Quotes from Jack Kornfield

Be a lamp unto yourself, make of yourself a light' were the last words of the Buddha. no teacher or outside authority can give us the truth or take it away. in the end, we will find that our heart holds the simple wisdom and unshakable compassion that we have sought all along.

If you hold on to any expectation, you miss the wisdom. It is impermanent. Be the One Who Knows, the witness to it all. This is how trust grows." And it is how love grows as well. Trust and love are the keys.

To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.

Then one day you will be sitting and fear will arise, and you will feel it and recognize it and think, "Oh, this is fear, I recognize you. Welcome back." Then it is as if the fear becomes one of your friends.

psychology—that life is an array of constantly changing sensations, some of them pleasant, some of them unpleasant, and some of them neutral. Our unconscious response is to grasp after the pleasant and to try to resist the unpleasant, so that we are always at war with the basic transience of our experience. We cannot really come to rest with things as they arise and depart.

To start, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, "Stay." Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. "Stay." And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over, and pees in the corner or makes some other mess.

The four radiant abodes are loving-kindness, compassion, joy and peace.These abodes are treasured because they are exquisitely simple, the universal expression of an open heart. When our peaceful heart meets other beings it fills with love. When love meets happiness, it becomes joy.

In a world of tension and breakdown it is necessary for there to be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding anguish and running away from problems, but by facing them in their naked reality and in their ordinariness. —Thomas Merton

If you put a spoonful of salt in a cup of water it taste 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.

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

Meditation is a practice that can teach us to enter each moment with wisdom, lightness, and a sense of humor. It is an art of opening and letting go, rather than accumulation or struggle. Then, even within our frustrations and difficulties, a remarkable inner sense of support and perspective can grow.

You ask, can changing your inner life make a difference in the troubles of the world? Nothing else can! No amount of technology, computers, internet, artificial intelligence, biotech, nanotechnology, or space technology is going to stop continuing racism, warfare, environmental destruction, and tribalism. These all have their source in the human heart.

Love being alive. Love your creative, distracted, overworked mind. Love your anxiety and depression and longing and wisdom. Love your food, celebrate your survival, open your senses to the mysterious communion of life right where you are.

The problem is, you think you have time.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

Before his death the Buddha asked his disciples to follow the Dharma, not any teacher or tradition. He put no one over the community of monks and nuns. The Dharma was to guide them. So for us, there is no blind belief or blind faith in Buddhism. We simply believe enough in the possibility of liberation and we are wise enough to see the suffering in our existence to have the faith to begin practice.

Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels.

The way I treat my body is not disconnected from the way I treat my family or the commitment I have to peace on our earth.

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.

In the end, forgiveness simply means never putting another person out of our heart.

Weigh the true advantages of forgiveness and resentment to the heart. Then choose.

Forgiveness is primarily for our own sake, so that we no longer carry the burden of resentment. But to forgive does not mean we will allow injustice again.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

Know that the freedom you seek can be found right here where you are.