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or blame. At Gampo Abbey, on the day before Sojong, we come together and talk about what we’ve been working with over the past two weeks. We share our insights about what helps and what hinders.
    Sojong itself is a little like the fourth and fifth steps in a Twelve Step program, which call for making “a searching and fearless” self-inventory, recognizing where we’ve gone off course, then sharing this with another person. Sojong is a kind of antiguilt process that allows us to assess ourselves honestly, acknowledge what we’ve done and where we are, then let go of self-judgment and move on. Instead of holding on to the view, “I’m hopeless. Week after week, month after month, year after year go by, and I can never stop lying” (or whatever your habit is), you can say, “Well, this is where I am now. I fully declare what’s happened now and in the past, and I go forward with a sense of a fresh start.”
    You don’t have to say this aloud to a group or another person, but most people find it easier to let go of self-judgment if they share their observations with someone else—a friend, perhaps, or a spiritual advisor. However you do it, the aim is to be fully honest and, at the same time, to shed feelings of guilt. One time, a group of students were asking Chögyam Trungpa about guilt. Among them was a man who had killed people in the Vietnam War and was tortured by self-loathing and guilt. Chögyam Trungpa told him, “That was then. This is now. You can always connect with your true nature at any time and be free of everything that went before.” Instead of letting our regrets drag us down, we can use them to spur us on to not repeat harmful acts but to learn from them how to be wiser in the future. We are fundamentallygood, not fundamentally flawed, and we can trust this.
    It’s never too late to restore your vow, to renew your commitment to refrain. But at the same time, if you’re not fully aware and conscious of what you’re doing, then the patterns will just become stronger and stronger, and you’ll continue to do the same things over and over again. So the process that begins with the first commitment is an opportunity to gain clarity about your mind and speech and actions and, at the same time, acknowledge honestly and gently what has happened in the past, then lay your harmful deeds aside and go forward.
    Nobody’s perfect in keeping the commitment to not harm. But still, students often ask me, “How can I make this vow with any integrity? If I’m going to break it at all, then what’s the point?” Patrul Rinpoche, a Buddhist master who lived in the eighteenth century, basically said there is no way to escape harming. He devotes an entire section of his book The Words of My Perfect Teacher to all the ways we cause harm: countless beings suffer from making the clothes we wear, from bringing us the food we eat. Beings suffer even when we walk. “Who is not guilty of having crushed countless tiny insects underfoot?” he asks. Our situation is inescapable because of our interconnectedness with all things. What makes the difference is our intention to not harm. On an everyday level, the intention to not harm means using our body, our speech, and our mind in such a way that we don’t knowingly hurt people, animals, birds, insects—any being—with our actions or words.
    And we not only vow to not harm, Patrul Rinpoche says, we also commit to doing the opposite: We help. We heal. We do everything we can to benefit others.

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    Be Fully Present, Feel Your Heart, and Leap
     
    T HE ON-THE-SPOT practice of being fully present, feeling your heart, and greeting the next moment with an open mind can be done at any time: when you wake up in the morning, before a difficult conversation, whenever fear or discomfort arises. This practice is a beautiful way to claim your warriorship, your spiritual warriorship. In other words, it is a way to claim your courage, your kindness, your strength. Whenever it