Jack Kornfield
A factor that greatly supports the opening of energy in practice is exercise and care of the physical body.Collection: Exercise
The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.Collection: Meditation
In any moment we can learn to let go of hatred and fear. We can rest in peace, love, and forgiveness. It is never too late. Yet to sustain love we need to develop practices that cultivate and strengthen the natural compassion within us.Collection: Letting Go
The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation.Collection: Practice
Finding a way to extend forgiveness to ourselves is one of our most essential tasks. Just as others have been caught in suffering, so have we. If we look honestly at our life, we can see the sorrows and pain that have led to our own wrongdoing. In this we can finally extend forgiveness to ourselves; we can hold the pain we have caused in compassion. Without such mercy, we will live our own life in exile.Collection: Pain
Within each of us there is a silence as vast as the universe. We long for it. We can return to it.Collection: Spiritual
Nirvana manifests as ease, as love, as connectedness, as generosity, as clarity, as unshakable freedom. This isn’t watering down nirvana. This is the reality of liberation that we can experience, sometimes in a moment and sometimes in transformative ways that change our entire lifeCollection: Reality
Forgiveness does not mean that we have to continue to relate to those who have done us harm. In some cases the best practice may be to end our connection, to never speak to or be with a harmful person again. Sometimes in the process of forgiveness a person who hurts or betrayed us may wish to make amends, but even this does not require us to put ourselves in the way of further harm.Collection: Hurt
The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.Collection: Expression
To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.Collection: Betrayal
If grief or anger arises, Let there be grief or anger. This is the Buddha in all forms,Sun Buddha, Moon Buddha, Happy Buddha, Sad Buddha. It is the universe offering all things to awaken and open our heart.Collection: Grief
When we let go of our battles and open our heart to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice. Only in this moment can we discover that which is timeless. Only here can we find the love that we seek. Love in the past is simply memory, and love in the future is fantasy. Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.Collection: Letting Go
Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.Collection: Meditation Practice
When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.Collection: Letting Go
It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.Collection: Past
We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open.Collection: Heart
May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.Collection: Heart
Without being aware of it, you take many things as being your identity: your body, your race, your beliefs, your thoughts.Collection: Buddhism
Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to express some of the most profound teachings of interdependence and emptiness I've ever heard. With the eloquence of a poet, he holds up a sheet of paper and teaches us that the rain cloud and the tree and the logger who cut the tree down are all there in the paper. He's been one of the most significant carriers of the lamp of the dharma to the West that we have had.Collection: Rain
Compassion arises naturally as the quivering of the heart in the face of pain, ours and another's. True compassion is not limited by the separateness of pity, nor by the fear of being overwhelmed. When we come to rest in the great heart of compassion, we discover a capacity to bear witness to, suffer with, and hold dear with our own vulnerable heart the sorrows and beauties of the world.Collection: Pain
Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.Collection: Wisdom
It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery.Collection: Spiritual
When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves.Collection: Connections
Live in joy, luminosity, and peace even among the troubles of the world. Remember who you are.Collection: Joy
True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.Collection: Individuality
To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.Collection: Spiritual
It is the place of feeling that binds us or frees us.Collection: Feelings
We can always begin again.Collection: Buddhism
Meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear, trust the unfolding of life, and you will attain true serenity.Collection: Serenity
In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!Collection: War
When we feel anger toward someone, we can consider that they are a being just like us, who has faced much suffering in life.Collection: Suffering
It is our commitment to wholeness that matters, the willingness to unfold in every deep aspect of our being.Collection: Inspirational
The ends do not justify the means. If our actions will bring harm to others, even in the service of some 'good,' they are almost certainly deluded. If our actions do not come from a kind heart, from loving courage and compassion, they are deluded. If they are based on a distinction between 'us' and 'them,' they stem from delusion. Only to the extent that we act from the wisdom of no separation, understanding how we are woven together, will our intention bring benefit.Collection: Heart
When I sit with students, I do not just want to help them solve their problems. I want to find a moment with each person where their mind stops and their eyes open. I want us to be together as if we were lying in a field on the underside of the earth on a clear summer night, held only by the magnet of gravity, looking down into a bottomless sea of stars. I want us to remember together the beauty all around us.Collection: Summer
In the West, there's a myth that freedom means free expression-that to follow all desires wherever they take one is true freedom. In fact, as one serves the mind, one sees that following desires, attractions, and repulsions is not at all freedom, but is a kind of bondage. A mind filled with desires and grasping inevitably entails great suffering. Freedom is not to be gained through the ability to perform certain external actions. True freedom is an inward state of being. Once it is attained, no situation in the world can bind one or limit one's freedom.Collection: Mean
In this there is no judgment and no blame, for we seek not to perfect the world but to perfect our love for what is on this earth.Collection: Perfect
To begin to meditate is to look into our lives with interest in kindness and discover how to be wakeful and free.Collection: Kindness
Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world.Collection: Reality
Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heartCollection: Philosophy
We need to learn how to honor and use a practice for as long as it serves us—which in most cases is a very long time—but to look at it as just that, a vehicle, a raft to help us cross through the waters of doubt, confusion, desire, and fear.Collection: Practice
What would we have to hold in compassion to be at peace right now? What would we have to let go of to be at peace right now?Collection: Letting Go
What brings the karmic result from the patterns of our actions is not our action alone. As we intend and then act, we create [our] karma: so another key to understanding the creation of karma is becoming aware of intention. The heart is our garden, and along with each action there is an intention that is planted like a seed. The result of the patterns of our karma is the fruit of these seeds.Collection: Karma
To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.Collection: Spiritual
Those who are Awake live in a state of constant amazement.Collection: Spiritual
Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.Collection: Suffering
Strength of the Heart comes from knowing that the pain that we each must bear is part of the greater pain shared by all that lives. It is not just 'our' pain, but 'the' pain and realizing this awakens our universal compassionCollection: Pain
How well we have learned to let goCollection: Letting Go
All of spiritual practice is a matter of relationship: to ourselves, to others, to life's situations.Collection: Spiritual
Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. “ It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life.Collection: Religious