Jack Kornfield Quotes - Page 9

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

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

Built on the foundation of concentration is the third aspect of the Buddha’s path of awakening: clarity of vision and the development of wisdom.

It is not enough to know that love and forgiveness are possible. We have to find ways to bring them to life.

In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion.

Every individual in the world has a unique contribution.

When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.

Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.

To let go in the deepest recesses of the heart, to release all struggle and wanting, leads us to that knowing which is timeless.

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.

An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past.

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.

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.

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.

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 life out.

True love is not for the faint-hearted.

Each moment of every day is new and then it vanishes. Where is that day? Where is that moment?

Some other people think that awakened consciousness is really about fullness or presence, being completely present for every moment, but these experiences are only one of the dimensions of awakened consciousness. Understanding these different dimensions as facets of awakening can help with the confusion surrounding the different spiritual paths. They're not leading to different places, but rather reflect the luminous and liberated aspects of consciousness itself. These qualities are not far away; in fact, they are right here.

Whenever we forgive, in small ways at home, or in great ways between nations, we free ourselves from the past.

Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.

Great pain, when it is honored from the heart, opens into great understanding.

With mindfulness, we are learning to observe in a new way, with balance and a powerful disidentification.

As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out. But if you say, 'This is what I am, it is a fact that I am going to investigate and understand,' then you can go beyond.

Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears.

Of course, you play the game of life because you got to be incarnated.