Heart Wisdom with Jack Kornfield

Plunging further into last week's topic, Jack offers vulnerable perspectives on how sexuality and relationships play into our life and practice.

"If one wants to understand karma, or one wants to understand virtue, ethics, or morality—which are equally important and profound in developing a spiritual life—the way to do it is very simple: it's beginning to know, observe, feel, and understand what's going on in our hearts as we act." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack vulnerably explores:

• Understanding karma, virtue, intention and action
• How so much of our sadhana and practice comes through our relationships
• Learning about ourselves and the universe through sex and relationship
• Sex and relationship as a form of opening and surrender, as well as commitment, offering, acceptance, growth, and healing
• Desire, grasping, reality, love, and the present moment
• Relationships as a place to find the foundations of mindfulness
• The nature of love as expression, growth, and unity

This episode from 1987 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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Exploring the relationship between spirituality and sexuality, Jack offers reflections and perspectives on ways to dance with the sexual energy in our lives.

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"In a way, sex is a mirror. How your sexuality goes in a particular day or week is pretty much a reflection of the rest of your heart, mind, spirit, and being. In that regard, it's just like meditation—you sit down, close your eyes, and you get to see what's there: frustration, anger, happiness, or love. Sexuality serves the same way, physically, but even more so emotionally." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack mindfully explores:

• The relationship between spirituality, sexuality, and our lives
• Why sexuality is such a major part of our culture
• Our underlying fear of true intimacy
• Suzuki Roshi's koan of "How do you realize Buddha while making love?"
• The Four Foundations of Mindfulness in relation to our sexuality
• Wounds, trauma, healing, and the body
• Using relationships in a skillful way to grow
• Tantra, breath, and going beyond ourselves

"If you look at our culture, television and mass media, sex is such a big part of it. Why is it such a big thing in our culture and our lives? Because, in part, it's a vehicle to go beyond ourselves." – Jack Kornfield

This Dharna talk from 1987 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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Directly following Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's death, Jack offers perspectives on the life and dharma of one of spirituality's most impactful and controversial figures.

"Lama Govinda said that of all the young tulkus, of all the young incarnate lamas to leave Tibet, there was none as bright as Trungpa Rinpoche—bright in the sense of his field of his being and his energy. Lama Govinda, even at a point when he wasn't very happy with the way Trungpa Rinpoche was behaving, said that he still had to admit there was no one who walked across the Himalayas and came out who had that light more than Trungpa." – Jack Kornfield 

In this episode, Jack dives into:

• A celebration of the life, teachings, and impact of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
• The Vimalakīrti Sutra, and how certain Bodhisattvas teach as householders so that their message can be best understood by the world
• How Jack being invited to teach alongside Ram Dass, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein on the faculty of Trungpa's Naropa University in Boulder, CO sparked their teaching careers in the West
• Lama Govinda's view on Trungpa's innate radiant brightness and his "lion's roar"
• The traditions, trainings, and spirit of Shambala through the metaphor of the rising sun
• Meeting our life and practice with an openness and fearlessness
• Buddhist personality types and their unique seeds of awakening
• Trungpa's discipline for practice, and his deep devotion for his teachers and dharma lineage
• Ping-ponging between Ram Dass's and Trungpa Rinpoche's dueling Bhakti and Buddhism sessions the opening summer at Naropa

"Trungpa Rinpoche gave himself as fully to the West as any Buddhist teacher that I know that has come. And in a more remarkable way, he absorbed our culture, our language, our customs, who we are, into himself and said, 'Alright, let's play! Let's take the seed of the Dharma and really make it sparkle and alive in the West.'" – Jack Kornfield

 This Dharma Talk on 4/01/1987 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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Rewiring our brains around difficulties, emptiness, fear, and longing, Jack highlights how we can connect our practice with our deepest love.

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"When you get afraid or things are difficult, fear is simply the signal that you're about to learn something new. When you feel afraid it's like the little light comes on that says, 'About to grow.'" – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack contemplates and explores:

• The times in our lives where we feel truly connected to our hearts
• Ajahn Jumnian, motivation for practice, spiritual thirst, and working with addiction
• Bringing awareness to the truth of emptiness and nature of joy and sorrow
• Reincarnation and seeing everyone in the world as your mothers, fathers, and children
• Finding that what we really want is simple heart connection
• Emptiness, longing, and feeding the hungry heart
• Stillness and living from our fundamental nature of love and caring
• The difficulties in life as part of the spiritual path
• Seeing life as a continuous flow of mistakes to learn from, and fear as a signal that you are about to grow

"To study emptiness means to accept without resisting, to not push away or not distract ourselves from the emptiness that's within us that we half-feel and keep trying to fill up through all of our sense of longing and deficiency. Instead, it's to sit and say, 'Alright, let me feel that longing, that emptiness, that space, that deficiency. Let me feel how deep it is, how big it is, and not just try to fill it right away.' When we stop running and feel that, then something new comes alive in us." – Jack Kornfield

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Mindfully retelling ancient Buddhist Dharma stories, Jack reflects on what it means to live with a wise heart.

"For someone who wants to break free inside of the forces of ignorance, delusion, habit, and sleepwalking—you must really see that there's something greater than just getting through each day, and devote yourself in some fashion to it." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack opens us to:

• Modern retellings of ancient Buddhist Dharma stories
• The courage and mystery of the heart
• The law of karma and the power of intention
• The compelling nature of spiritual practice
• Buddha's past life as a lion living on an island with an elephant friend
• Discovering what is love, and what is goodness in the heart
• Learning to listen to where our actions comes from

"Find a place in yourself—in your being, your heart—that really wants to understand what life and death is about, that wants to live in a different way. Let that be the source of your inspiration, the source of your guidance." – Jack Kornfield

This Dharma Talk from 3/23/86 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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In this vintage Dharma Talk, Jack illuminates Buddhism's Three Characteristics of Life: stress, non-self, and impermanence.

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 "Somehow we believe our concepts, that we'll be here forever, that our life is really going to go on and on. Or we believe our advertising, the idea from the culture that if you get 'this' you'll be able to hold onto it and it will make you happy. It's just not true. Happiness is a matter of the heart; not something we can grasp or hold." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack mindfully explores:

• Knowledge, love, patience, and a spirit of constancy
• Being here now and living in mindfulness in the present moment
• Buddhism's Three Characteristics of Life
• Anicca: impermanence
• Anatta: non-self
• Dukkha: stress/suffering
• True happiness as a matter of the heart
• How you can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf
• The original truth of self and freedom

This teaching is part of a 4-week long Yoga of Heartfulness online course featuring teachings from Ram Dass and friends. Learn more about this 10 hour course: Ram Dass' Yoga of Heartfulness

This flowing lecture from 4/18/1985 was originally published on DharmaSeed

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Jack returns with a cosmic Dharma Talk exploring expansion and contraction in relation to impermanence as the root of spiritual practice.

"The law of change is the brown rice and vegetables of spiritual practice, it's the root of our direct experience of life." – Jack Kornfield 

In this episode, Jack takes us on a cosmic journey through:

• The basic fundamentals of Dharma teachings on how to live wisely in our practice
• A trippy interstellar perspective flip through a simple intergalactic thought experiment
• Life—this capacity to be conscious and aware—as a process of expansion and contraction
• The law of change, impermanence, as the "brown rice and vegetables" of spiritual practice
• Spiritual practice as a way to find freedom and compassion within ourselves
• Learning to live in the present of how it is, rather than how we wish it would be

This Dharma Talk from Spirit Rock Meditation Center on 6/20/1994 was originally published on DharmaSeed.

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This week, Jack joins Michael Krasny for a conversation diving into mindfulness, loneliness, compassion, gratitude, suffering, meditation, and the Dharma.

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"With mindfulness you learn to live in the present. If you walk down the street and you're spending all your time thinking about that conversation you had and the tasks you have to do, you miss the people walking by, you miss the clouds after that rainstorm, the colors of the sunset—the lavender, red, and orange that's reflected in the windows and puddles—you miss your life. Mindfulness becomes liberating in that way." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack and Michael discuss:

• Ram Dass and the idea of "being here now" in regards to suffering, depression, and suicidal thoughts
• Overcoming loneliness, isolation, and grief by reaching out and connecting with others
• Wrapping ourselves in the infinitely compassionate cloak of of Quan Yin or Mother Mary
• How compassion and mindfulness practices regulate our body away from the 'fight, flight, freeze' response
• Vipassana meditation, the mindful loving witness, and bringing it back into the world
• Planting seeds with your conscious effort and peaceful heart, but not being attached to the outcome
• How mindfulness liberates us to be fully present for the beautiful nuances of our lives
• The difference between pain (inevitable) and suffering (optional)
• The various meanings of the word "Dharma," and it's relation to truth
• Making friends with our inner-critic and judging mind
• Consciousness, gratitude, and the Great Mystery

"We have the capacity to hold our sorrows and our measure of suffering with compassion rather than judgment, rather than fear, almost as if you could wrap yourself with the cloak of Quan Yin—the Goddess of Infinite Compassion—or Mother Mary, so that you know that you're not alone, and that we've done this." – Jack Kornfield 

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Uncovering how to live with a peaceful heart, Jack maps the inner landscapes of meditation, and shares how we can use listening to find The Way.

“A peaceful heart is not a withdrawal from life, but rather coming back into ourselves to remember the place that neither grasps nor judges and hates.” – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack mindfully explores:

• What it means to live with a peaceful heart
• Moving beyond the grasping of attachment and aversion
• Living in the world from a place of wisdom
• The inner landscapes of meditation
• Greed, hatred, delusion, and revenge
• Interdependence, connection, and Bodhicitta
• Impermanence and the wisdom of insecurity
• The Goddess of Peace and the Goddess of Justice
• Wise response and transmuting suffering
• Bodhisattvas and compassion
• Buddha and the boundless infinity of love
• Listening to embody The Way

This flowing Dharma Talk from Jack on 10/01/2001 was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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Jack returns for an illuminating Dharma Talk exploring the deep human longing for the wedding of body and spirit.

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"The invitation of spiritual life, of awareness or mindfulness—we could call it a sacred attention—is not to hurry up, fix, or make this human realm perfect or better. Nor is it to ignore it, but rather to awaken to what is each day as we meet it in our bodies, in our hearts, in our minds, in our family, in our community on this earth – to see it how it is, and to illuminate it with the heart, to illuminate it with our understanding and compassion, to find the basket of spirit that is here, and let that spirit shine in this human realm." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack dives into:

- An old African wisdom story of a shepherd, his cattle, a dark forest, a lover, and a magic basket

- Life, death, void, silence, and opening to the great mystery

- Perception, consciousness, and Buddha's wisdom that mind is the principle element of creation

- Listening, truth, timelessness, and The One Who Knows

- The balance and connection between spirit and form

- Rumi and the deep human longing to wed body and spirit

- Buddha and the teachings of compassion

- Breath, wholeness, and the eternal present

- Moving past the fear body by breaking through the myth of seperation

This Dharma Talk from Spirit Rock Meditation Center on 09/11/2000 was originally published on DharmaSeed.org

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