Top 100 Jack Kornfield Quotes
#1. Attachment is conditional, offers love only to certain people in certain ways; it is exclusive. Love, in the sense of metta, used by Buddha, is a universal, nondiscriminating feeling of caring and connectedness.
Jack Kornfield
#2. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched.
Jack Kornfield
#4. Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.
Jack Kornfield
#5. Working with these distractions, steadying the canoe, letting the waves pass by, and coming back again and again in a quiet and collected way, is at the heart of meditation. After
Jack Kornfield
#6. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#7. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#8. Equanimity arises when we accept the way things are.
Jack Kornfield
#9. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.
Jack Kornfield
#10. The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you're knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering?
Jack Kornfield
#11. In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.
Jack Kornfield
#13. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#14. Accumulated knots in the fabric of our body, previously undetected, begin to reveal themselves as we open.
Jack Kornfield
#15. Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.
Jack Kornfield
#16. Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.
Jack Kornfield
#17. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#18. The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind.
Jack Kornfield
#19. My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes - most of which never happened. Mark Twain
Jack Kornfield
#20. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#21. identify with everything so easily - with your body, your thoughts, your opinions, your roles - and so you suffer. I have released all identification.
Jack Kornfield
#22. As you acknowledge desire or wanting, you can begin to see that your mind acts a little like a child at Disneyland: I want that candy and I want to go on that ride and I want that stuffed toy.
Jack Kornfield
#23. Indifference is a misguided way of defending ourselves.
Jack Kornfield
#25. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#26. Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.
Jack Kornfield
#27. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#28. Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations, we free ourselves from the past.
Jack Kornfield
#29. most often the kinds of pains we encounter in meditative attention are not indications of physical problems. They are the painful, physical manifestations of our emotional, psychological, and spiritual holdings and contractions.
Jack Kornfield
#30. Mindfulness and fearless presence bring true protection. When we meet the world with recognition, acceptance, investigation, and non-identification, we discover that wherever we are, freedom is possible, just as the rain falls on and nurtures all things equally.
Jack Kornfield
#31. As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.
Jack Kornfield
#32. When repeated difficulties do arise, our first spiritual approach is to acknowledge what is present, naming, softly saying 'sadness, sadness', or 'remembering, remembering', or whatever.
Jack Kornfield
#33. In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Some
Jack Kornfield
#34. In truly listening to our most painful songs, we can learn the divine art of forgiveness.
Jack Kornfield
#35. The root of the problem is that everyone has to first discover the root of anger and hatred inside themselves before they can understand how it operates in the outside world.
Jack Kornfield
#36. O Nobly Born, now there is born in you exceeding compassion for all those living creatures who have forgotten their true nature. - Mahamudra text of Tibetan yogi Longchenpa
Jack Kornfield
#37. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy - material or spiritual.
Jack Kornfield
#38. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.
Jack Kornfield
#39. You need a community. They remind you when you forget, and you remind them when they forget.
Jack Kornfield
#40. We can bring a heart of understanding and compassion to a world that needs it so much.
Jack Kornfield
#41. When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.
Jack Kornfield
#42. Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.
Jack Kornfield
#44. We can easily become loyal to our suffering ... but it's not the end of the path.
Jack Kornfield
#45. With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.
Jack Kornfield
#46. Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.
Jack Kornfield
#47. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#48. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#49. The wholeness and freedom we seek is our true nature, who we really are.
Jack Kornfield
#50. 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?
Jack Kornfield
#51. We each have been betrayed. Let yourself picture and remember the many ways this is true. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past. Now sense that you can release this burden of pain by gradually extending forgiveness as your heart is ready.
Jack Kornfield
#52. Though outer events may be difficult, the key to our happiness is how our mind responds to them.
Jack Kornfield
#53. The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?
Jack Kornfield
#54. Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.
Jack Kornfield
#55. As Albert Camus wrote, "We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and others.
Jack Kornfield
#56. When attachment arises in the place of love, it sees the other as separate; it grasps and needs. Attachment is conditional; it seeks control and it fear loss. Ask your heart if attachment has replaced love. If we speak to our heart, it will always tell us the truth.
Jack Kornfield
#57. True love and prayer are learned in the hour when love becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.
Jack Kornfield
#58. There are no holy places and no holy people, only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.
Jack Kornfield
#59. Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.
Jack Kornfield
#60. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#61. When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves.
Jack Kornfield
#62. Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?
Jack Kornfield
#63. The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is to
release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the
clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our
spirit.
Jack Kornfield
#64. In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart.
Jack Kornfield
#65. We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life.
Jack Kornfield
#66. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#67. An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past.
Jack Kornfield
#68. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#69. It is our commitment to wholeness that matters, the willingness to unfold in every deep aspect of our being.
Jack Kornfield
#70. The society that denies its poverty and injustice has lost a part of its freedom as well. If we deny our dissatisfaction, our anger, our pain, our ambition, we will suffer. If we deny our values, our beliefs, our longings, or our goodness, we will suffer.
Jack Kornfield
#71. Notice what's comfortable and what's uncomfortable.
Jack Kornfield
#72. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#73. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#74. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#75. Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears.
Jack Kornfield
#76. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#78. And as to me, I know of nothing else but miracles. WALT WHITMAN
Jack Kornfield
#79. Our belief in a limited and impoverished identity is such a strong habit that without it we are afraid we wouldn't know how to be.
Jack Kornfield
#80. Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart
Jack Kornfield
#81. We as human beings have the amazing capacity to be reborn at breakfast everyday and say, "This is a new day."
Jack Kornfield
#82. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#83. The Buddhist approach to this collective suffering is to turn toward it. We understand that genuine happiness and meaning will come through tending to suffering. We overcome out own despair bby helping other to overcome theirs.
Jack Kornfield
#84. The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.
Jack Kornfield
#85. The task is not to perfect yourself, it's to perfect your love.
Jack Kornfield
#86. No matter how difficult the past, you can always begin again today,
Jack Kornfield
#87. There is a palpable relief when I teach the perspective of nobility, of training in compassion, of non-religious ways to transform suffering and nurture our sacred connection to life.
Jack Kornfield
#88. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#89. Train your mind the same way you'd train a puppy: Be patient, be consistent, and have some fun along the way.
Jack Kornfield
#90. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#91. We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.
Jack Kornfield
#92. If we gain something, it was there from the beginning. If we lose anything, it is hidden nearby.
Jack Kornfield
#93. To let go in the deepest recesses of the heart, to release all struggle and wanting, leads us to that knowing which is timeless.
Jack Kornfield
#94. A second quality of mature sirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance ...
Jack Kornfield
#95. To become mindful ... present ... is really the invitation to work with the joys and the sorrows of the world, and to do so with this gift, this capacity of loving awareness, of attention that actually can be present for the whole dance.
Jack Kornfield
#96. 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.
Jack Kornfield
#97. Weigh the true advantages of forgiveness and resentment to the heart. Then choose.
Jack Kornfield
#98. May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.
Jack Kornfield
#100. We need a warrior's heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities.
Jack Kornfield
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