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

to cultivate bravery as well as compassion and honesty. When these really unresolved issues of our lives come up, we are no longer trying to escape but are beginning to be curious and open toward these parts of ourselves.
    “Drive all blames into one” is a healthy and compassionate instruction that short-circuits the overwhelming tendency we have to blame everybody else; it doesn’t mean, instead of blaming the other people, blame yourself. It means to touch in with what blame feels like altogether. Instead of guarding yourself, instead of pushing things away, begin to get in touch with the fact that there’s a very soft spot under all that armor, and blame is probably one of the most well-perfected armors that we have.
    You can take this slogan beyond what we think of as “blame” and practice applying it simply to the general sense that something is wrong. When you feel that something is wrong, let the story line go and touch in on what’s underneath. You may notice that when you let the words go, when you stop talking to yourself, there’s something left, and that something tends to be very soft. At first it may seem intense and vivid, but if you don’t recoil from that and you keep opening your heart, you find that underneath all of the fear is what has been called shaky tenderness.
    The truth of the matter is that even though there are teachings and practice techniques, still we each have to find our own way. What does it really mean to open? What does it mean not to resist? What does it mean? It’s a lifetime journey to find the answers to these questions for yourself. But there’s a lot of support in these teachings and this practice.
    Try dropping the object of the blame or the object of what you think is wrong. Instead of throwing the snowballs out there, just put the snowball down and relate in a nonconceptual way to your anger, relate to your righteous indignation, relate to your sense of being fed up or pissed off or whatever it is. If Mortimer or Juan or Juanita walks by, instead of talking to yourself for the next four days about them, you would stop talking to yourself. Simply follow the instruction that you’re given, notice that you are talking to yourself, and let it go. This is basic shamatha-vipashyana instruction—that’s what it means by dropping the object. Then you can do tonglen.
    If you aren’t feeding the fire of anger or the fire of craving by talking to yourself, then the fire doesn’t have anything to feed on. It peaks and passes on. It’s said that everything has a beginning, middle, and end, but when we start blaming and talking to ourselves, things seem to have a beginning, a middle, and no end.
    Strangely enough, we blame others and put so much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is because we’re afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever. Therefore, instead of relating directly with the sorrow or the loneliness or the anger, we think that the way to end it is to blame it on somebody else. We might just talk to ourselves about them, or we might actually hit them or fire them or yell. Whether we’re using our body, speech, mind—or all three—whatever we might do, we think, curiously enough, that this will make the pain go away. Instead, acting it out is what makes it last.
    “Drive all blames into one” is saying, instead of always blaming the other, own the feeling of blame, own the anger, own the loneliness, and make friends with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it’s necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is—or how right everything is, for that matter.
    I challenge you to experiment with dropping the object of your emotion, doing tonglen, and seeing if in fact the intensity of