Jack Kornfield Quotes - Page 7

To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.

When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. The ocean of life rises and falls within us - birth and death, joy and pain, it is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

Only a deep attention to the whole of our life can bring us the capacity to love well and live freely.

A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched. Wisdom is alive only as long as it is lived, understanding is liberating only as long as it is applied.

As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.

Every individual has a unique contribution.

To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

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.

You need a community. They remind you when you forget, and you remind them when they forget.

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.

We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything.

The best of modern therapy is much like a process of shared meditation, where therapist and client sit together, learning to pay close attention to those aspects and dimensions of the self that the client may be unable to touch on his or her own.

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.

The independence and rebelliousness of our adolescence offer us yet another quality essential to our practice; the insistence that we find out the truth for ourselves, accepting no one's word above our own experience.

In this world there are two great sources of strength. One rests with those who are not afraid to kill. The other rests with those who are not afraid to love.

You have to accept the way things are before you can move on.

What we seek is what we are.

It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life.

We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go.

Tending to ourselves, we tend the world. Tending the world, we tend ourselves.

The awakened heart and mind can be experienced as clarity itself, pure knowing.

As we step out of the way new things are born.

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.

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!