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To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free.

Jack Kornfield

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Jack Kornfield
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: July 16
Author
Psychologist
Writer
the United States of America
Meditation
Point
Free
Understand
Life
Insight

More quotes by Jack Kornfield

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To see the preciousness of all things, we must bring our full attention to life
Jack Kornfield
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Though outer events may be difficult, the key to our happiness is how our mind responds to them.
Jack Kornfield
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When we feel anger toward someone, we can consider that they are a being just like us, who has faced much suffering in life.
Jack Kornfield
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To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.
Jack Kornfield
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Each moment of every day is new and then it vanishes. Where is that day? Where is that moment?
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Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well...In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.
Jack Kornfield
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To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises.
Jack Kornfield
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Expressing gratitude to our benefactors is a natural form of love. In fact, some people find loving kindness for themselves so hard, they begin their practice with a benefactor. This too is fine. The rule in loving kindness practice is to follow the way that most easily opens your heart.
Jack Kornfield
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All of spiritual practice is a matter of relationship: to ourselves, to others, to life's situations.
Jack Kornfield
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We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.
Jack Kornfield
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The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person because I need them.” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This isn’t love at all - it is attachment - and attachment is rigid, it is very different from love.
Jack Kornfield
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When repeated difficulties do arise, our first spiritual approach is to acknowledge what is present, naming, softly saying 'sadness, sadness', or 'remembering, remembering', or whatever.
Jack Kornfield
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The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically, through understanding an gradual training.
Jack Kornfield
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The present moment is really all that we have. The only place you can really love another person is in the present. Love in the past is a memory. Love in the future is a fantasy. To be really alive, love - or any other experience - must take place in the present.
Jack Kornfield
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The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion you can weep.
Jack Kornfield
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To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.
Jack Kornfield
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Love is based on our capacity to trust in a reality beyond fear, to trust a timeless truth bigger than all our difficulties.
Jack Kornfield
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To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and betrayals is to accept them and from this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more freedom and compassion than we could imagine.
Jack Kornfield
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Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.
Jack Kornfield
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It is hard to imagine a world without forgiveness. Without forgiveness life would be unbearable. Without forgiveness our lives are chained, forced to carry the sufferings of the past and repeat them with no release.
Jack Kornfield