Jack Kornfield
Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.Collection: Breathing
The words of the Buddha offer this truth: ∼ Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed.Collection: Hatred
Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.Collection: Integrity
There is no higher happiness than peace.Collection: Higher
The wholeness and freedom we seek is our true nature, who we really are.Collection: Freedom
Know that the freedom you seek can be found right here where you are.Collection: Found
Built on the foundation of concentration is the third aspect of the Buddha’s path of awakening: clarity of vision and the development of wisdom.Collection: Vision
It is not enough to know that love and forgiveness are possible. We have to find ways to bring them to life.Collection: Way
In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion.Collection: Heart
When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.Collection: Love Is
Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.Collection: Integrity
Every individual in the world has a unique contribution.Collection: Unique
To let go in the deepest recesses of the heart, to release all struggle and wanting, leads us to that knowing which is timeless.Collection: Letting Go
The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.Collection: Spiritual
An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past.Collection: Spiritual
Gratitude is confidence in life itself. In it, we feel how the same force that pushes grass through cracks in the sidewalk invigorates our own life.Collection: Gratitude
As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life.Collection: Practice
Expressing gratitude to our benefactors is a natural form of love. In fact, some people find loving kindness for themselves so hard, they begin their practice with a benefactor. This too is fine. The rule in loving kindness practice is to follow the way that most easily opens your heart.Collection: Gratitude
We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.Collection: Smart
True love is not for the faint-hearted.Collection: Love Is
Each moment of every day is new and then it vanishes. Where is that day? Where is that moment?Collection: Moments
Some other people think that awakened consciousness is really about fullness or presence, being completely present for every moment, but these experiences are only one of the dimensions of awakened consciousness. Understanding these different dimensions as facets of awakening can help with the confusion surrounding the different spiritual paths. They're not leading to different places, but rather reflect the luminous and liberated aspects of consciousness itself. These qualities are not far away; in fact, they are right here.Collection: Spiritual
Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations, we free ourselves from the past.Collection: Home
Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.Collection: Buddhist
Great pain, when it is honored from the heart, opens into great understanding.Collection: Pain
With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.Collection: Powerful
Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears.Collection: Limits
As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out. But if you say, 'This is what I am, it is a fact that I am going to investigate and understand,' then you can go beyond.Collection: Inspirational
Of course, you play the game of life because you got to be incarnated.Collection: Games
We need courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit. But the place for this warrior strength is in the heart. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy-mate rial or spiritual. We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities.Collection: Running
Wherever you are is the perfect place to awaken. This moment is the exact place to practice compassion and loving awareness. You have all the ingredients to breathe and find freedom just where you are.Collection: Compassion
What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive.Collection: Inspirational
The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you're knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering?Collection: Beach
Weigh the true advantages of forgiveness and resentment to the heart. Then choose.Collection: Forgiveness
There are no holy places and no holy people, only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.Collection: People
With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.Collection: Compassion
When we have for so long been judged by everyone we meet, just to look into the eyes of another who does not judge us can be extraordinarily healing.Collection: Inspirational
...Spiritual opening is not a withdrawal to some imagined realm or safe cave. It is not a pulling away, but a touching of all the experience of life with wisdom and with a heart of kindness, without any separation.Collection: Spiritual
We can bring a heart of understanding and compassion to a world that needs it so much.Collection: Heart
To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.Collection: Life
If you put a spoonful of salt in a cup of water it tastes very salty. If you put a spoonful of salt in a lake of fresh water the taste is still pure and clear. Peace comes when our hearts are open like the sky, vast as the ocean.Collection: Ocean
Nobody knows why they were born or where they come from.Collection: Born
But forgiveness is the act of not putting anyone out of your heart, even those who are acting out of deep ignorance or out of confusion and pain.Collection: Pain
When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.Collection: Regret
It takes courage to grieve, to honor the pain we carry. We can grieve in tears or in meditative silence, in prayer or in song. In touching the pain of recent and long-held griefs, we come face to face with our genuine human vulnerability, with helplessness and hopelessness. These are the storm clouds of the heart.Collection: Song
There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart.Collection: Heart
We as human beings have the amazing capacity to be reborn at breakfast everyday and say, “This is a new day.”Collection: New Day
We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.Collection: Letting Go
There is beauty to be found in the changing of the earth’s seasons, and an inner grace in honouring the cycles of life.Collection: Cycle Of Life