Book Notes
Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön — review and summary
Start Where You Are is not a self-improvement book in the usual sense. It is an argument for beginning where you actually are — difficulty, confusion, and all — rather than where you think you should be.
Pema Chödrön is an American Tibetan Buddhist nun who has written extensively about the intersection of Buddhist practice and the ordinary difficulties of human life. Start Where You Are is her exploration of lojong — a system of Tibetan mind training that uses paradoxical aphorisms as meditation objects — and its application to the specific difficulties that prevent most people from working effectively with their own experience.
The lojong teachings
Lojong is a twelfth-century Tibetan practice that uses fifty-nine short aphorisms as the basis for meditation and daily practice. The aphorisms are deliberately compressed and sometimes paradoxical: "Abandon any hope of fruition." "Don't ponder others." "Be grateful to everyone."
Chödrön works through a selection of these slogans, unpacking their practical meaning in ordinary contemporary life. The unpacking is the primary value of the book for readers without a Buddhist background: these are not decorative aphorisms but instructions, and Chödrön is good at making the instruction concrete.
The core argument
The book's central argument, running beneath the specific slogans, is about the relationship to experience. Most people, most of the time, are either trying to hold on to pleasant experience or trying to avoid unpleasant experience. Neither orientation produces genuine stability, because pleasant experience always ends and unpleasant experience always returns.
The alternative Chödrön points toward is not indifference — not the elimination of preference — but a different quality of relationship to experience: openness, curiosity, the willingness to be with what is actually happening rather than with what you want to be happening or fear is happening.
This orientation is called tonglen in the Tibetan tradition. It involves breathing in difficulty (both your own and others') and breathing out relief. It is the opposite of the usual instinct, which is to breathe in comfort and breathe out difficulty. Chödrön's argument is that the usual instinct perpetuates the difficulty rather than reducing it.
What is practically useful
The most practically useful material in the book concerns self-criticism and self-judgment. Chödrön is particularly direct about the way self-criticism functions — not as a useful corrective but as a way of avoiding the actual feeling that self-criticism is generated in response to.
The alternative she offers is not self-acceptance in the sense of telling yourself that everything is fine. It is a more fundamental shift: meeting your own experience — including the parts you are not proud of — with the same quality of care you would try to offer to someone else in difficulty.
This is easy to say. It is one of the harder things to actually practise. The book is useful precisely because it takes the difficulty seriously and does not promise that the practice is easy or that it works quickly.
Who this book is for
Start Where You Are is most useful for people who are drawn to Buddhist ideas but want a practical rather than a doctrinal account of them, and for people who are working with persistent self-criticism, difficulty tolerating their own experience, or a general sense that the standard self-help advice is too lightweight for what they are dealing with.
Practical reflection prompts:
- What is your usual relationship to difficulty — avoidance, struggle, or something else?
- Where does self-criticism appear in your life, and what is it actually doing when it appears?
Bibliographic details
- Author: Pema Chödrön
- Published: 1994 (revised editions in subsequent years)
- Publisher: Shambhala Publications