Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living [Paperback]

Pema Chödrön's perennially helpful guide to transforming the pains and difficulties in our lives into opportunities for genuine joy and personal growth

We all want to be fearless, joyful, and fully alive. And we all know that it’s not so easy. We’re bombarded every day with false promises of ways to make our lives better—buy this, go here, eat this, don’t do that; the list goes on and on. But Pema Chödrön shows that, until we get to the heart of who we are and really make friends with ourselves, everything we do will always be superficial. Here she offers down-to-earth guidance on how we can go beyond the fleeting attempts to “fix” our pain and, instead, to take our lives as they are as the only path to achieve what we all yearn for most deeply—to embrace rather than deny the difficulties of our lives. These teachings, framed around fifty-nine traditional Tibetan Buddhist maxims, point us directly to our own hearts and minds, such as “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment,” “Be grateful to everyone,” and “Don’t expect applause.” By working with these slogans as everyday meditations,Start Where You Areshows how we can all develop the courage to work with our own inner pain and discover true joy, holistic well-being, and unshakeable confidence.“Instead of telling us a million things we need to fix in order to achieve mindfulness, Chödrön argues that we are exactly where we need to be. A must-read for any mindful and emotionally intelligent practitioner.”—Book RiotPema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun in the lineage of Chögyam Trungpa. She is resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners. She is the author of many books and audiobooks, including the best-sellingWhen Things Fall ApartandDon't Bite the Hlƒ!