Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73645 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Alice Walker
'As one of Pema Chodron's grateful students, I have been learning the most pressing and necessary lesson of all: how to keep opening wider my own heart.'

Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
'Pema's deep experience and her fresh way of looking at things are like mountain water - clear and deep.'

Synopsis
Start Where You Are is an indispensable handbook for cultivating fearlessness and awakening a compassionate heart, from bestselling author Pema Chodron. With insight and humour, she presents down-to-earth guidance on how to make friends with ourselves and develop genuine compassion towards others. This book shows how we can 'start where we are' by embracing rather than denying the painful aspects of our lives. Pema Chodron frames her teachings on compassion around fifty-nine traditional Tibetan Buddhist maxims, or slogans, such as: 'Always apply a joyful state of mind', 'Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment' and 'Be grateful to everyone'. Working with these slogans and through the practice of meditation, Start Where You Are shows how we can all develop the courage to work with our own inner pain and discover joy, well-being and confidence.

Customer Reviews

Heart warming
Pema has done it again! She manages to write about the spiritual path and buddhist teachings with such simplicity and earthiness. This is not detached in any way. A moving book that teaches us all about ourselves and that nothing is forbidden, we are simply human beings moving through our life together. If you are on the path to discover who you really are then this is a book you should read.

Wondrous simplicity and clarity
Pema Chodron is a wonderful teacher, who shares time honored techniques of breathing in suffering and anger and breathing out compassion and love in a way that is so guileless and disarming that it is almost guaranteed to touch your heart.

This book works on many levels... I am not a 'serious practitioner,' by any means, but someone who goes to work every day and has to deal with many frustrations and stresses, but this book offers practical methods that help you deal with just these impediments in your life, so that you can be happier, and give more happiness to others.

I also sense that for someone who is more dedicated to making their life centered on spiritual practice, this book is a foundation for such a disciplined path as well.

Finally A Book That Supports the Embracing of Humaness!
Chodron's book was such a fresh breath! While most books are giving us the top ten reasons why we should deny, hide or get rid of our not-so-good feelings and emotions, she suggests that we start right there and breathe them in. She points out that as our feelings are shared simultaneously with millions of others, we are never alone. This is so obvious, but the point is rarely made.

Chodron teaches us that the self-improvement market can join the human experience! We are worthy as is.