Start Where You Are

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’ 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, wellbeing and confidence.

Reviews

‘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.’
Alice Walker

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

About the author

Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned Tibetan meditation master. She is the author of ‘The Wisdom of No Escape,’ ‘Start Where You Are,’ and the best-selling ‘When Things Fall Apart.’ She is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastry in North America established for Westerners.