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

the so-called poison lessens. I have experimented with this, because I didn’t believe that it would work. I thought it couldn’t possibly be true, and because my doubt was so strong, for a while it seemed to me that it didn’t work. But as my trust grew, I found that that’s what happens—the intensity of the klesha lessens, and so does the duration. This happens because the ego begins to be ventilated. This big solid me—“ I have a problem. I am lonely. I am angry. I am addicted”—begins somehow to be aerated when you just go against the grain and own the feelings yourself instead of blaming the other.
    The “one” in “Drive all blames into one” is the tendency we have to want to protect ourselves: ego clinging. When we drive all blames into this tendency by owning our feelings and feeling fully, the ongoing monolithic ME begins to lighten up, because it is fabricated with our opinions, our moods, and a lot of ephemeral, but at the same time vivid and convincing, stuff.
    I know a fifteen-year-old Hispanic guy from Los Angeles. He grew up in a violent neighborhood and was in gangs from the age of thirteen. He was really smart, and curiously enough, his name was Juan. He came on really mean. He was tough and he snarled and he walked around with a big chip on his shoulder. You had the feeling that that was all he had going for him: his world was so rough that acting like the baddest and the meanest was the only way he saw to survive in it.
    He was one of those people who definitely drive all blames into others. If you asked him a simple question, he would tell you to fuck off. If he could get anybody in trouble, he definitely would do so. From one point of view, he was a total pain in the neck, but on the other hand, he had a flair and brilliance about him. It was always mixed; you hated him and you loved him. He was outrageous and also sparky and funny, but he was mean—he would slap people and push them around. You knew that that was pretty lightweight compared with what he was used to doing at home, where they killed each other on a regular basis.
    He was sent to Boulder, Colorado, for the summer to give him a break, to give him a nice summer in the Rocky Mountains. His mother and others were trying to help him get a good education and somehow step out of the nightmare world into which he had been born. The people he was staying with were loosely affiliated with the Buddhist community, and that’s how I came to know him. One day he came to an event where Trungpa Rinpoche was, and at the end of this event, Trungpa Rinpoche sang the Shambhala anthem. This was an awful experience for the rest of us because for some reason he loved to sing the Shambhala anthem in a high-pitched, squeaky, and cracked voice.
    This particular event was outside. As Rinpoche sang into a microphone and the sound traveled for miles across the plains, Juan broke down and started to cry. Everyone else was feeling awkward or embarrassed, but Juan just started to cry. Later he said he cried because he had never seen anyone that brave. He said, “That guy, he’s not afraid to be a fool.” That turned out to be a major turning point in his life because he realized that he didn’t have to be afraid to be a fool either. All that persona and chip on the shoulder were guarding his soft spot, and he could let them go. Because he was so sharp and bright, he got the message. His life turned around. Now he’s got his education and he’s back in L.A. helping kids.
    So that’s the point, that we tend to drive all blames into Juan because Juan is so obnoxious. We aren’t encouraged to get in touch with what’s underneath all our words of hatred, craving, and jealousy. We just act them out again and again. But if we practice this slogan and drive all blames into one, the armor of our ego clinging will weaken and the soft spot in our hearts will appear. We may feel foolish, but we don’t have to be afraid of that. We can make friends with