Some Buddhist Lojong

I just finished a book called “Start Where You Are” by Pema Chodron. The subtitle for the book is “A Guide to Compassionate Living’, and it lays out how to awaken the heart by lojong (mind training). Here were some quotes from the book that had meaning to me:

• · Helping yourself or someone else has to do with opening and just being there. What works with one person might not work with another and so each experience requires us to just be there, not in a past experience helping someone else.

• · You should never have expectations for other people. Just be kind to them. When we set goals for others, we are being aggressive, and we are only looking for success for ourselves. We are asking them to live up to our ideals.

• · Don’t wallow in self-pity. Get to know what the self-pity sounds like under your story line. Self-pity takes a lot of maintenance.

• · One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is to feel that now is not good enough. We think back to the past or ahead to the future. We compare things to what happened before, or need to wait until something happens in the future. But we are never satisfied with now. This moment. One of the Buddhist teachings is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. That is an orientation to the future, and the future doesn’t exist, only NOW does. You’re never going to get it all together. There is not going to be some special future moment when all loose ends are tied up.

• · Sometime when you’re feeling miserable, you challenge people to see if they will still like you when you show them how ugly you an get. This one speaks for itself!

• · The notion “I am the helper and you are the one who needs help” might work in a temporary way, but fundamentally nothing changes, because there’s still one who has it and one who doesn’t. This final one sums up my life’s frustrations – trying to help people change but they haven’t had a fundamental change of attitude and I, by comparison, look superior. I need to be much more mindful of this!

The book was less than 150 pages but as you can see it had an awful lot of thought-provoking stuff! By writing these down, I hope that I shall keep them more closely in my thoughts. I also hope they were of interest to you!