Jack Kornfield's Heart Wisdom Podcast Ep. 133: Training The Inner Child

be here now just be here now [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 i feel actually quite blessed um teaching meditation is a is a good job it is you get to be with people at their best or at least not at their worst because they're quiet [Music] it's true and they ask about things that generally matter to them a lot it's it's wonderful i'd like to try and put a couple of things together this evening that i've been thinking about and they are a bit disparate so i'm not sure how they'll fit but i'll give it a try and i believe they even relate in some way to what we've talked about the past couple of weeks and if they don't then i'll rewrite the talk and we'll try some other week again they have to do with inner meditation and outer child rearing somehow guiding the children in our life outwardly and inwardly last week someone came up to me after afterwards uh who had sat there and said that they were a bit confused from what we talked about that there was a kind of a mixed message that in one way in buddhist practice and meditation as we've been working with it for a long time those who've been coming regularly the main teachings are to let go not to make anything or become anything but really to learn how to let go in a graceful way from day to day and person to person and moment to moment and maybe even life to life and what was confusing is that beside that message there was also put out another message which was to cultivate or or to be able to create certain states of mind happiness or love or loving kindness or compassion rather than just letting go and taking things as they are and it got even more exaggerated when i read that piece about kindergarten at the end of last time which i heard in a particular way um and some other people heard very differently um for those who didn't hear it this person said that all he really needed to learn as a grown-up he learned in kindergarten and it was simple things like share your toys and don't hit or put things back where you got them flush and you know brush your teeth and stuff like that and when i read it the spirit for me was really that of simplicity that practice or spiritual life or whatever was something that was very basic and very human and and very immediate and not something esoteric or or philosophical but for some other people who heard it it was like a whole list of parental do's and don'ts put your toys back where you found them clean up afterwards don't hit other kids you know brush your teeth when you're supposed to and rather than being a process of letting go it was kind of the a new list of commandments there's a very interesting story of a man who was dying coming to see sariputra i believe it was one of the chief disciples of the buddha and sorry putra gave him the man asked how can you find love in your heart or in life and sorry putra gave him an answer which was a series of teachings on the development of lovingkindness and the man thanked him and he did that and he attained a great deal of loving kindness in his heart and then he died and sarfutra went back and told the buddha about this and it was in one of the rare times that because he was a very fine teacher in his own right sorry putra that the buddha admonished him and said you didn't do right by that man and sorry putra said why he asked to learn how to have love in his heart and i taught him and the buddha said that wasn't enough you didn't also teach him how to be free and in some way the loving kindness meditation especially the kind that was taught in that circumstance or traditionally it's very powerful and it creates a sense of loving whoever you bring to mind you develop until there's a state of of happiness and well-being and love with them it's kind of like candy in meditation it's really good but it's not really the love that can touch all things it's not the love that can open to the whole of life and find freedom it's the love that's love as opposed to i don't know um disgruntlement or or irritation or closeness of mind or heart and so i thought about that and the questions that were raised about last week and i started to think about child rearing because in a way what we're doing is rearing our inner child our spiritual child learning to nourish your love or discipline or whatever and there's a certain balance in that i want to read you something it's a page and a half that was recently published in a very fine magazine called the sun which is published in north carolina it's kind of literary psychological spiritual journals called hunches on childhood by a psychologist in washington state named kent hoffman this is about children and it's about 13 or 14 points he makes one i'm a psychologist that is to say i'm an archaeologist and a midwife to the human soul and i believe after many years of doing this work that what happens in our earliest years has a radical and root effect on all that we experience thereafter two we love because we were first love three we failed to love because we ourselves were failed very early on it is difficult to give what we didn't get four our degree of openness to relationship to the world around us to others to intimacy is established in the first years of our life in relation to our parents in our family in relation to our mother mothering is not supported in this culture mothering nurturance community relationship is dangerous because it reminds us of our dependence and the limitations of the ones upon whom we were dependent five the way we were treated as small children is the way we will treat ourselves and others the rest of our life with tenderness and support with neglect and cruelty or with something in between six few of us have a batting average of even two hits out of ten when it comes to treating ourselves with tenderness and support seven each person is infinitely precious of infinite worth that is worth worthy of infinite tenderness and support nowhere is this more obvious than a parent than in the life of a young child eight to have grown up in this industrialized society means that we are each of us wounded in ways that we do not yet comprehend unless we grieve and thus release these wounds we will pass them on to the next generation nine the central wound of early childhood is abandonment 10. children are exceptionally sensitive that is fragile children we are also very resilient therein lies the problem we do bounce back early on from woundings and to the naked eye we appear to have gone on beyond the wound and we have we've also stayed right there at the scene of the crime depending on how deep the wound or abandonment we will make certain that we return again and again and again until we can somehow get it right eleven it is difficult to support children in a context that doesn't support us industrialized economy financial anxiety sexism racism meritocracy dysfunctional families aggression ambition not to mention genetics and acts of nature all of these as well as the painfully slow process of parents freeing themselves from their wounds of their past interact all of them affect the next generation 12. in spite of our wounds there is at our core a truth that cannot be extinguished it has wisdom and tenacity and love it can be lost and forgotten but never destroyed 13. less violent cultures hopi sonoy eskimo kalahari appear to prioritize early childhood practices that encourage confidence at the core of children and thus they create a less violent society thirteen the future of the planet is in part dependent upon establishing the raising of healthy children as the central priority and then lastly the way we hold our children is the way we hold our future there's a lot in that i could well just stop with that and let you sit and reflect on it and think about it the central wounds of our own childhood of abandonment of not being loved that we look in our lives in so many ways repeat and look somehow to heal and the capacities that we have in our life to create a healthy society or raise healthy children or have a healthy inner spiritual life based on that which we received or didn't from our past in some way our spiritual life is a rearing of an inner child and there are several things that are needed which may also be why there was a sense of two different messages last week at least in one part there was primarily we need to give attention and love and energy it's called wise attention in buddhist practice we need to give attention to our inner child just as we need to give attention to anyone we we have in our charge as a child that we're trying to raise when we asked the dalai lama when we interviewed him if he were to come and live in the west what would he most want to do and he said set up a school for young children and raised them from the beginning to understand the heart of loving kindness and wisdom krishnamurti was asked what he felt was the most important thing and he did he did in his 80 years or 90 years of his life and all of his teaching and he said start some schools for young children and it's both literal and it's metaphorical so the first thing that's needed is to give attention to give love to give energy without it nothing flourishes children don't flourish and our spiritual practice doesn't flourish unless we give it a lot of attention and care and energy and a lot of love that's the foundation for it it's not a practice of judgment or denial or beating your inner child it doesn't get you very far spiritually it doesn't raise a very healthy outer child either beside the giving of a loving and caring attention the second thing that's necessary which is a little bit it's opposite but not really it's simply a different expression of love is the setting of limits you can't raise a healthy kid unless you can say no and anybody who gets past two years old without saying no to their child is in real trouble i mean it gets very apparent you see it at the playgrounds in the preschools the parents who don't know how to set limits are up to their neck in alligators or whatever it is in three-year-olds or four-year-olds inwardly we also need to learn to set limits which is learning to concentrate learning to say a healthy no to not indulge yourself in ways that are harmful or to get lost in things and then when the choice comes should i follow this further or is it time to really let go to learn how to say no to learn how to steady ourselves to learn to create boundaries to learn to separate this is the work of children and it's the work in our spiritual life too to see what's healthy food and what's not and give what's healthy to our inner spirit and child as well as to the outer is this clear to you that that's as important an aspect of love as that which holds the child in tenderness to give attention and love is the first to set limits out of love to say no separation wise discipline and then the third is trust these days we tend to push children in our culture and if you're interested in some interesting reading in education read some of the uh there's a psychologist at harvard excuse me a tufts named elkind who's written a series of books the the best selling of them is entitled the hurried child but he has several others preschoolers at risk and things on critiques of our culture and education and what it's about is the idea that we can hurry kids up and teach them reading early and teach them to ride their bikes earlier and and teach them to be achievers and we give them exams so they get in the right kindergarten and the right elementary school and it's true in marin county it's absolutely true it's competitive at that age and it's crazy and it's not just in that not just in kind of the super kid mentality but it's in television and advertising and dressing little kids up in fancy designer jeans and clothes that are really meant for kind of sexual um adults to interact with in some way to look fancy or to attract somebody else and we make miniatures of them and put them on kids even when you watch television shows generally who's the smart guy when there's a show and there's children on it it's the kids that are the ones that are supposed to be smart and kind of have the wise lines or the wise ass lines and the adults who kind of take it from them there isn't much modeling for kids just to be kids we want them to be independent we put them in daycare and preschool at times even when we don't really need to instead of just mothering them or fathering we're taking care of them there's a kind of ambition and speed in our culture that's put on to our children and it deprives them of the most important thing they need to be a healthy adult which is a healthy childhood it deprives them of their childhood ambition or we get so caught up or consumed with our lives in our work that we're not really there to touch to hold to be with to nourish to play with our children we're a very ambitious culture especially at this time there's a story of mullinaz rudin he went to the court of the emir of the kind of provincial leader because he heard they were looking to hire some people and he wanted some work and he went in and one of the consultants to the emir this man who was one of the members of the court received him and this man was kind of interviewing those who might take jobs under the emir and he said to nasruddin he said you've come for a job nasruddin said yes he said we like really ambitious men here and nasruddin said fine i'll take your job and the man said what are you mad and najrudin said is that also a qualification [Laughter] but if we look around at our culture and its values there is a lot of that of madness and of ambition now here i've been talking about raising our children and i i would like to talk more about that some night and about education because i'm learning about it and to talk about it lets me understand it better and and i value it it seems important to share but i'm not just talking about our children i'm talking about our society and our parents and how we were raised and even more than that i'm talking about our inner children as well our spiritual children for at the core of it all what's not critical is the technique whether it's montessori or whether it's waldorf school or open classroom or whatever you know or whether it's the breath or loving kindness meditation or whether you use mental labels or pay attention to body sensation it's not the technique in meditation or in the classroom child rearing but it's what we communicate in some way from our being in our heart to that child and how much care we bring that's really what matters how caring is that person that the child spends time with and that's true for our inner child to bring a heart of confidence and compassion and freedom these are qualities that the buddha communicated to his disciples a kind of groundedness that there was a place to sit that no matter what arose it was fine a confidence you want to communicate that to your child outer inner a place of love that no matter what arises it's possible to touch it with the heart and if you work with that to not be devastated to learn compassion to learn this universal power of our heart so what's communicated inwardly or outwardly it's communicated in our meditation yes you can sit and you can open to what's pleasant and what's unpleasant to what's sorrowful and to what's joyful you can open even to the worst difficulties of your life you can do it you want to communicate that to a child and you communicate it to yourself and practice you can use your spiritual life your attention to find wisdom to find balance you can grow you can develop it's a lot like gardening i've been talking about children but i spent some time this weekend in my garden it's the same thing it's planting and mulching and working over the soil and putting in fertilizer and watering and taking off the snails and all of those kinds of things guarding and nourishing the plants and letting them grow because the truth is that if children are held and cared for and loved and loved with appropriate discipline and limits they do grow you don't need to teach them to be independent they want to be independent if you love them enough then they they feel secure enough to go and explore they're not so afraid there's a lot of spirit and passion when you work with children that you see and our sitting and our working and our opening is to reclaim that in ourselves so let me ask you some questions what age is your inner spiritual child maybe he or she appears in a couple of different ages sometimes very small perhaps something for you to know a notice this week or this month or this year what's the predominant age of this spiritual inner child now what does it need what kind of nourishment does this child need what kind of loving attention how much time children take a lot of time my friends they do and how much time does your inner spiritual child really need what would nourish it to grow what kind of food what kind of place to be what kind of discipline is necessary and where's the kid getting in trouble you know or having too much sweets and too much tv and not enough of something else you know pretty well what kind of discipline would be useful for that inner spiritual child does it need more encouragement more attention more time with other kids who are interested in spiritual things that's really to listen inside and see what could you do to nourish that aspect of your being to bring it to flowering to bring it to independence to bring it to strength and freedom and happiness there's a kind of a balance can you hear that now i'll read you a sutra from the buddha it's not on child rearing it's a different metaphor and some of you may have heard it before but it seems somehow related he says suppose that a goldsmith builds a furnace lights a fire in the opening and takes gold with a pair of tongs and puts it into the furnace from time to time he blows on it from time to time he sprinkles water upon it and from time to time he examines it closely if the goldsmith were to blow on the gold continuously it might be heated too much and ruin it if he continuously sprinkled water on it it would be cooled if he were only to look at it the gold would not come to perfect refinement but if from time to time this goldsmith attends to each of these three functions the gold will be compliant workable bright and will be easily molded and whatever beautiful ornament the goldsmith wishes to make of it earrings necklace golden chain it can now be used for that purpose similarly there are three qualities to which a meditator or someone devoted to inner training should pay attention from time to time namely the qualities of concentration of energy and of equanimity if we give regular attention to each of them then our minds will be compliant workable lucid not unwieldy well concentrated but if we should give attention exclusively to concentration it's possible that our mind will fall into indolence or dullness if we give attention exclusively to energetic effort it's possible the mind may become restless or agitated and if we give it exclusively to equanimity it's possible the mind will not see clearly and bring itself to perfect freedom so whatever we do in our practice requires a balance to whatever state we wish to attain we must look after this inner balance so here we sit and do our practice or we do it at home or we do it at our work our spiritual life and the question really is finding this balance it's really the balance that i just spoke of working with the inner child energy or effort that is the willingness to be there to open to to enter into our experience as we sit or as we work with another person to really become present with our breath with typing with teaching with gardening with driving to be there not just in body but to have the body and heart and the spiritual child the mind all together it requires the same fullness that when you want to be with a child you have to give children know when you're only half there and after a while they start nagging you and kind of asking for things and stuff because you're trying to be there and read something at the same time that's one of the ones i've tried to pull off with my kid you know or you're trying to be there and thinking about other things and after a while they say wait a second pay attention so the first thing that effort that the buddha spoke of is the willingness it's kind of a brightness of our being to come fully into what our experience is and then that's balanced with concentration which is that discipline if you will or steadiness it's a collectedness or a stillness it's not just indulging i want candy all the time and i want caroline's if she could have her favorite meal it would be cake with icing whipped cream ice cream honey and sugar on top and probably coke or something like that to drink and it's not that she gets very much of it mostly at birthday parties but she remembers those parties we hear about them for the weeks in between and then daddy do you know what we had after the cake so the element of concentration this other part is a steadying a stillness a collectedness and not being scattered a willingness to set some limits in in a caring way for ourselves in our outer life through some spiritual wisdom and in our inner life not just to let the mind wander as it will but to begin to train it and to to [Music] steal it and to focus it so that we can see in a deep way what's here first is to be present and then second in that to work with the heart and the mind and the body to steady and then the third again the buddha talked about equanimity which is really the receptive quality that's the quality that i call trust to observe what's here when you become steady and you're really present with it than to observe without judgment and this is where the letting be comes in because wisdom comes most deeply from seeing what is true and relating to that wisely it's not so much changing ourselves but the wisdom will grow as children grow as independence grows freedom grows when we see what is true and say yes this is true and open ourselves to relate to that to relate to it with a caring heart with compassion with understanding that things aren't always cake and whipped cream and ice cream and honey and sugar and all of that things are not that way all the time thank god actually even if it was all extremely pleasurable you know what you get sick of it remember that line from ramakrishna why is there evil in the world to thicken the plot but that doesn't doesn't nourish the heart it doesn't raise the spiritual child in the way to find fulfillment and strength and steadiness and knowing so it's balancing these qualities and that balancing that care takes time it takes listening and it takes doing it when you can't raise your kid by pawning it off on somebody else you don't get a very good kid out of it this is roomie again many centuries ago where the great indian poet who lived part of his time in marin county he says these spiritual window shoppers who idly ask how much is that oh i'm just looking they handle 100 items and put them down shadows with no capital no investment they make what must be spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping but these walk into a shop and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment in that shop where did you go nowhere what did you have to eat nothing much even if you don't know what you want buy something to be a part of this exchange give yourself up for something start a huge foolish project like noah you never know when it might come in handy and i'll tell you one more thing it makes absolutely no difference what other people think of you they haven't been right before this have they truth is perfect and complete in itself it's not something newly discovered this is from zen master dogen as a way to end it's always existed truth is not far away it's nearer than near there's no need to attain it since not one of your steps leads away from it don't follow the advice of others rather learn to listen to the voice within yourself your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things in your meditation you yourself are the mirror reflecting the solution of your problems the human mind has absolute freedom and the human heart as well within its true nature you can attain this intuitively not by working toward it but by allowing the meditation to show you this freedom there have been thousands upon thousands of students who've practiced meditation and obtained its fruits don't doubt its possibilities because of the simplicity of its method if you can't find the truth right where you are where else do you think you will find it life is short and no one knows what the next moment will bring open your heart while you still have the opportunity you will soon discover a treasure of inner wisdom which in turn you can then share abundantly with others bringing them in the world happiness and peace that was written 1500 years ago or something like that it seems rather current the next issue of the inquiring mind is has a series of articles on the relationship of psychotherapy and meditation various teachers and psychologists are writing and as i listen and people speak i hear a lot of truth and very important things in the different voices even though they may almost say opposite things at times the gist of what i wrote about in in my own few pages piece for the inquiring mind was looking at the limitations of meditation as a as a psychologist also and and i admit from the beginning that i might be biased by having that training but i i have two sets of experiences that relate to that to people's past that are very compelling one is i see a number of people as clients not just from vipassana sitters but from the zen and sufi in tibetan and various other communities who've had a lot of benefit from their spiritual practice and it opened them up and they changed their lives and found a kind of freedom that i don't think they would just have found by going and telling their story in therapy or touch something that was much more universal but then i find a lot of people coming and saying even so there are these other places that don't work so well that seem to be conditioned by the past it's like these two pieces fitting together even more compelling if you will is to look at the group of meditation teachers zen masters and roshi's and swamis and llamas and mamas and whatever this the whole and being in that profession i hang out with all these guys and gals the guru set and looking around very honestly there has been a major disaster at at least half of the biggest zen tibetan vipassana hindu jain you name it spiritual centers and not just only among asian teachers but as much among western teachers there's been a major disaster primarily focusing around some big area of unconsciousness and power or sexuality or relationships and ability to listen or or be intimate or money or one of those things in the majority of those places so that's another side that's a piece that and so then it begins to get me asking this question well um what you know what kind of freedom can you find or expect from spiritual practice or what things can psychotherapy or a psychological perspective help with that meditation can't or maybe there's some other dimension of life or or in some way how they fit together and i'm not even trying to present an answer right now this evening but just hearing these different sides and and putting out a little bit more it's very hard to look at parenting what i hear also in some way is it's very hard to look at parenting and issues around it if there's guilt involved if there's even the slightest blame that you should this is the way you should have done it because i think people care incredibly for their children and they really do the best that they're that they're possibly capable of given the limitations of the society and money and and their own wounds and their own inner needs and so forth and most of the parents i know really try um so if there's any blame or if there's a sense as carol points out that that's it you know either you bond well in the first day or something like that or you don't get into the right university that we don't even you know or or whatever it is that it's over with and that's certainly not true there all those stories in the times of the buddha of people who were murderers and thieves who came and then heard some amazing amazingly deep teaching and completely changed their life well so to have the view that it's all bound in the past or it's all dependent on your parents as a parent i certainly wouldn't want that on the other side there's this other piece that our history does affect us a lot and it affects most of the swamis and llamas and gurus and mamas and whatever um in the same way that it affects us and there's some wedding together that's necessary some responsibility for the personal and the universal to touch something that's great or to act in the world in an ecological or political way that that makes it different or to find something that transcends our past in ourselves that's really greater than that through our spiritual life that we're not limited just to this body or just our personal history in one life and at the same time to also respect the power of that which is personal and how it does repeat and and to be willing to pay attention to that part of ourselves as well as to that which goes beyond the limited sense of self [Music] you

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Keywords: francesca maxime, podcast, buddhist wisdom, wise girl, buddhism, buddhist, rerooted, rerooted podcast

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Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021