The Peaceful Heart Dharma Talk — Jack Kornfield

welcome back [Music] glad to see you again at least i see some of you in the tiles on the screen which is really really sweet see these smiling faces and so now i'd like to do some teaching and really focus on a peaceful and loving heart and as i do i'd like you to take it as a meditation practice if you will or as a reminder you listen there won't be a quiz at the end but you let yourself listen somehow to sense what's true for you and if it reminds you of something that's important that's a value a beautiful thing or something that you want to reflect upon [Music] receive that and if something doesn't seem like it's right to you let it go but let it be a kind of contemplative listening now i started with the practice of equanimity tonight um and i need to say a tiny bit more about it that the practice and the understanding of equanimity is not to avoid conflict or to avoid change rather it is finding a balance in the midst of it so there's a famous chant in pali like the sanskrit ancient language that goes on [Music] and the translation of it all things are impermanent they rise and they pass away that's the first two lines of it for those those who are at peace with this truth i don't know the melody we created we created a nice melody for it but i don't go to the second part those who are at peace with this truth find true happiness those who are at peace with the fact that everything arises and passes away and that's the mystery of human incarnation that death is stalking you to use stone juan's phrase from carlos castaneda that everything that we knew our childhood what happened to it it's back with the dinosaurs you know and the pyramids and you know things arise for a time and then they just vanish it's remarkable and to be at peace with this brings true happiness so i just turned 75 a few days ago trudy my beloved wife also just turned 75 a few weeks before that we look at each other this is as we say this is a big number all right and it sort of get got me reflecting because i was fortunate enough to know four of my great-grandparents reasonably well several of whom lived all the way until i was in high school or in college and they were mostly born in the 1880s or even in the late 1870s like a decade or so after the civil war and they came on boats in the late 1800s to settle in the east coast in philadelphia and they told me stories of what it was like to live in russia or or odessa or turkey where one of my great-grandparents and grandfather comes from and i remember my own grandfather who was this just warm-hearted loving human being loved his garden as much as anything but he'd been in world war one you know and he was telling us all the he would teach us the world war one songs i'm not going to sing to you mademoiselle from marmiter i'll stop with the first line you know and other such body soldier stones um and then i realized wow in this life in 75 years because it stretches both ways it goes back to people that i knew were there almost in the civil war and this is what we live and it turns and it changes and then on the other hand um i mean i i'm working with some friends in silicon valley who are part of the largest ai artificial intelligence project in the world and so all right here's my mother talking about people still lighting gas lamps when she was a kid on the street you know on my grandparents and then here's a.i and it's like it changes baby all the time and who we are we are this change itself it gives us perspective like that famous ojibwa saying i often quote sometimes i go about pitying myself when all the while i'm being carried by great winds across the sky that we're part of some mysterious dance that's unfolding now part of the dance that's unfolding right now are these multiple crises the health crisis with the pandemic and covid that's affecting so many of us all of us no one left out even though we're not all in the same boat as it's been said some are in yachts and some are in row boats and some are kind of clinging to a piece of driftwood but it's still affecting us all the health crisis the economic crisis which is affecting so many in all kinds of difficult ways the climate crisis and then underneath it all the moral crisis which is reflected in black lives matter and the movement for racial justice and economic justice and all these are happening at the same time how do we practice in the midst of them all i think of the time the years that i lived at ajancha's forest monastery which was on the edge of thailand near the border of laos in cambodia in a province that bordered both laos and cambodia and i remember living there and a friend came to visit after i'd been a monk there for a while he was part of the quakers international group that had been sent to vietnam and laos during the war which is just on the other side of the river from this province to do peace work in the middle of the battles in laos and vietnam and i visited him and i spent time in those countries and he came and he complained he said you all are just sitting on your butts and there's a war going on and you should be out there and making a difference and i've been out protesting i certainly have i've protested most of my life in different ways but here i was a monk and he said this to arjun shah and arjun shah said just stay here a bit and maybe you'll see something new because you know how to protest and that's fine and after some days all the fight and angst and the stress that he carried from being at a war zone even as a pacifist or as a passive began to slowly settle he got quieter in some way and he said oh this is really helping me and then anjan shah looked at him and he said he said you know we can see the tentacles of the war from here because we were near an air base so there would be bombers and jets flying overhead soldiers coming through he said and there's always a war somewhere he said but what also was needed is a place in the midst of it all that human beings can come and remember that that that there's another way to live an island of peace and sanity and in this monastery these hundreds of acres of jungle and forest where the monks and nuns had been living for some years you could drop your wallet all your money someone would pick it up and save it for you and give it back you know you could fall and be a difficulty people would rush to help you the level of care and ethics and virtue and beauty that you felt of a community living in harmony with respect for one another ajah said the world needs to be reminded of this so that they so that we do not forget and you would say over and over tom jai singh open my can you make your heart peaceful now i've been out for almost every day for weeks and weeks holding a big black lives matter sign it actually says time for racial and economic justice black lives matter on one of the busiest street corners first in la for some weeks and now for weeks here in in the bay area and people come by and a lot of people will honk thumbs up wave some people scowl thumbs down shout bad things all lives matter what are you doing you know all that and i'm just standing there um letting the traffic go by with my mask on and holding my sign and i think of my dear friend maladoma zomei who's a west african shaman and medicine man and a kind of remarkable teacher he has a couple of phds from the sorbonne and from an american university but most importantly he really was raised as a shaman by the dagara people in west africa and after we had worked together for a number of years with retreats for kids coming out of street gangs and um all kinds of inner city work and prison work and things like that he was called by his elders to go back and have his elders initiation and there's a series of initiations in that dogara people and in those communities as you go through the stages of life the elders initiation when he went back he stripped down to a little loin cloth they gave him a a calabash of water they took him to the center of the village and made an ash circle around him and said you may not leave this ash circle for three days and three nights on the bare earth and then they put an ash circle around his mouth and they said you may not say anything for three days and three nights once he sat there they rang that they beat the village from and they said anyone in this village or the surrounding villages who has anything to say to this man especially any difficulties any complaints any problems anything you don't like that he's done now is the time to get it out and so people would come and all he could do was sit there and let all the insults and all of the critique and all of that come and go and this was called the true training of an elder can you understand this praise and blame to be a wise person is to be able to hold all of this so equanimity or balance of heart is not passive but it's actually an attention to what's present and i think of my friend houston smith who was a very famous professor of religion and various other things wrote this great book on the religions of mankind and houston smith's granddaughter was all in the news one year had been out on a sailboat in tahiti with some other famous athletes um and then she was murdered um and this was he had this very deep soul connection with his granddaughter this lovely lovely being and lovely and houston smith as you can imagine was completely heartbroken and he said people sent condolences and people brought him food and all the things that one might do for someone who was grieving a great loss he said the thing that helped me most was a young man that lived on the street a few houses away who was a native american and he said i would be sitting out on the porch and this young man would come up over a number of days and he would take the chair next to me and he would just sit with me being silent and houston said that that presence for the deep hurt that i had that caring presence that was the most beautiful thing that anyone gave me in this time of sorrow so again we're just exploring what is the peaceful heart the near enemy the the quality that masquerades as equanimity it's called the near enemy is is indifference and indifference is a is a not caring it's a withdrawal it's based on fear it's a pulling away from the world but true equanimity is being at peace in the midst of the mystery becoming the witness to it the one who knows was the expression for majin shah the loving awareness which is who you really are your consciousness that was born into this body and you get to witness the play of human incarnation and as you do so you know you see the eight winds of praise and blame and gain and loss and fame and disrepute and pleasure and pain changing all the time like a star at dawn a flash of lightning in a summer cloud an echo a rainbow a phantom a dream these are the poetic words from the dhammapada and the diamond sutra about this life it appears and it disappears praise and blame and gain and loss and then in the first lines of the heart sutra it says form is not different than emptiness now what does that mean it means that all these things that arise that seem so substantial dissolve and they're replaced by the next breath or the next emotion or the next circumstance or the next sunrise or sunset [Music] that nothing is substantial in itself and who we are is the consciousness that witnesses this play of life now i have a number of friends who've been sick some of them very sick with coronavirus i have friends or people in the orbit who've been arrested in demonstrations maybe worse than that i have friends who are stuck at home with five kids and no child care and they're working on theirs they're suffering for you and there's boredom and restlessness and and loss of money and fear and anxiety and vulnerability and alarm and how do we practice with this how do we pause and breathe and let ourselves stay present with the sense of equanimity and vastness a balance in the midst of change so i will read you a passage from margaret wheatley meg wheatley who is an activist and a wise elder and a systems theorist on all kinds of things and she writes about those who become warriors of the spirit who carry that spirit in difficult times warriors for the human spirit are awake human beings who have chosen not to flee they abide they serve as beacons of an ancient story that tells of the goodness and generosity and creativity of humanity you can identify them by their cheerfulness you will know them by their compassion when asked how they do it they will tell you about discipline dedication and the necessity of community so the first quality she says is they do not flee they abide they've chosen not to flee as james baldwin explains not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it's faced and whether it's the nature of the virus or the economic injustice or the racial injustice or the climate change nothing can be responded to until we face it until it is faced and so this is really the beginning of what she's speaking about and then she says they serve as beacons of an ancient story of goodness and generosity and that is who we are as a species in spite of all the bad stuff you see on the news here you get the news of you know some shooting in this city and some looting there or some you know war still happening someplace and what you don't get in the news is the one billion acts that hour during the newscast where parents put scrambled eggs you know or oatmeal or or rice gruel or whatever their national food is on the table for their children and then cleaned the dishes you know and went out and did something for their neighbor or worked together with others the billions of acts of humanity and kindness so this is the ancient story of goodness and generosity in which the those who are the warriors for the human spirit they become what the dalai lama is described as in this beautiful text the dalai lamas are a lamp in the darkness they carry a spirit even when it's seems dark and it's not really it turns out that if you read and study the buddhist teachings the most fundamental teachings of the four noble truths what you understand is that suffering which is the first noble truth that life has suffering not that life is suffering because it's magnificent and unbearably beautiful and it has suffering anybody not have suffering you can you know sign off now and i wish you well tell us how it is but it has suffering but that is only the first noble truth it's not the end of the story there are causes for suffering among humanity greed hatred ignorance fear prejudice these ignorance and and racism and prejudice and fear and greed societies based on greed and fostering hatred they will suffer lives based on this will bring suffering but that's only the second noble truth then the third truth is that there is peace that peace is possible and that the fourth that there's a path there are practices of compassion and mindful loving awareness of of uh living with integrity of quieting the mind and opening the heart that allow you to live in this ever-changing world with an inner freedom that no one can take from you i think of my new friend and colleague we did a bit of teaching together valerie carr who's a wonderful activist and filmmaker sikh and a lawyer and she says the darkness we experience now can be seen culturally and globally all the problems that i've described as a the darkness of a tomb but if we turn our attention in another way we can see them see it as the darkness of the womb then in fact we are in a birth process and anybody who's given birth or even attended a birth as i have because i certainly haven't given birth in this incarnation knows that birth is not that easy it's messy sometimes it's bloody you know it's painful it goes on a lot longer than you thought it would um it's dangerous in different ways and there are contractions that come and then they pause and then they're peaceful and then a huge new contraction comes it's this amazing process that the body becomes a channel for new beings to come into this planet it's extraordinary and what if we are in a birth process collectively valerie asks and i pose it to you what if in fact it's not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of a womb of new birth what if we hold it that way and work toward it so those who carry the spirit are beacons who remind people that suffering is not the end of the story that in fact we've lived through pandemics and earthquakes and typhoons and you know all kinds of things in world wars and battles and something in us knows how to be reborn how to survive the difficulties it's in your dna your ancestors are cheering for you say go baby you know how to do this we did it before you and now it's your time and that the story that suffering is not the end of the story but human magnificence and care for one another and the possibility of a new burn and then she says something really remarkable you can identify them by their cheerfulness now that's something to say in a time when there's so much hurt and pain in the world and it's not to deny it all but here's the instruction from the buddha he says live in joy in love even among those who hate live in joy and health even among the sick and afflicted live in joy and peace even among the troubled look within quiet the mind and heart be still and free from fear and attachment know the sweet joy of living in the way so this is instructions in the time of illness and you know the time of conflict the time of difficulty to find a joy in yourself in the midst of it all and i remember when i first met gen master tiknot han and was kind of reading his books and he's such so remarkable and he would talk about how when you sit and practice you should put a half smile on your lips you know that little half smile of the buddha you should smile and i have to say um at first i thought it was like putting one of those yellow smiley faces on top of suffering it's like come on don't you have anything deeper than that in fact he's a very deep guy but it's like smile smile i asked him about it once and he said i've seen so much suffering i have to teach joy i have to teach joy and i think about john lewis who just died as we all know and all the things that have been said about him that he was a kind and gentle human being a humble servant who looked out for all of humankind these are the kind of things that the people who are closest to are saying about him that he had a deep faith in the central and essential goodness of humanity in spite of all the suffering he'd seen and so he was a gentleman and a gracious human being and a carrier of joy and i heard a story today actually because he had been in in the last decade or so he'd helped create a graphic novel or comic book series called march which was all about the selma march and civil rights in the 60s that he was so much a part of with dr king and the person who helped him create that took him to comic-con which is the giant convention of all the comic heads around the world he gave a talk you know holding up march and so forth and then he put on a trench coat and a backpack and he said in my backpack is an apple a toothbrush and the two books that i carried on my march this is what i had with me and he said let me show you and he went down from the stage and he began to walk and the young people were there got up and they started following him and pretty soon there were a thousand young people following him as he marched out and around the convention center as if he was saying to them you can do this as if he was passing on something that had cheer and joy and creativity even in the midst of the difficulty you can identify them by their cheerfulness you will know them by their compassion the demonstrations that have been happening not just around the country but around the world that are highlighting the kind of terrible injustice and kind of woven in racism and suffering and in in all these different ways have been 95 or 99 peaceful and yes there's been a bit of rioting i myself am not a stranger to that from my earlier activist days i have to say um you know and if you're a young man basically you say is there anything dangerous to do around here you know where can i sign up for it so there's in that in the spirit of it martin luther king said writing is the language of the unheard or the proverb that so speaks to what's happened at that part that little part the african proverb that says if a child is not cared for by the village they will burn it down to feel its warmth if a child is rejected by the village they will burn it down to feel its warmth so there's this longing in us as human beings to feel valued to feel seen to feel connected to one another and if that's denied because you're born and your skin is a certain color or you're born in a certain circumstance that longing doesn't go away it still has to find its voice and now black bodies brown bodies you know bipod bodies nations are being presented with the bill of what has been ignored for all the suffering and it's time to settle up for all that's happened so some years ago i was invited to san quentin prison for a graduation from the grip program this was run by uh by jacques verdon a dear friend who had started with the help of spirit rock the inside prison project it's now morphed in different ways for the last 20 years or more i was part of the board president of the board for a while and certainly helped in its genesis and now it spread through many prisons and do fantastic work but this was a graduation and i was to be one of the speakers so i went in and there was the biggest hall in san quentin and at one end were 120 men wearing mortar boards and graduation gowns like a college or high school graduation and at the other end other part of the room were the 300 visitors which included people from the governor's office or from the corrections department local mayors various people involved with prison work lots of other folks social workers friends family 300 of them the men had chosen a valedictorian to speak of their program and the grip program guiding rage into power had anger management mindfulness practice yoga um restorative justice training and forgiveness all these kind of things and it really turned these men's lives around so they appointed their valedictorian who gave a beautiful little talk about them and then said we have things that we need to say to you and they all stood up and first they read a pledge that they had been violent men and that they pledged now they had learned that they would never again use violence to solve a conflict or situation or difficulty in the world they offered this pledge and then following that they made a deep apology to all the suffering they'd caused to all the people the families the community those who had suffered in some way from the acts the families of others even their own families and everyone in the room and then i was asked to give a little talk which i did about beginning again that it's never too late to start over and to begin again beginner's mind kind of birth of a new life and then my good friend and compadre luis rodriguez who is a great latino poet was supposed to read a poem and louise and i had done a lot of work in different years in prisons and in with kids and gangs and all kinds of other stuff and he's an extraordinary poet he was the poet laureate of los angeles for a couple years in a row until last year and um an activist and you know his poems because he himself had been a heroin addict and been on the street and homeless and in and out of working in prisons and things he really speaks from it's like there's blood and guts in his poems um they're very real and i thought all right he's going to read some his poems are powerful he got up and he said i can't read my poem we all pause he said i can't read it because all you men apologize to us but it's we who need to apologize to you most of you were born in communities of poverty of drug use held and surrounded in the in the field of racism you know and disrespect for who you are you were children brought up in communities where there wasn't economic opportunity and work and decent education um we failed you and as we who need to offer you an apology and when he finished saying that the room got silent no one could speak because they knew he was telling another piece of the truth that needed to be voiced so this is really the heart of compassion that can look and see those who've suffered and also those who are causing suffering out of their ignorance all of them and hold them in the great heart of compassion then she says you can identify them by their cheerfulness you can know them by their compassion when asked how they do it they will tell you about discipline dedication and the necessity of community discipline for almost everyone in this covered time one of the most important things to learn is a kind of routine for your life it gets chaotic if there you are and you don't have a routine you know i mean i i think about it how how to make a a schedule that takes time for silence for yourself that takes time for meditation and i've been working with first responders i've been doing all kinds of teaching but i was working with groups of first responders including my daughter's organization oasis legal services which gets asylum for peoples whose lives are in danger from around the world and they they're the first people often that these folks who are seeking asylum will ever have told their whole story to about what it's like to be a gay guy an african man a gay guy in uganda and know that if anyone finds out you're likely to be stoned to death or to be a lesbian coming from guatemala where you've been raped by family members to fix you you know one story after another or a transgender person who came from saudi arabia if you can imagine that you know and in working with the staff because there's all the secondary traumas well i said you know you guys need backup i said i don't know what you believe in but in every one of your offices you should make a little altar you know and maybe you put on guadalupe or maria or maybe with buddha or kanye in the goddess of infinite compassion maybe you put kali on there because you need her fierceness you know i don't know but it's not for you to hold in your bodies you need to go in and light a candle and say all right kali all right guadalupe all right mother mary i'll do your work but you have to carry this it's not your job to carry it and make rituals wash your hands and face between each climate client do a scan through your body and i'm talking about this for first responders but it's really all of us in some way we're now on the front lines of what's happening in the world protected though you may be and you need to find your own discipline and your own routine and your own steadiness and your own practices in the midst of it all and then she says they will tell you about discipline and dedication dedication is the bodhisattva vows you know amidst the suffering of the world may i be a lamp in the darkness food for the hungry medicine for the sick a resting place for the weary and may i do this as long as beings exist chance the dalai lama so that my life and all lives come together to alleviate the sufferings of the world and bring everyone into peace this is a really uncertain time and we are in a great birth process that we can hope give something new to the world that some birth that happens that we get to be a part of for those of you who've been around a birth they're times to breathe remember that instruction breathe there are times to push that's part of the dedication but not always you know and there are times just to you know back and feel the mystery of life coming through you and life of this universe coming through you in this mystery as thomas merton taught to this young activist do not depend on the hope of results because what's true for us is that we can do all that we can but we don't get to choose the results and as you get to see this more and more deeply as you plant seeds of goodness as you care for the world more and more you realize that it's not in your hands the results and you focus on the truth and the value and the rightness of the work itself you're dedicated to plant seeds of goodness to care for things in the world and if you're someone with privilege which is a lot of us who are listening this talk because i'm talking to myself all these days as well it's not about guilt or shame there's another way to see it it is your assignment you've been given the cosmic assignment to have privilege and then to use it to set your intention and say how can i use this privilege in a way that makes the world a more beautiful place and by beautiful i mean in every way a just place in a caring place they will tell you about discipline dedication and necessity of community communities the only way together we be we are attending the birth of something new messy though it may be and when you go in the hospitals you know hopefully you don't have to go but sometimes it happens the the doctor who comes down the ward whoever she is or he is it's called the attending right the attending physician the attending this is your job you have the assignment with your privilege or wherever you are and you now have become the attending one to the new birth of the world and you want to do it with love and a peaceful heart because the world doesn't need more hate and it doesn't need more fear and it doesn't need more ignorance and confusion you are loving awareness this is your true nature this is what was born into you you are consciousness you are loving awareness manifesting through this really bizarre experiment that the cosmos has decided to make you in all the galaxies of the universe there's never been quite something as unique and strange as you and saying all right now let's do something interesting with this you are the cosmos born in this way you are loving awareness the consciousness that is who you are that was born into your body and tiknot han was brought here to san francisco a couple of years ago after he suffered a major stroke at that time he was 89 or 90. he was in france at plum village and for a while in the french hospitals and getting good care but then a friend in silicon valley who is very much a student of tiknon han flew tiknot han and a whole group of his monks and nuns to be here so that they could get really top medical care from uc and stanford and so forth for him and there he was living in san francisco um in a place set up by mark benioff from salesforce i will use his name wonderful friend and in the mornings tiknot han would be rolled in in a wheelchair he couldn't speak and he could just barely move one arm and he had been in considerable pain but they set up one of the rooms where they were all stay as his endo as a meditation hole and he would be wheeled in and the bell would be struck and we would all sit for 40 minutes and tignaton would be there and then they would ring the bell at the end and the last morning before he went back to france he'd been here in the bay area for six months or more for treatment trudy and i went to sit with him and join that group and when the bell was struck at the end of the sitting he deliberately looked around and gazed at the eyes of everyone there you know and he looked at me and i've known him for years he looked at others and trudy is the one that noticed this she said to me do you remember did you look at his eyes because she said and i could see it one eye was tremendously present like he was acknowledging each person that was there this beautiful sense of mindful loving presence she said one eye was here fully present and one eye was on eternity and you could see it as if he was holding here he was 90 years old with a stroke you know he knew the dance of birth and death he'd seen in his whole life one eye on eternity and one eye completely present and where we are and then we went into the kitchen afterward he was taken back by his caregivers and i was sitting with sister chung kong who is the kind of female counterpart and leader in his community for years and years and we were talking about how there was a big retreat happening down at deer park in southern california that very week and i said well because tai tik nathan had this terrible stroke and won't won't be there are people coming anyway and she said oh yeah 600 people are arriving today and then she paused and she said he taught us that we are him and he is us that the community itself is really the carrier of the dharma and he said that in other ways when he said the next buddha to come this world the next buddha is the sangha he taught us that we are him and he is us so as i finish i'd like you to imagine maybe you even can lift your hands up for a moment on either side of your body and imagine that you're holding hands with all the other people who are listening tonight you know there's a thousand or two thousand or ten thousand however many it's quite a few actually and we're all in the circle holding hands together you're the ones that abide that have chosen not to flee known by your goodness and generosity discipline and dedication and the necessity of community feel that we we carry each other in our hearts and in our beings and maybe the only question to ask is what would love have me do today what would love have me do with all of you together what would have love have us do together so with this i thank you for listening

Channel: Jack Kornfield

Views: 44,028

Rating: 4.9366422 out of 5

Keywords: mindfulness, compassion, jackkornfield, spirit rock, meditation, buddhism

Id: VNZyW7_bLLU

Length: 48min 13sec (2893 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020