Start Where You Are — A Guide to Compassionate Living is Pema Chödrön's structured presentation of the Tibetan mind-training tradition known as lojong, published by Shambhala in 1994 as the second of her widely-read books after The Wisdom of No Escape. The book is organised around the fifty-nine slogans collected in the 12th-century Chekawa Yeshe Dorje text Seven Points of Mind Training and used in the Shambhala lineage descended from Chögyam Trungpa; each slogan is given a short chapter that pairs the traditional Tibetan reading with examples from contemporary North American life — a difficult relationship, an unwanted job, the experience of physical pain. The book ends with the practice of tonglen — sending and taking — as the operational core of the lojong tradition.
Reception
Start Where You Are is the title most often used as the entry point to the Tibetan lojong tradition in Anglophone Buddhism, and the volume that supplied the lojong reading framework for the subsequent wave of Pema Chödrön's books (Comfortable with Uncertainty, 2002; The Places That Scare You, 2001). Within the Shambhala lineage the book is read as the most successful pastoral application of Trungpa's earlier, denser teachings on lojong (Training the Mind, 1993); within the Tibetan academic tradition (Jeffrey Hopkins, Thupten Jinpa) it has been noted that Chödrön's slogan readings sometimes shift the doctrinal emphasis from the explicit emptiness-and-bodhicitta scaffolding of Chekawa's text toward a more open contemplative-psychological register, accurate to Trungpa's transmission but distinct from the Indo-Tibetan source. The book has been continuously in print since 1994, has sold reportedly more than half a million copies in the United States, and is the most-assigned of Chödrön's titles in convert-Buddhist sangha reading lists.
Frequently asked
What is Start Where You Are about?
Pema Chödrön's structured presentation of the Tibetan lojong (mind-training) tradition, organised around the fifty-nine slogans of Chekawa Yeshe Dorje's twelfth-century text Seven Points of Mind Training. Each slogan is given a short chapter that pairs the traditional Tibetan reading with examples from everyday life — difficult relationships, unwanted work, physical pain. The book ends with the practice of tonglen as the operational core of lojong.
What is lojong and why does this book focus on it?
Lojong (mind training) is a system of fifty-nine Tibetan Buddhist slogans compiled by the twelfth-century teacher Chekawa Yeshe Dorje in Seven Points of Mind Training. Start Where You Are takes each slogan as a short chapter and pairs the traditional reading with examples from daily North American life, making the tradition accessible without reducing its scope.
What is tonglen practice and how does Chödrön present it?
Tonglen (taking and sending) is a Tibetan meditation practice in which one breathes in the pain and difficulty of oneself and others, and breathes out ease and relief. Chödrön presents tonglen as the operational core of the lojong tradition and returns to it throughout the book as the practical application of bodhicitta — the awakening heart — in everyday experience.