Jack Kornfield
Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.
Spiritual practice should not be confused with grim duty. It is the laughter of the Dalai Lama and the wonder born with every child.
Westerners, more than most Asians, are prone to feelings of fear, self-hatred, and unworthiness.
Sense the blessings of the earth in the perfect arc of a ripe tangerine, the taste of warm, fresh bread, the circling flight of birds, the lavender color of the sky shining in a late afternoon rain puddle, the million times we pass other beings in our cars and shops and out among the trees without crashing, conflict, or harm.
In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation - it's like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.
Buddhism talks about the possibility of transforming greed, hatred, and delusion. But sometimes need turns into greed.
If you can sit quietly after difficult news; if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm; if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy; if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate; you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill; if you can always find contentment just where you are: you are probably a dog.Collection: Running
The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?Collection: Inspirational
To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.Collection: Letting Go
No amount of outer technology, no amount of computers and biotechnology and nanotechnology is going to stop the continuation of warfare and racism and environmental destruction. What's called for on the Earth at this time is really a change of heart ... the question is really not the future of humanity, but the presence of eternity.Collection: Heart
Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.Collection: Children
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.Collection: Motivational
Whatever your difficulties - a devastated heart, financial loss, feeling assaulted by the conflicts around you, or a seemingly hopeless illness - you can always remember that you are free in every moment to set the compass of your heart to your highest intentions. In fact, the two things that you are always free to do - despite your circumstances - are to be present and to be willing to love.Collection: Heart
In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let goCollection: Letting Go
We do not have to improve ourselves; we just have to let go of what blocks our heart.Collection: Letting Go
Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.Collection: Letting Go
Equanimity arises when we accept the way things are.Collection: Mindfulness
Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.Collection: Regret
The waves do keep coming, so learn to surf.Collection: Surf
Acceptance does not mean inaction. We may need to respond, strongly at times...From a peaceful center we can respond instead of react. Unconscious reactions create problems. Considered responses bring peace. With a peaceful heart whatever happens can be met with wisdom...Peace is not weak; it is unshakable.Collection: Heart
Grant that I have enough suffering that my heart really opens to the great compassion of this world, that I be given enough so that I don't wall myself off from the world, that it breaks down the heart and the separation and the ego and the fear, and it lets me touch the nectar, the milk of kindness itself, of something greater.Collection: Wall
In deep self acceptance, grows a compassionate understanding.Collection: Acceptance
The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love - or any other experience - must take place in the present.Collection: Memories
The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.Collection: Miracle
Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring about them in a flexible and wise way.Collection: Letting Go
If you want to love, take the time to listen to your heart. In most ancient and wise cultures it is a regular practice for people to talk to their heart. There are rituals, stories, and meditative skills in every spiritual tradition that awaken the voice of the heart. To live wisely, this practice is essential, because our heart is the source of our connection to and intimacy with all of life. And life is love. This mysterious quality of love is all around us, as real as gravity... Yet how often we forget about love.Collection: Wise
Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.Collection: Meditation
To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others.Collection: Live Life
The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind.Collection: Practice
Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was Young. And my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.Collection: Heart
Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?Collection: Kindness
One of the essential tasks for living a wise life is letting go. Letting go is the path to freedom. It is only by letting go of the hopes, the fears, the pain, the past, the stories that have a hold on us that we can quiet our mind and open our heart.Collection: Letting Go
Life without forgiveness is unbearable.Collection: Unbearable
Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.Collection: Perseverance
Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.Collection: Meditation
We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?Collection: Buddhism
The questions asked at the end of lie are very simple ones: Did I love well? Did I love the people around me, my community, the earth, in a deep way? And perhaps, Did I live fully? Did I offer myself to life?Collection: Death
This life is a test-it is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. Remember, this life is only a test.Collection: Tests
No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.Collection: Yoga
There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.Collection: Pain
Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale.Collection: Memories
According to Buddhist scriptures, compassion is the "quivering of the pure heart" when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of life.Collection: Buddhist
Compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things.Collection: Compassion
It only take a few minutes of meditation to directly realize we are a river of sensations, feelings, thoughts, perceptions. How can we navigate this evanescent river of life wisely? With mindful awareness and love it becomes clear. You can fight against the river of change, or use its wisdom to teach you how to graciously move and create and flow with the full measure of joy and sorrow, gain and loss, praise and blame that make up every human incarnation.Collection: Moving
As we encounter new experiences with a mindful and wise attention, we discover that one of three things will happen to our new experience: it will go away, it will stay the same, or it will get more intense. whatever happens does not really matter.Collection: Wise
Everyone and everything is in some degree or other our teacher.Collection: Teacher
You awaken your True spirit by way of the broken heart: ragged, vulnerable, fierce and finally compassionate. Chris trod this rough way and shows honestly how it can be done.Collection: Heart
In deep self-acceptance grows a compassionate understanding. As one Zen master said when I asked if he ever gets angry, 'Of course I get angry, but then a few minutes later I say to myself, 'What's the use of this,' and I let it go.'Collection: Letting Go
The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person because I need them.” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This isn’t love at all - it is attachment - and attachment is rigid, it is very different from love.Collection: Love You
In opening we can see how many times we have mistaken small identities and fearful beliefs for our true nature and how limiting this is. We can touch with great compassion the pain from the contracted identities that we and others have created in the world.Collection: Pain