Jack Kornfield – Heart Wisdom – Ep. 91 – Living with a Peaceful Heart

the game is to be where you are be it honestly and as consciously as you know how watch the latest ramdas documentary film becoming nobody on gaya.com of course there was fear in losing that familiar identity but there was always also wonder the guy.com library supports you with transformational content see it for yourself and go to guy.com be here now and check out the be here now playlist curated just for you visit gaia.com be here now and start your free trial today [Music] welcome to the jack cornfield heart wisdom hour we are delighted to share with you jack's innate common sense wisdom and his clear open heart if you are interested in supporting jack's podcast go to be here now network dot com slash jack let's do a little one syllable chant just to kind of recollect the energy after the social time and that the one syllable chant is a seed syllable in sanskrit that's considered the syllable that represents great wisdom um because it's the syllable seed syllable ah it's the sound of opening or letting go um receiving um so let's just sing off for a little bit and then sit for half a minute or so in the stillness afterward and add harmony [Music] ah [Music] [Music] well that kind of did it didn't it that was nice and i'm not sure which i like better or the harmony which gets very sweet or the silence afterward so here you've come monday night into this beautiful temple and i'd like to speak about the quality of equanimity i've just come back from travels in asia japan and in dharmsala india being part of the mind life science meetings with the dalai lama and various scientists and social scientists from around the world this one focused on education and social and emotional learning and the dalai lama through the days we were together for a good part of a week kept his focus on all right we have good science about these things now how do we change the world how do we change the world how do we make the world better for our children for adults for people who are vulnerable over and over again what's best for the world how do we use this and then when we had a chance to talk together a little bit privately a little bit of dharma conversation he said now when you teach he said you must emphasize cessation and then he went on to explain what he meant by that in the buddhist teachings of the four basic truths or noble truths they're suffering and it's causes and then there's an end to it basically then he went on to say you must teach people that there's freedom and goodness that's possible for each of them and for this world that that's what's possible when greed hatred and delusion are released and given up it says in the buddhist text we no longer cause sorrow for ourselves and others this is nirvana or zen master suzuki roshi who said when you realize the fact that everything changes does you know when you realize the fact that everything changes and find yours find your composure in the midst of it this is the gateway to nirvana or to well-being or to peace so this is what the dalai lama was kind of urging saying remind people what's possible how it is possible to live and this is also the last of the series of ten talks on the qualities of the awakened heart equanimity or peace and they're the qualities of the awakened heart because they're not found someplace else you don't have to go to the himalayas or you know to kyoto and japan they're the nature of the heart and mind itself luminous is this mind it says in the buddhist teachings but it gets confused by the various thoughts and feelings that color it but when we see them when we see them arise it's sort of like the leaves fluttering on a tree when the wind comes up we think that everything's moving but actually the tree is still there and the leaves flutter and then they quiet down again and our fundamental state is peaceful it just gets bothered by stuff you know life and the 24-hour news cycle and the people in your family you know and money problems and work and all of those things and yet underneath it all there is a there's a substrate of stillness and an understanding and a sense that you have when i ask that question you know how would it be to live with a peaceful heart most people in the room i couldn't see you all but i could see some of your thoughts were like yeah pretty good idea actually it would help and so what you also could see in that brief meditation on equanimity is that we can be reminded we can invite we can turn towards certain qualities whether it's compassion or loving kindness you know or respect for one another understanding and when we turn toward them the mind is malleable it's pliampliant and when we turn our consciousness or attention in a particular direction that's what flowers as technolon says when you water certain seeds then they blossom and if you water the seeds of peace guess what they grow or you feel them come alive and if you water the seeds of resentment or disappointment or something those two will grow unfortunately you've noticed that so dharma which is a very complex or multi-meaning word in sanskrit means the teachings it means the truth or the law it means one's particular destiny it has all these meanings but here in the temple the dharma teachings are the teachings of the way things are the kind of fundamental universal truth to help us live wisely and equanimity grows when we have a vast perspective it's in certain ways the culmination of the practices of a spiritual life and uh zen master ryokan the beloved most beloved poet of japan writes if someone asks me what is the mark of enlightenment or illusion i cannot say wealth and honor are nothing but dust as evening falls i sit in my hermitage and stretch out both feet in answer there's a kind of ease and relaxation wealth and honor these things come and go but if you want to know about a peaceful heart stretch out your feet notice the changing of the light we've gone from that beautiful green landscape through the um twilight and now into spring evening darkness and find in yourself a way to rest in the midst of all things now it's also true well here's another early buddhist text some children were playing beside a river they made castles of sand each child defended their castle and said this one is mine and they kept them separate and wouldn't let any mistakes about whose was whose and when they were finished sometimes they visited but sometimes they fought one owner of one castle got angry and pulled the other child's hair and you spoiled my castle you know and they all kind of ganged up on one child and then he found other friends and we know how human beings are it says in here but then evening came it was getting dark and they all thought it was time to go home their mothers were calling them and no one cared what became of their castle one child stamped on his the waves washed over another and they turned away and they all went back home so that is um an ancient buddhist text and it's somehow written to remind us of something if you hadn't noticed and that is that the things that make up our life and that matter and that we can care about they don't last and you have many incarnations i think about my early childhood in my middle school and time that i lived as a monk and you know when i first got married and um all those things are gone and the houses i lived in are gone some of them were torn down i could go back they don't even exist anymore that whole thing just disappeared and then at some point i'll be gone right and people who knew me will remember me oh yes a little sadness right i'll miss them and then they'll be gone and then okay boop it's gone it's what happens it's the sandcastle thing you know it's really really true so then how do we live what's wise there are the worldly winds there's praise and blame and gain and loss and fame and disrepute and pleasure and pain and i guess it says in ecclesiastes there's a time for planting and a time for sowing and reaping and birth and death and all there's a time for every season and it keeps changing doesn't it i mean let's get real about it praise and blame so what do we do you know the taoist sage says if a person is crossing the river and a boat collides with their skiff they will start shouting and become angry and all because there's somebody in the other boat but if an empty boat came down the river and collided with their skiff they would not be shouting and they would not be angry said if you empty your boat as you cross the river over the world if you don't kind of hold on to things if you empty your boat then no one will oppose you and no one will seek to harm you he's really talking about an inner state of a peaceful heart of not not creating conflict with the way things are and this is going to be a tough talk a little bit only because there are a lot of things in the world that need attention and need to be changed and there's no way in which what i'm saying denies that or wouldn't celebrate and doesn't celebrate our need to do that but how do we do it and where do we come from and how do we actually live in this changing world and if you listen and pay attention there is an innate capacity that you have to breathe to relax to open to let go to see all the views that your mind has even as you did that equanimity meditation you know the mind has no pride and it came up with all kinds of other things for you to be doing right and it didn't want to let go of your worries and your tragedies and your longings and all of that it's yeah but remember me don't be get so peaceful yet i've got things to tell you you know and people to be opposed to and blame and love and seduce and whatever all the things that it said but you also can feel that there's a capacity that's bigger than just the storytelling mind to open and let go and amidst all of that to come to a place of rest or peace or trust amidst the changing seasons and then there comes a sense of grace not because everything you know will go the way you want it to you know there's still warfare and racism and environmental destruction and things that we have to tend to but there's also a bigger story as dr martin luther king said you know the ark of the moral universe may be long but it bends toward justice and we we can also sense the truth of that and i remember when i was working in the cambodian refugee camps many years ago um here was the dry barren hot you know it was the hot season flat place with a big pit well at one end that people would walk into their buckets and everybody had a little tiny hut that was made of bamboo 50 or 100 000 people in each camp um made of woven bamboo maybe six feet wide and eight feet long with a little door and some cloth hung over the door and the path coming in and next to the door there was a little plot of land maybe one square yard one square meter that was next to the door path and then the next hudson little path between them and after [Music] a month or two almost everybody in their huts had planted a garden they'd lost everything people in their families had been killed their villages burned there they were they had nothing and there was a little squash plant and a bean plant and pepper plant and stuff and they would go every day and stand in the hot sun in these long lines and get the water and tend their plants and it was a kind of extraordinary thing to watch but that there's something in life itself that will renew itself it wants to it's it's nature and it's possible to begin to trust in that way so equanimity doesn't mean indifference that's called the near enemy that equanimity it masquerades as it but an indifference is fear or withdrawal you know insulation i don't want life to touch me equanimity is the willingness to be in life but to be spacious and open to have a vast perspective and say yes here i am showing up caring loving but i'm not i'm not in control of this game and i hope you've noticed that and so there's less like juan suz there's less person in the boat me mine the way it should be you know and it's not that there won't be self-consciousness and you know the small sense of self and the body of fear and all those things that arise as part of our nature but it's almost like oh yeah there's that that's the personality that's okay um but it's not the real story and you discover through your meditation practice those of you who have a meditation practice or your your inner spiritual life the capacity of your heart to move with all things to embrace the mystery that the changing mystery of life and it is a mystery nobody knows and who are you really how did you get here how did all the stars and planets i mean come on nobody has the answer to that it says in one of the buddhist texts thus shall ye think of this fleeting world a star at dawn a flash of lightning in a summer cloud an echo a rainbow a phantom a dream it appears and it's mysterious that it appears and then it's gone you remember y2k right what happened to it you know it's back with the pharaohs and it's back with um i don't know um yeah it's back with um i was i love lucy and you know in the middle ages it goes back into wherever it came from to emptiness and another day says all right here we're gonna have another day um but things appear and then they disappear and we know intuitively that there is a way to find balance my teacher ajahn chah said in almost all his teachings he didn't really teach anybody anything he just said if they were falling off of the on the the road on one side he said go that way go back to the middle if they were falling off the left-hand side he said go back that way he said that's all i do people get attached here they get afraid they say come back be here in the present and as you are be here with a with a loving awareness of this life because it's all you have this is it and this just as you know how to ride a bike you know you learn it and when you learn it you know that balance there's a kind of inner learning of balance and then gradually you learn to trust you know you don't need your bike just to be on a really flat simple place you can take it places and then when difficulty comes you have this capacity this from zen master suzuki roshi he says suppose your children are suffering from a hopeless disease you don't know what to do you can't lie in bed normally the most comfortable place for you would be a warm comfortable bed but now because of your mental agony you cannot rest you may walk up and down pace in and out but this doesn't help actually the best way to relieve your mental suffering is to sit in meditation even in such a confused state of mind and with a bad posture if you have no experience of sitting in this kind of difficult situation you're not yet a real meditation student for no other activity can appease your suffering in continuous practice under a succession of agreeable and disagreeable situations you will realize the marrow of meditation and acquire its true strength so it's not saying that you won't have gain and loss and pleasure and pain and birth and death you will have it anybody not have it you can have your fifteen dollars back right it's just how it is but we can sit with a kind of loving awareness a sacred attention that says this is life this is life with its unbearable beauty and its ocean of tears that make up our human incarnation so there's suzuki roshi i think about rosa parks because i love reading about her you know and she'd actually planned that for a while and i remember seeing a big picture of her this kind of luminous being now she knew how to sit she said i just knew i had to sit there and not get up she could come here we want her on our faculty right i knew i just had to stay on the bus you know and there's something in that of the courage of heart that comes in a peaceful heart to say yes i'm peaceful and yes i'm here i really know what it means to be alive and present so part of it is you know the the great gift of having a bigger perspective that the mark of the moral universe is long it bends toward justice that life will renew itself and even when terrible things happen the little plants in the gardens in the refugee camp something will renew itself it's not the end of the story and the other is a kind of common humanity the fact is that we all suffer as well as have beautiful delicious wonderful things in our life but everybody also experiences suffering and loss and aging and sickness and things like that don't they all right don't you don't we moa oc right and we also survive and we have a kind of courage and ability um that we share as human beings to go through what's beautiful and what's difficult and that's our journey and it's not a mistake you know and you're not bad because you suffer you didn't do something wrong just you know you took the ticket for the human incarnation ride at disneyland and it says beautiful joy and great suffering you want one well okay you got a body here you are you know that's how it works so you start to see the commonality of this and the transformation of our life then comes from our ability to be present for it as it is which is what meditation teaches us that suzuki roshi's phrase the marrow of meditation because it's not about some particular state it's the capacity to be present for life with loving awareness for what it is this from william butler yates who says we can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us so that they may see their own images and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet it's a kind of amazing passage yates was an extraordinary poet saying if we can be present and you know it when people are really in the midst of suffering or when you have the privilege of being with somebody who's dying you know you can't fix that one if they're dying you can't change it but if you can be present for it the the stillness and the presence you have allows what needs to happen the the last words that haven't been spoken the feelings that need to be felt in that circumstance or in other ones because you're actually there for it you're not trying to fix it or change it you're actually present and that's part of the gift of equanimity it untangles it cleanses it purifies it brings a certain balance and even in a moment it can change everything i mean there you are should it happen that you're in an argument with your lover or your spouse or your partner or whoever it happens to be if you have one and if you don't you'll find someone else to argue with it's okay right and then there's a little voice in the back that says we're really in it aren't we you know you know that voice god we really got into it this time and that little voice says hmm pretty interesting we're in the drama now we're really in it you know and even that little voice that moment it's like a pause that says well this is part of our human life but it's not all of who we are it's just you know part of what we do we also get in conflict sometimes and then there's a breath that comes you take a bigger breath and you say yeah are you okay in this here we are having conflict is it all right i mean conflict isn't a bad thing you know we have different desires and needs and things it depends how we handle it unfortunately how do we say this you know in kindergarten and there was that beautiful little five-year-old zoe who came up many of you saw her in her sparkly pink dress with the flowers on it she'd come for a baby blessing five years ago and now i get to see her dancing around in kindergarten which so i asked her if she was in school she said yes i am in kindergarten she really wanted me to know the particulars um if kids start hitting each other with blocks which they do in preschool and kindergarten the teacher will say something very simple like use your words right couldn't we do that on a national level an international level i mean as a species it's not that complicated so there's something in us that knows that it's possible to step back and say well we're really caught in it and that we don't have to be so caught in it in some moment we can say oh yes and we can begin to trust that trust not so much your plans and ideals and goals and things to figure out because you know um and i love the work of byron katie some of you may know her she invites people to question their thoughts whatever view or story you have first of all there's another story about it you know it's one perspective but she'll say what if that thought weren't true how would it be for you you know how's it working for you to keep attached to that thought or even more what if it's opposite were true i think how could ever that be you know but we have ideas about things and yet they may turn out somewhat differently than we imagined so holding them lightly is actually um a really good thing and then they say today's the satori is tomorrow's mistake right you have a great revelation but then how about the next day and equanimity is an invitation somehow again to a place of trust of something much larger there's a passage that i love um that i think also is important in kind of our national and cultural conversation and this comes from mothering magazine from peggy o'mara who is the editor and she writes we have a cultural bias against dependency against any emotion or behavior that indicates weakness this is tragically evident and the way we push our children we establish standards more important than their inner experiences when we wean our children rather than trusting they'll wean themselves when we insist that they sit at the table and finish their meals rather than trusting they will eat well if healthful food is provided when we toilet train them at an early age rather than trusting they will learn to use the toilet and not be wearing diapers in high school it is the nature of the child to be dependent and it is the nature of dependence to be outgrown dependence insecurity and weakness are natural states for a child for all of us but just as we grow from crawling to walking babbling to talking puberty to sexuality from weakness to strength uncertain to mastery begrudging dependency because it's not independence is like begrudging winter because it's not yet sprained dependency blossoms into depend into independence in its own sweet time and that's a that's a that's a wisdom for child rearing but it's a deeper wisdom as well you know if we live in a cowboy culture i'm completely independent and you know i can take care of myself you're not you're vulnerable every time you drive down the street that other people stay on the right side and every time you go through a traffic light that people stop at the red and let you go through the green you know and you're vulnerable every time you use money that people will believe that that little piece of paper is actually worth something you know that's an agreement um and you're vulnerable as i say we sit here and breathe and relax and open this amazing thing our body breathes and the the breath we take was breathed by the other people in the room for sure you know and the deer in the hillside and i saw a badger here once it was really great and coyotes and mountain lions but it comes across the pacific and it dusted mauna loa and mauna kea and it dusted fukushima nuclear reactor it did you know we are in it together and so the whole idea that you're independent is a fiction you are a life expressing itself in a particular form and life apparently approves of you because you're still here right and all your ancestors who are survivors are kind of at your back rooting you on they say yep you can do it we did it we went to go through this and you can do this as well and when we stop even for a moment when we meditate when we take a walk in the hills when we quiet ourselves we can sense that there's a vast stillness that we long for amidst the clamor of the culture a huge silence which contains everything the turning of the stars and the seasons and birth and death and the joy and sorrow people around us the mystery of life it's not far away it's here in any minute in any moment and equanimity is a is an invitation in the yogic tradition it's the opening of the crown chakra where you sit and the crown chakra opens and you feel the turning of the seasons and the stars with each breath this is a another buddhist text where the buddha is speaking i consider the position of kings and rulers as that of dust motes in a sun beam i see the greatest treasures of gold and gems is but broken tiles i look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags i see the myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds and the great indian ocean as drops of mud that soil one's feet i perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusions of magicians and look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of dragons and the rise and fall of beliefs as traces left by the four seasons so it's poetic it's beautiful poetry traces left by the four seasons and the serpentine dance there's a stillness in you that is beckoning you that is saying yes you can live from this place and meditation and spiritual life really is a reminder of this that all these things are turning and civilizations the sumerian and the hittites and the you know ottoman empire remember the british empire when i was young that was a big empire but you know these economies you go or whatever the portuguese empire well right the chinese empires the empires the mayan and the aztec and the incan and so forth but who are we you know if we grasp and hold on then it's like rope burn right it's changing and you're trying to hold on to it um but with loving awareness which is what you are you really the witness of it all when you get quiet then you come back to rest in the silent mind which we could call loving awareness the awareness of this dance just as you can step out of a conflict and say god in that there's a place of stillness in us that's outside of time tiknot han who writes this body is not me i'm not limited to this body i'm life without boundaries i've never been born and i've never died since before time i've been free birth and death are only doors through which we pass sacred thresholds on our journey birth and death are a game of hide and seek so laugh with me hold my hand let us say goodbye to meet again soon we will meet today and again tomorrow in every moment for we are life meeting itself he's a pretty deep cat and he's pointing to a truth and a reality that who you are is spirit you're not this body i mean i hope not anyway kale and you know big macs or whatever it is that's just not who you are you know and you're not your feelings because they're always changing right and god knows you're not your thoughts i mean because they contradict one another as whitman says yeah i am large i contain multitudes but so what are you spirit was born into this body consciousness and it will leave in that mysterious moment of death you are awareness itself you are loving awareness that's having this human experience and to meditate isn't to have some particular okay now i've got it and i'm quiet and i've had some great insight those come but it's really to remember who you are this vastness and spaciousness and stillness [Music] and when you do there comes a possibility of a kind of vast perspective and freedom here's mahatma gandhi who says i believe in the unity of all things and therefore i believe that if one person falls the whole world falls to that extent and if one person gains the whole world is uplifted by that we each have our we each have our place to contribute and then he goes on and when i despair i remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won yes there have been murderers and tyrants and for a time they can seem invincible but in the end they always fall think of it always in the end they always fall think of it always and there's like those plants the squash and the beans in the little gardens in the refugee camp life wants to renew itself and we're asked to participate in this mystery not from a place of contraction and fear all that comes okay you can notice that with loving awareness but from a place of a a deeper care and a deeper trust so when i came back from being with my beloved trudy we were traveling together in in as i said in kyoto and then dharmsala i came back to do some teaching in washington dc for a big conference of 4 000 therapists which they need in dc very badly right now and the day after i did my keynote address and whatever was the day of march for our lives so i went out on pennsylvania avenue and you know as because it matters to me and i've been out demonstrating in all kinds of ways because they matter and one of the things that was really striking seemed like three-quarters of a million people out there extraordinary number and then big marches elsewhere and that was very moving was how civilized it felt how composed and gracious people seemed there were lots of little kids and certainly many many many young people and many generations and it was very diverse and people were all gracious with one another it was like the world you we want to live in and the cops were all smiling first of all they don't really want us all to have guns they have a certain perspective on that but also they were appreciating the civility of it and how you know and at the same time with that civility there was a passion it was very interesting because the young people who spoke and the you know and those who were on the big screens right in front of the capitol building and so forth i mean there was this wonderful um black gospel singer who did the times they are changing from bob dylan in a whole new way that i'd never heard was fabulous but then here's a poem by alison luderman an oakland poet one of my favorites she writes i see her on tv screaming into a microphone her head is shaved and she is beautiful and 17 and her high school was just shot up and she had to walk by friends lying in their own blood her teacher bleeding out and she's my daughter the one i never had and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter and she's her own woman in the fullness of her young fire calling on politicians who take money from the gun makers tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop speaking she doesn't apologize she keeps calling them out all of them all of us who didn't do enough to stop this thing and you can see the gray faces of those who've always held power contort utterly baffled to face this new breed of young woman not silky not compliant not caring if they call her a ten or a troll and she cries but she doesn't stop speaking truth into the microphone though her voice is raw and shaking and the sun is molten brass and i'm three thousand miles away thinking how neruda said the blood of the children ran through the streets without fuss only now she is they are raising a fuss shouting down the walls of jericho and it's not that we road weary elders have been given the all clear exactly but our shoulders do let down a little we breathe from a deeper place we say to each other well it looks like the baton may be passing to these next runners and they are fleet as thought and fiery as stars and we take another breath and say to each other the baton has been passed and we set off then running hard behind them and it's hard to read it without weeping and i love the end of it because it's not that they're doing it that we are behind them also and we have to be and we have to hold the space so that those who are young and full of that passion and fire also can feel supported by us so it's not separate so the equanimity doesn't mean that one with a peaceful heart can't act in the world but you can act in a very different way that civility of those three quarters of a million people still had a courage and a strength in it now the equanimity practice that we did which invited you to invoke or open to that quality of a peaceful heart to rest at ease amidst the turning of all things to be opened and balanced and peaceful had this little phrase at the end when you pictured another person that said your happiness and suffering depend on your own heart on your own thoughts and actions and not my wishes for you and this is a tough part of equanimity but it's taught as a practice as a balance for loving kindness and compassion practice because if you only do compassion loving kindness it can accidentally fall into kind of attachment i need a certain result or i want you to change or to be a certain way when you love someone or something you know and you want it to be a certain way you can get really attached you could call this also the response the ancient wise response to codependence in relationship because basically you can love people and care for them and support them but you can't love for them you can't change for them you can't let go for them and so there's something in the moment where you see this loved one and you wish them to have a peaceful heart and then you say i may you have a peaceful heart may be filled with love i care for you and your happiness and suffering depend on your heart your thoughts and actions and not my wishes for you and i remember teaching this practice i had the honor of leading a group um at alice walker's for about 10 years it was a group for women of color and they sort of adopted me somehow i felt very fortunate like that and um i was nervous when i taught the first time because i thought that they might consider it to be a kind of cold um buddhist detachment thing which it isn't um it's really an invitation to liberation but i taught it anyway i said so how was this and they were smiling and they said and it was a group that was quite accomplished women a professor at berkeley or someone who ran the hiv aids project somewhere or you know alice as a pulitzer prize-winning author and so forth they said in our community especially in the communities of people of color when we're accomplished in some way people want a lot from us come and you know help my nonprofit um write something for my book i need money for my nephew or niece who's in trouble we get this all the time and we do what we can but at some point we also need to be able to say your happiness and suffering are in your hands and in your heart we can love you we can do what we can but they depend on your own state of heart and mind your own thoughts and actions and not our wishes for you and it was actually quite liberating does that make sense to you so it's not meant as a uncaring it's meant as a disentanglement from the ideas we have for other people just in case you have those kind of ideas about other people you know and we all live through the same enormous change of circumstances of gain and loss and pleasure and pain and then you get that phone call surprise i think of this friend who is a hospice nurse took care of and then she got the call from the doctor saying you know your biopsy doesn't look good and she said it was so different taking care of all those other people but when i got the call wait a second it's it's moi as miss piggy would say you know it's different it's me such a surprise and she became of course you know scared in some ways but also tremendously tender oh yeah this is what it's like to go through this and of course we could complain the world is unjust and we need to work for justice and the world is you know still humanity well what did gandhi say when he's asked about western civilization it would be a good idea right something like that but i remember the poetry um in the book of job where job was complaining and he had a fair reason to complain all those things that happened to him but he then there's this voice out of the whirlwind which is really out of the the whirlwind of creativity of life itself where were you when i clothed the sky when i placed the suns in their orbits were you there when i laid the foundation of the earth when i set the morning stars to sing together in the sky when i set the sea with doors to hold it as it gushed forth out of the womb when i swaddled the earth in clouds do you know the seasons of the wild ass as she brings forth her young and the days the falcon learns to fly and it's really a poem about mystery that we don't know so much really there's something about creation itself that we are a part of but it's not meant to be just figured out in our heads about how it's supposed to be and instead it becomes possible to meet it and to care for it with a peaceful heart to live in that way and that's the real miracle yes stand up for justice you know yes plant seeds plant sequoias that you know take 2 000 years to grow yes um you know make a conscious build business and raise conscious children and beautiful children do all these things um but how do we do it we have a choice and i remember the story of this couple who were unable to conceive and decided to adopt a child and then they decided well um they would go where there were children that were either orphaned or really needed parents so they went in this case they went to india and they found this young very little child and adopted him and brought him back and after a year or two discovered that he had cerebral palsy and also that he was profoundly deaf and so they started to take care of him physically the cerebral palsy and they started to teach him sign language as this person in front is doing so beautifully and then they got really worried about their little boy about how lonely he would be with cerebral palsy and being deaf so they went back to india you know most of us say oh my god i i adopted this child and now look this little boy is sick with cerebral palsy and he can't hear and he's deaf you know what a tragedy they went back to india and they said you have any other kids with cerebral palsy or deaf our boy needs friends and they adopted a second child with the same difficulties or the same challenges you might say say oh we got one we need two of them you know to keep each other company you will have difficulties anybody in this room have difficulties don't bother that's all right you will you also have a good heart you have all kinds of possibilities when you get quiet and when you look you can do magnificent things in the smallest way and it plants incredible seeds in this world think about where in your life you know needs grace needs letting go needs a more spacious heart and what it is that supports this in your life you know it could be reading a poem or sitting in meditation or taking a walk in the hills brings you back to a place of peace or your best friends who remind you give you a bigger perspective or just taking a long hot path you know listening to music you know what brings your heart back to peace and gives you a big perspective human life is not without its sorrow and yet in the midst of all there is a reality of presence of consciousness itself that's open and vast and inviting and it allows you to walk through this world with a peaceful heart with understanding you know all the wise people of the ages and people we care about and celebrate in some way yes they may have done amazing things but the wise ones also did it from a place of understanding a place of graciousness a peaceful heart there's an interesting experience that happens to people sometimes in very wonderful or deep meditation sessions it's one of the dozen or 20 flavors of awakening or enlightenment that can happen maybe i'll talk about those flavors some night soon it's the experience of perfection and it's almost like i'm i'm wary of saying it i'm very careful of saying it because i don't mean the war in syria as perfection and i don't mean hungry children and starving people or perfection in the ordinary sense and i think we have to do whatever we can to care for one another and to reach out and tend this world and to knit together the parts that have torn but there's another reality that's also true and that is to see the mysterious perfection of it all and then somehow there couldn't be birth without death you know and there couldn't be gain without loss and there couldn't be night without day and there couldn't be joy without sorrow and sweet without sour it's actually how it's woven together this is human this is duality it's human incarnation and in this perspective as the um mystic julian of norwich wrote she said and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well there was it was the a revelation that she had um that was filled with love really it was filled with love for the whole world for all its beauty and all its sorrows together if that makes sense to you and again i want to be very careful in talking about it because it doesn't mean that one does intend and care but it's the invitation to rest in that which is sacred and then every place you are is the holy land you know and every body is the body of the buddha in different forms when the buddha was lying between the two sal trees as the story is told in his last day and surrounded by the villagers and monks and princes and nuns and all the people who were there um the very last thing attributed to him he said this world is impermanent make of yourself a light be a lamp be a light in this ever changing world and that's the invitation of this practice of peace and well-being and love that we carry that that's who we are actually and it's possible for us so let's sit for a moment quietly [Music] to and so perhaps the point is not to let the fears and the terror and the confusion that's there out in the news and in the world not let it colonize your heart not let it take you over the world actually needs people whose hearts are at peace and who can see with clarity and tended with the kind of beauty that is given to you and given to each of us and if anything tonight resonated with you or reminded you um then that becomes something that you already had and that you can carry as you go thank you for coming drive politely out there it's lots of cars and it's dark enjoy the spring evening and come again [Music] you

Channel: Be Here Now Network

Views: 4,874

Rating: 4.816092 out of 5

Keywords: be here now network, podcast love, loving podcast, loving awareness, be here now, love podcast, buddhism podcast, mindfulness podcast, spirituality podcast, jack kornfield, meditation podcast, be here now network jack kornfield, be here now network youtube, heart wisdom podcast, be here now network podcasts, heart wisdom jack kornfield, be here now youtube, jack kornfield heart wisdom, heart wisdom, buddhist wisdom, jack kornfield guided meditation

Id: qep9wr_ZLKg

Length: 59min 11sec (3551 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020