Quotes from Jack Kornfield

the Dalai Lama suggests, "With worry and anxiety, repeatedly cultivate the following thought. 'If the problem can be remedied then there is no need to worry about it. And if there is no solution, there is no point in being worried, because nothing can be done about it anyway.' Remind yourself of these facts repeatedly.

Though one may conquer a thousand times a thousand men in battle, he who conquers himself is the greatest warrior.

To protect the separate self, we push certain things away, while to bolster it we hold on to other things and identify with them. A

Even trying too hard to be good, we can lose our center. ~ To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. Thomas Merton

In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Some

Trying to hold onto "how it was" will only create suffering and disappointment, because life is a river and everything changes.

The truth is that things change whether we want them to or not. Becoming attached to things as they are or pushing things away that we do not like does not stop them from changing. It only leads to further suffering.

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.

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 live out

never hurts to think too highly of a person; often they become ennobled and act better because of it.

Meditation takes discipline, just like learning how to play piano. If you want to learn how to play the piano, it takes more than a few minutes a day, once a while, here and there. If you really want to learn any important skill, whether it is playing piano or meditation, it grows with perseverance, patience, and systematic training.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love. With

If this day in the lifetime of a hundred years is lost, will you ever touch it with your hands again? The

We note feelings and find that they last for only a few seconds. We pay attention to thoughts and find that they are ephemeral, that they come and go, uninvited, like clouds.

Accumulated knots in the fabric of our body, previously undetected, begin to reveal themselves as we open.

The place where we can most directly open to the mystery of life is in what we don't do well, in the places of our struggles and vulnerability. These places always require surrender and letting go: When we let ourselves become vulnerable, new things can be born in us. In risking the unknown we gain a sense of life itself. And most remarkably, that which we have sought is often just here, buried under the problem and the weakness itself.

You will begin to see desire's impermanent nature, and you will also realize that you do not have to act on every thought or desire. You will learn that you can choose from the many possibilities of how to respond to desire when it arises, and you can discover a new kind of freedom, where you do not have to follow your desires, but can choose to behave in new ways in response to your desires.

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.

Right before anger arises, there is often a sense of hurt or fear or loss. When you can feel that, you can notice how little compassion or kindness you have for yourself and others. When we feel fear or when we feel pain or when we feel hurt, our response is often anger, but what is most healing is to acknowledge the anger and to notice what causes it, and to hold that in our attention.

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.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.

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.

The Joy of Being Alive Now and then it's good to pause in your pursuit of happiness, and just be happy. —GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE