Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living Read Free

“me-victorious.” Me first. Ego. That kind of “me-victorious” attitude is the cause of all suffering.
    In essence what this little saying is getting at is that words like victory and defeat are completely interwoven with how we protect ourselves, how we guard our hearts. Our sense of victory just means that we guarded our heart enough so that nothing got through, and we think we won the war. The armor around our soft spot—our wounded heart—is now more fortified, and our world is smaller. Maybe nothing is getting in to scare us for one whole week, but our courage is weakening, and our sense of caring about others is getting completely obscured. Did we really win the war?
    On the other hand, our sense of being defeated means that something got in. Something touched our soft spot. This vulnerability that we’ve kept armored for ages—something touched it. Maybe all that touched it was a butterfly, but we have never been touched there before. It was so tender. Because we have never felt that before, we now go out and buy padlocks and armor and guns so that we will never feel it again. We go for anything—seven pairs of boots that fit inside each other so we don’t have to feel the ground, twelve masks so that no one can see our real face, nineteen sets of armor so that nothing can touch our skin, let alone our heart.
    These words defeat and victory are so tied up with how we stay imprisoned. The real confusion is caused by not knowing that we have limitless wealth, and the confusion deepens each time we buy into this win/lose logic: if you touch me, that is defeat, and if I manage to armor myself and not be touched, that’s victory.
    Realizing our wealth would end our bewilderment and confusion. But the only way to do that is to let things fall apart. And that’s the very thing that we dread the most—the ultimate defeat. Yet letting things fall apart would actually let fresh air into this old, stale basement of a heart that we’ve got.
    Saying “Loss and defeat to myself” doesn’t mean to become a masochist: “Kick my head in, torture me, and dear God, may I never be happy.” What it means is that you can open your heart and your mind and know what defeat feels like.
    You feel too short, you have indigestion, you’re too fat and too stupid. You say to yourself, “Nobody loves me, I’m always left out. I have no teeth, my hair’s getting gray, I have blotchy skin, my nose runs.” That all comes under the category of defeat, the defeat of ego. We’re always not wanting to be who we are. However, we can never connect with our fundamental wealth as long as we are buying into this advertisement hype that we have to be someone else, that we have to smell different or have to look different.
    On the other hand, when you say, “Victory to others,” instead of wanting to keep it for yourself, there’s the sense of sharing the whole delightful aspect of your life. You did lose some weight. You do like the way you look in the mirror. You suddenly feel like you have a nice voice, or someone falls in love with you or you fall in love with someone else. Or the seasons change and it touches your heart, or you begin to notice the snow in Vermont or the way the trees move in the wind. With anything that you want, you begin to develop the attitude of wanting to share it instead of being stingy with it or fearful around it.
    Perhaps the slogans will challenge you. They say things like “Don’t be jealous,” and you think, “How did they know?” Or “Be grateful to everyone”; you wonder how to do that or why to bother. Some slogans, such as “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment,” exhort you to go beyond common sense. These slogans are not always the sort of thing that you would want to hear, let alone find inspiring, but if we work with them, they will become like our breath, our eyesight, our first thought. They will become like the smells we smell and the sound we hear. We can let them