Jack Kornfield Quotes
The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.
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.
We do not have to improve ourselves; we just have to let go of what blocks our heart.
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.
Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.
In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go
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.
To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.
The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.
We as human beings have the amazing capacity to be reborn at breakfast everyday and say, “This is a new day.”
Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.
We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.
Live in joy, luminosity, and peace even among the troubles of the world. Remember who you are.
To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.
Letting go does not mean not caring about things. It means caring about them in a flexible and wise way.
The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.
Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.
We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open.
We can bring a heart of understanding and compassion to a world that needs it so much.
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.
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.
Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.
May I be given the appropriate difficulties so that my heart can truly open with compassion. Imagine asking for that.
When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves.
There are no holy places and no holy people, only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.
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.
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.
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.
The Sufis have a saying: "Praise Allah, and tie your camel to a post." This brings together both parts of practice: pray, yes, but also make sure that you do what is necessary in the world.
Without being aware of it, you take many things as being your identity: your body, your race, your beliefs, your thoughts.
Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.
Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.
Within each of us there is a silence as vast as the universe. We long for it. We can return to it.
When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.
Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?
There is beauty to be found in the changing of the earth’s seasons, and an inner grace in honouring the cycles of life.
Compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things.
The work of your heart, the work of taking time, to listen, to help, is also your gift to the whole of the world
