The point at which they agree is to let go of holding on to yourself. That's the way of becoming at home in the world. Ego is not sin. Ego is not something you get rid of. Ego is something you come to know - that you befriend by not acting out or repressing all the feelings that you feel.

Ego is like a room of your own, a room with a view, with the temperature and the smells and the music that you like. You want it your way. You'd like to have a little peace: you'd lie to have a little happiness, you know, just "gimme a break!"

But the more you think that way, the more you try to get life to come out so that it will always suit you, the more your fear of other people and what's outside your room grows. Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.

To begin to develop compassion for yourself and others, you have to unlock the door. You don't open it yet, because you have to work with your fear that somebody you don't like might come in. Then as you begin to relax and befriend those feelings, you begin to open it. Sure enough, in come the music and the smells that you don't like. Sure enough, someone puts a foot in and tells you you should have a different religion or vote for someone you don't like or give money that you don't want to give. Now you begin to relate with those feelings. You develop some compassion, connecting with the soft spot.

It help to realize that the Nelson Mandelas and Mother Teresas of the world also know how it feels to be in a small room with the windows and the doors closed. They also know anger and jealousy and loneliness. They're people who made friends with themselves and therefore made friends with the world. They're people who developed the bravery to be able to relate to the shaky, tender, fearful feelings in their own hearts and therefore are no longer afraid of those feelings when they are triggered by the outside world.

When you begin to practice in this way, you're so honest about what you're feeling that it begins to create a feeling of understanding other people as well... We become part of a people who have cultivated their bravery throughout history, people who, against enormous odds, have stayed open to great difficulties and painful situations and transformed them into the path of awakening. We WILL fall flat on our faces again and again, we WILL continue to feel inadequate, and we can use these experiences to wake up, just as they did. The lojong teachings give us the means to connect with the power of our lineage, the lineage of gentle warriorship.

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All the teachings and all the practices are about just one thing; if the way that we protect ourselves is strong, then suffering is really strong too. If the ego or the cocoon gets lighter, then suffering is lighter as well. Ego is like a really fat person trying to get through a narrow door. If there's lots of ego, then we're always getting squeezed and poked and irritated by everything that comes along. When something comes along that doesn't squeeze and poke and irritate us, we grasp onto it for dear life and want it to last forever. Then we suffer more as a result of holding on to ourselves.

One might think that we're talking about ego as enemy, ego as original sin. But this is a very different approach, a much softer approach. Rather than original SIN, there's original SOFT SPOT. The messy stuff that we see in ourselves and that we perceive in the world as violence and cruelty and fear is not the result of some basic badness but of the fact that we have such a tender, vulnerable, warm heart of Bodhicitta, which we instinctively protect so that nothing will touch it.

There seems to be a need to change the fundamental pattern of always protecting against anything touching our soft spot. Tonglen practice is about changing the basic pattern.

From START WHERE YOU ARE by Pema Chdrn, 1994.
Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston.