Jack Kornfield's Blog

Compassion and love are immensely important in our world. They’re about understanding, connection, and genuine happiness. When we show compassion, we open our hearts to others’ struggles and joys, and we really get each other. Love goes beyond boundaries, bringing us together and reminding us that we’re all connected. It’s like a ripple effect of kindness and understanding that can totally change our world, bringing healing and unity.

In this podcast, I join Prince Ea in the sauna for an insightful session about how the power of compassion and love can help us heal ourselves and others, how to stay awake in a world that will make you fall asleep, the practice of intention, and so much more.

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“True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” – Thomas Merton

The Buddhist tradition tells us that when their energies are strong, there are specific antidotes for the Five Hindrances. For desire, there is the antidote of reflecting on impermanence and on death. For anger, there is the antidote of loving-kindness, and forgiveness. For sleepiness, the antidote is to arouse energy through changing posture, or visualization and faith. For restlessness the antidote is to bring calm or concentration through inner techniques of steadying and relaxing. And for doubt the antidote is faith or inspiration through reading or speaking with someone wise or finding some way to inspire oneself.

If you do not have the training and skills to help you work with the hindrances, they can seem overwhelming and too difficult and you may want to give up on your spiritual practice. This is why you need a teacher and systematic training to begin to work with your mind: your mind and the forces you encounter there can be very confusing.

Buddhist teachings point to the basic roots of human suffering as “greed, hatred, and delusion.” These are what get us into trouble. The hindrances grow from these roots. We may not be worried by this, “Oh, just desire and aversion, our dislikes and ignorance, and a little bit of unclarity of mind. We can work with this. That is not too bad.” But after we have sat for a while, we discover that greed means confronting attachment in the deepest sense, that our desire is a powerful and primal kind of force, and that hatred means discovering a rage within us like Attila the Hun and Hitler. All of these are found in each person’s mind. Greed is the deepest kind of hunger that drives the world. Delusion includes the darkest kind of confusion and ignorance.

These states are powerful. They are the forces that make war in the world. They are the forces that create poverty and starvation in one country and abundance in another. They are the forces that cause the whole cycling of what is called the samsaric repetition of birth and death to take place. And we will encounter them when we practice living in the present moment with steady, concentrated attention.

This is not easy. At times it seems overwhelming. Yet here is where we learn. Thomas Merton said, “True prayer and love are learned in that hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” In facing the most difficult of your hindrances honorably, if you let yourself sit with them, there will come a real opening of the heart. An opening of the heart, body, and mind takes place, because we finally stop running away from our boredom or our fear or our anger or our pain.

This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘

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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.

“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 heartsAjahn Jumnian, motivation for practice, spiritual thirst, and working with addictionBringing awareness to the truth of emptiness and nature of joy and sorrowReincarnation and seeing everyone in the world as your mothers, fathers, and childrenFinding that what we really want is simple heart connectionEmptiness, longing, and feeding the hungry heartStillness and living from our fundamental nature of love and caringThe difficulties in life as part of the spiritual pathSeeing 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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This is a conversation between Open AI CEO Sam Altman, along with wisdom teacher, Jack Kornfield, moderated by Soren Gordhamer. Wisdom 2.0 addresses the great challenge of our age: to not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our own well-being, effective in our work, and useful to the world. The conversation discusses both opportunities and challenges of AI, and the need for ethics and values as it develops.

From Wisdom 2.0 – Together Conference – San Francisco – April 2023

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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 storiesThe courage and mystery of the heartThe law of karma and the power of intentionThe compelling nature of spiritual practiceBuddha’s past life as a lion living on an island with an elephant friendDiscovering what is love, and what is goodness in the heartLearning 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

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“How can you sit in love and live in love rather than in fear? The first step is to love your fear. There’s a way in which you actually have to bow to the fear and say, ‘I know you. You too are part of this humanity.'” – Jack Kornfield

To work with Buddhism’s Five Hindrances—desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness, and doubt—we must actually study them, observing and allowing them to be incorporated into our meditation practice. When desire arises, we begin to examine ‘desiring mind’ with mindfulness. We acknowledge it, “Desire, desire,” and feel its quality. To look at desire is to experience the part of ourselves that is never content, that always says, “If only I had some else, something different than this, that would make me happy. If only I had some other relationship, some other job, some more comfortable cushion, less noise, cooler temperature, warmer temperature, another meditation shawl, a little more sleep last night, then I could sit well.”

The mindful way of working with desire is not to condemn it, but to turn attention to the state of desire, to experience it in the body and mind, and to name it gently, “Wanting, wanting.” In this way we learn to be fully aware of states like desire without being so caught up by them. Then we can choose which to follow. We find freedom with our attention. Desire is rampant in the modern world. Mindfulness brings real understanding.

The same approach of mindfulness is used when working with anger, aversion, or fear. We may have to acknowledge fear eighty times before it becomes familiar to us. But if we sit unmoving, and every time fear comes we note, “Fear, fear,” and let ourselves be mindful of the trembling and the coolness and the breath stopping and the stories and images, if we just stick with it, one day fear will arise and we will say, “Fear, fear, oh, I know you! You are very familiar!” Our whole relationship to the fear will have changed and we will see it as an impersonal state, like a program that comes on the radio for a while and passes away, and we will be freer and wiser in our relationship to it.

This may sound easy, to be present with a balanced and soft attention, but it is not always so. There were several therapists at one long retreat I taught who were schooled in the primal scream tradition. Their practice was one of release and catharsis, and in their work they set a period aside every morning to release and to scream. After doing sitting meditation for a few days they said, “This mindfulness is not working.” I asked, “Why not?” They replied, “It is building up inner energy and anger and we need a place to express it. Could we use the meditation hall at a certain hour of the day to scream and release? Otherwise it gets toxic when we hold it in.” I suggested that they go back and sit with it anyway, and I hoped it would not kill them. I asked them to sit and see what happens, since they were there to learn something new. They did. And after a few days they came back and said, “Amazing.” I said: “What was amazing?” They said: “It changed!” they became free in a new way. Anger, fear, desire – all of those states can be a source of wisdom when they are acknowledged and felt fully, because as we become present for them, we see how they arise according to certain conditions and they affect the body and mind in a certain way. If we are mindful and not caught up in them, we can observe them like a storm, they are experienced for a time and then they pass away.

This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘

The post Observing the Storm: Working with the Five Hinderances appeared first on Jack Kornfield.

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

“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 constancyBeing here now and living in mindfulness in the present momentBuddhism’s Three Characteristics of LifeAnicca: impermanenceAnatta: non-selfDukkha: stress/sufferingTrue happiness as a matter of the heartHow you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surfThe original truth of self and freedom

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“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.” – G.I. Gurdjieff

As we try to steady the mind, the most common difficulties that arise in practice are called by the Buddha the five hindrances. These five hindrances are familiar to all those who meditate.

The wisest approach to these hindrances is illustrated in the story about the spiritual teacher Gurdjieff:

There was an old man in Gurdjieff’s community who was difficult for everyone to live with. He was argumentative, obnoxious, noisy, and smelly, an all around troublemaker. After many months of conflict with the other community members, this old man gave up. He decided to leave and return to Paris. When Gurdjieff heard about this, he was upset. He went directly to Paris, found the man, and with great effort, convinced him to come back, but only by offering him a big monthly stipend. Everyone else paid to study with Gurdjieff, but this man was getting paid! When the other students saw him return and found out he was actually being paid for to be there, they became quite upset. When they complained to Gurdjieff, he explained: “This man is like yeast for bread. Without him here you would not really understand the meaning of patience, the meaning of loving-kindness or compassion. You would not learn how to deal with your own anger and irritation. So I bring him here. You pay me to teach and I pay him to assist.”

The practice of developing patience and compassion with the hindrances and blockages means allowing them to arise and observing them with awareness. We use them as an opportunity to learn directly about anger, fear, and desire. We can learn how to relate to them without being so identified, without resisting, without being caught up in them. This takes practice.

This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘

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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 practiceA trippy interstellar perspective flip through a simple intergalactic thought experimentLife—this capacity to be conscious and aware—as a process of expansion and contractionThe law of change, impermanence, as the “brown rice and vegetables” of spiritual practiceSpiritual practice as a way to find freedom and compassion within ourselvesLearning to live in the present of how it is, rather than how we wish it would be

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The present moment provides the gateway to enter into all the realms of consciousness that are beyond the everyday level. – Jack Kornfield

In spirituality, no matter what gate we enter or what form we practice, sooner or later obstacles arise. The first arise because when we stop our distractions and bring meditative attention to our inner experience, we will encounter the unfinished business we carry, the untended longings, love, fears and hurts. And as we get even quieter and more vulnerable, we will face the mystery of our own mortality, of death. In all of the great spiritual traditions attention is given to these problems and pitfalls in spiritual practice, for it is through these that the path often unfolds.

In the Christian mystical tradition one of the great texts is The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, in which he talks about the periods of loneliness, fear, and doubt that one goes through after the initial awakenings into the light. Evagrius, a fourth-century Christian monk who lived in the Egyptian desert with the Christian Desert Fathers wrote a text on the demons that come to people who go into the desert as hermits and undertake a meditation practice. These include the demons of pride, the demons of fear, the demons of lust, the noonday demon who is the demon of sleep, and so forth.

In Buddhist traditions there are descriptions of similar kinds of obstacles. In Zen, practitioners might experience makyo (“diabolic or disturbing phenomena”) during meditation. These are hallucinations involving vision, hearing, smell, or other senses. Though everyday life is often referred to as illusory or dreamlike in Zen, makyo are a kind of super-illusion, above and beyond ordinary illusion.

How does one begin to understand and work with the pitfalls and the difficulties? The basic Buddhist teachings on the obstacles one encounters in spiritual practice begins with how to approach the common hindrances such as physical pain and restlessness. Then the instructions move on to explore the more extreme, delightful, and terrifying kinds of visions, mental states, and difficulties that can arise for people in more intensive or advanced spiritual practice.

Buddhist meditation and other systematic disciplines, train awareness and concentration, which bring us into the present. This is the first task of the spiritual path, to focus and steady the fluctuating, frenetic mind. The present moment is the entry into spiritual realms, because the past is just memory, and the future is just imagination. The present moment provides the gateway to enter into all the realms of consciousness that are beyond the everyday level. To be here fully requires a steadying of the mind, a concentration, and attention. It is like that sign in a Las Vegas casino, “You must be present to win.” You have to be present to awaken.

This is an excerpt from ‘Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are‘

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