No Escape, No Problem 3

with pain at all, will we be fearless enough, brave

enough, and enough of a warrior to be willing to feel
the pain of others. To that degree we will be able to
take on the pain of others because we will have dis-
covered that their pain and our own pain are not dif-
ferent.
However, to do this, we need all the help we can
get. It is my hope that this book will supply that help.
The tools you will be given are three very supportive
practices:

1. Basic sitting meditation (called shamatha-

vipashyana meditation)
2. The practice of taking in and sending out
(called tonglen)
3. The practice of working with slogans (called
the seven points of mind training, or lojong)

All these practices awaken our trust that the wis-

dom and compassion that we need are already within
us. They help us to know ourselves: our rough parts
and our smooth parts, our passion, aggression, igno-
rance, and wisdom. The reason that people harm
other people, the reason that the planet is polluted
and people and animals are not doing so well these
days is that individuals don’t know or trust or love
themselves enough. The technique of sitting called
shamatha-vipashyana (“tranquillity-insight”) is like a
golden key that helps us to know ourselves.
4 No Escape, No Problem

Shamatha-Vipashyana Meditation
In shamatha-vipashyana meditation, we sit upright
with legs crossed and eyes open, hands resting on our
thighs. Then we simply become aware of our breath
as it goes out. It requires precision to be right there
with that breath. On the other hand, it’s extremely re-
laxed and extremely soft. Saying, “Be right there with
the breath as it goes out,” is the same thing as saying,
“Be fully present.” Be right here with whatever is
going on. Being aware of the breath as it goes out, we
may also be aware of other things going on—sounds
on the street, the light on the walls. These things may
capture our attention slightly, but they don’t need to
draw us off. We can continue to sit right here, aware
of the breath going out.
But being with the breath is only part of the
technique. These thoughts that run through our
minds continually are the other part. We sit here talk-
ing to ourselves. The instruction is that when you
realize you’ve been thinking, you label it “thinking.”
When your mind wanders off, you say to yourself,
“Thinking.” Whether your thoughts are violent or
passionate or full of ignorance and denial; whether
your thoughts are worried or fearful, whether your
thoughts are spiritual thoughts, pleasing thoughts of
how well you’re doing, comforting thoughts, uplifting
thoughts, whatever they are, without judgment or
 No Escape, No Problem 5

harshness simply label it all “thinking,” and do that

with honesty and gentleness.
The touch on the breath is light: only about 25 per-
cent of the awareness is on the breath. You’re not
grasping or fixating on it. You’re opening, letting the
breath mix with the space of the room, letting your
breath just go out into space. Then there’s something
like a pause, a gap until the next breath goes out
again. While you’re breathing in, there could be some
sense of just opening and waiting. It is like pushing
the doorbell and waiting for someone to answer.
Then you push the doorbell again and wait for some-
one to answer. Then probably your mind wanders off
and you realize you’re thinking again—at this point,
use the labeling technique.
It’s important to be faithful to the technique. If
you find that your labeling has a harsh, negative tone
to it, as if you were saying, “Dammit!,” that you’re giv-
ing yourself a hard time, say it again and lighten up.
It’s not like trying to down the thoughts as if they
were clay pigeons. Instead, be gentle. Use the label-
ing part of the technique as an opportunity to develop
softness and compassion for yourself. Anything that
comes up is okay in the arena of meditation. The
point is, you can see it honestly and make friends
with it.
Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very
healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to
know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all tæhe ways
6 No Escape, No Problem

that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down,
deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little
ways. You can know all that with some sense of
humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re
coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up
against these things. We are all in this together. So
when you realize that you’re talking to yourself, label
it “thinking” and notice your tone of voice. Let it be
compassionate and gentle and humorous. Then
you’ll be changing old stuck patterns that are shared
by the whole human race. Compassion for others be-
gins with kindness to ourselves.*

Lojong Practice
The heart of this book is the lojong practice and
teachings. The lojong practice (or mind training) has
two elements: the practice, which is tonglen medita-
tion, and the teaching, which comes in the form of
slogans.
The basic notion of lojong is that we can make
friends with what we reject, what we see as “bad” in
ourselves and in other people. At the same time, we
could learn to be generous with what we cherish,
what we see as “good.” If we begin to live in this

*If you’ve never tried sitting meditation before, you may wish to
seek the guidance of a qualified meditation instructor. See the list
of meditation centers at the back of the book for help in finding an
instructor.
 No Escape, No Problem 7

way, something in us that may have been buried for

a long time begins to ripen. Traditionally this “some-
thing” is called bodhichitta, or awakened heart. It’s
something that we already have but usually have not
yet discovered.
It’s as if we were poor, homeless, hungry, and cold,
and although we didn’t know it, right under the
ground where we always slept was a pot of gold. That
gold is like bodhichitta. Our confusion and misery
come from not knowing that the gold is right here
and from always looking for it somewhere else. When
we talk about joy, enlightenment, waking up, or
awakening bodhichitta, all that means is that we
know the gold is right here, and we realize that it’s
been here all along.
The basic message of the lojong teachings is that if
it’s painful, you can learn to hold your seat and move
closer to that pain. Reverse the usual pattern, which
is to split, to escape. Go against the grain and hold
your seat. Lojong introduces a different attitude to-
ward unwanted stuff: if it’s painful, you become will-
ing not just to endure it but also to let it awaken your
heart and soften you. You learn to embrace it.
If an experience is delightful or pleasant, usually
we want to grab it and make it last. We’re afraid that
it will end. We’re not inclined to share it. The lojong
teachings encourage us, if we enjoy what we are ex-
periencing, to think of other people and wish for
them to feel that. Share the wealth. Be generous with
8 No Escape, No Problem

your joy. Give away what you most want. Be generous

with your insights and delights. Instead of fearing
that they’re going to slip away and holding on to
them, share them.
Whether it’s pain or pleasure, through lojong prac-
tice we come to have a sense of letting our experience
be as it is without trying to manipulate it, push it
away, or grasp it. The pleasurable aspects of being
human as well as the painful ones become the key to
awakening bodhichitta.
There is a saying that is the underlying principle
of tonglen and slogan practice: “Gain and victory
to others, loss and defeat to myself.” The Tibetan
word for pride or arrogance, which is nga-gyal, is
literally in English “me-victorious.” Me first. Ego.
That kind of “me-victorious” attitude is the cause of
all suffering.
In essence what this little saying is getting at is
that words like victory and defeat are completely in-
terwoven with how we protect ourselves, how we
guard our hearts. Our sense of victory just means that
we guarded our heart enough so that nothing got
through, and we think we won the war. The armor
around our soft spot—our wounded heart—is now
more fortified, and our world is smaller. Maybe noth-
ing is getting in to scare us for one whole week, but
our courage is weakening, and our sense of caring
about others is getting completely obscured. Did we
really win the war?
 No Escape, No Problem 9

On the other hand, our sense of being defeated

means that something got in. Something touched our
soft spot. This vulnerability that we’ve kept armored
for ages—something touched it. Maybe all that
touched it was a butterfly, but we have never been
touched there before. It was so tender. Because we
have never felt that before, we now go out and buy
padlocks and armor and guns so that we will never
feel it again. We go for anything—seven pairs of
boots that fit inside each other so we don’t have to
feel the ground, twelve masks so that no one can see
our real face, nineteen sets of armor so that nothing
can touch our skin, let alone our heart.
These words defeat and victory are so tied up with
how we stay imprisoned. The real confusion is
caused by not knowing that we have limitless wealth,
and the confusion deepens each time we buy into
this win/lose logic: if you touch me, that is defeat,
and if I manage to armor myself and not be touched,
that’s victory.
Realizing our wealth would end our bewilderment
and confusion. But the only way to do that is to let
things fall apart. And that’s the very thing that we
dread the most—the ultimate defeat. Yet letting
things fall apart would actually let fresh air into this
old, stale basement of a heart that we’ve got.
Saying “Loss and defeat to myself” doesn’t mean to
become a masochist: “Kick my head in, torture me,
and dear God, may I never be happy.” What it means
10 No Escape, No Problem

is that you can open your heart and your mind and
know what defeat feels like.
You feel too short, you have indigestion, you’re too
fat and too stupid. You say to yourself, “Nobody loves
me, I’m always left out. I have no teeth, my hair’s get-
ting gray, I have blotchy skin, my nose runs.” That all
comes under the category of defeat, the defeat of ego.
We’re always not wanting to be who we are. However,
we can never connect with our fundamental wealth
as long as we are buying into this advertisement hype
that we have to be someone else, that we have to
smell different or have to look different.
On the other hand, when you say, “Victory to oth-
ers,” instead of wanting to keep it for yourself, there’s
the sense of sharing the whole delightful aspect of
your life. You did lose some weight. You do like the
way you look in the mirror. You suddenly feel like you
have a nice voice, or someone falls in love with you or
you fall in love with someone else. Or the seasons
change and it touches your heart, or you begin to no-
tice the snow in Vermont or the way the trees move in
the wind. With anything that you want, you begin to
develop the attitude of wanting to share it instead of
being stingy with it or fearful around it.
Perhaps the slogans will challenge you. They say
things like “Don’t be jealous,” and you think, “How
did they know?” Or “Be grateful to everyone”; you
wonder how to do that or why to bother. Some slo-
gans, such as “Always meditate on whatever provokes
 No Escape, No Problem 11

resentment,” exhort you to go beyond common

sense. These slogans are not always the sort of thing
that you would want to hear, let alone find inspiring,
but if we work with them, they will become like our
breath, our eyesight, our first thought. They will be-
come like the smells we smell and the sound we hear.
We can let them permeate our whole being. That’s
the point. These slogans aren’t theoretical or ab-
stract. They are about exactly who we are and what is
happening to us. They are completely relevant to
how we experience things, how we relate with what-
ever occurs in our lives. They are about how to relate
with pain and fear and pleasure and joy, and how
those things can transform us fully and completely.
When we work with the slogans, ordinary life be-
comes the path of awakening.
 2
No Big Deal

T he practices we’ll be doing help us develop

trust in our awakened heart, our bodhichitta. If
we could finally grasp how rich we are, our sense of
heavy burden would diminish, and our sense of cu-
riosity would increase.
Bodhichitta has three qualities: (1) it is soft and
gentle, which is compassion; (2) at the same time, it
is clear and sharp, which is called prajna; and (3) it
is open. This last quality of bodhichitta is called
shunyata and is also known as emptiness. Emptiness
sounds cold. However, bodhichitta isn’t cold at all,
because there’s a heart quality—the warmth of com-
passion—that pervades the space and the clarity.
Compassion and openness and clarity are all one
thing, and this one thing is called bodhichitta.
Bodhichitta is our heart—our wounded, softened
heart. Now, if you look for that soft heart that we
guard so carefully—if you decide that you’re going
to do a scientific exploration under the microscope
and try to find that heart—you won’t find it. You can
look, but all you’ll find is some kind of tenderness.
There isn’t anything that you can cut out and put
under the microscope. There isn’t anything that you

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