly to specific suffering—yours or someone else’s—which you then use to understand that this suffering is universal, shared by us all.
    Almost everybody can begin to do tonglen by thinking of someone he or she loves very dearly. It’s sometimes easier to think of your children than your husband or wife or mother or father, because those relationships may be more complicated. There are some people in your life whom you love very straight-forwardly without complication: old people or people who are ill or little children, or people who have been kind to you.
    When he was eight years old, Trungpa Rinpoche saw a whimpering puppy being stoned to death by a laughing, jeering crowd. He said that after that, doing tonglen practice was straightforward for him: all he had to do was think of that dog and his heart would start to open instantly. There was nothing complicated about it. He would have done anything to breathe in the suffering of that animal and to breathe out relief. So the idea is to start with something like that, something that activates your heart.
    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