Jack Kornfield
Gratitude is the confidence in life itself... As gratitude grows it gives rise to joy. We experience the courage to rejoice in our own good fortune and in the good fortune of others... We can be joyful for people we love, for moments of goodness, for sunlight and trees, and for the very breath within our lungs. Like an innocent child, we can rejoice in life itself, in being alive.Collection: Gratitude
At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?Collection: Love
A second quality of mature sirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.Collection: Kindness
Use whatever has come to awaken patience, understanding, and love.Collection: Understanding
Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.Collection: Pain
Everybody needs to take some time, in some way, to quiet themselves and really listen to their heart.Collection: Heart
May you know the beauty of your own true nature.Collection: May
The emotional wisdom of the heart is simple. When we accept our human feelings, a remarkable transformation occurs. Tenderness and wisdom arise naturally and spontaneously. Where we once sought strength over others, now our strength becomes our own; where we once sought to defend ourselves, we laugh.Collection: Heart
Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole.Collection: Spring
The trouble is that you think you have time.Collection: Procrastination
When the stories of our life no longer bind us, we discover within them something greater. We discover that within the very limitations of form, of our maleness and femaleness, of our parenthood and our childhood, of gravity on the earth and the changing of the seasons, is the freedom and harmony we have sought for so long. Our individual life is an expression of the whole mystery, and in it we can rest in the center of the movement, the center of all worlds.Collection: Expression
It is true that the heart has its seasons, just as a flower opens to the sunlight and closes to the night. We need to be respectful of those rhythms. But we can't close down for long. It is our true nature to have an open heart.Collection: Flower
Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.Collection: Inspirational
Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.Collection: Philosophy
We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.Collection: Buddhism
Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.Collection: Simple
In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart.Collection: Heart
Forgiveness sees wisely. It willingly acknowledges what is unjust, harmful, and wrong. It bravely recognizes sufferings of the past, and understands the conditions that brought them about.Forgiveness honors the heart's greatest dignity. Whenever we are lost, it brings us back to the ground of love.Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.Collection: Heart
The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom.Collection: Spiritual
Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?Collection: Why Not
Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.Collection: Two
Love is based on our capacity to trust in a reality beyond fear, to trust a timeless truth bigger than all our difficulties.Collection: Wisdom
Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.Collection: Letting Go
The task is not to perfect yourself, it's to perfect your love.Collection: Perfect
In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.Collection: Letting Go
We can struggle with what is. We can judge and blame others or ourselves. Or we can accept what cannot be changed. Peace comes from an honorable and open heart accepting what is true. Do we want to remain stuck? Or to release the fearful sense of self and rest kindly where we are?Collection: Struggle
Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched.Collection: Love
Spiritual life doesn't make you a good person; you ARE a good person, you are a holy being when you are born. What spiritual life does is remind us that this is who we really are.Collection: Spiritual