Top 279 Quotes & Sayings by Jack Kornfield - Page 5

Skill in concentrating and steadying the mind is the basis for all types of meditation.

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

There is no higher happiness than peace.

Samadhi doesn’t just come of itself; it takes practice.

A factor that greatly supports the opening of energy in practice is exercise and care of the physical body.

We can easily become loyal to our suffering … but it's not the end of the path.

In any moment we can learn to let go of hatred and fear. We can rest in peace, love, and forgiveness. It is never too late. Yet to sustain love we need to develop practices that cultivate and strengthen the natural compassion within us.

When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.

How did we get into this funny-looking body that has a hole at one end in which we regularly stuff dead plants and animals? It's bizarre that we got here, incarnated into this world with these bodies.

The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation.

We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy—material or spiritual.

Yet I knew that spiritual practice is impossible without great dedication, energy, and commitment.

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.

In Buddhist practice, the outward and inward aspects of taking the one seat meet on our meditation cushion.

In sitting on the meditation cushion and assuming the meditation posture, we connect ourselves with the present moment in this body and on this earth.

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

Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice.

Know that the freedom you seek can be found right here where you are.

We can bring our spiritual practice into the streets, into our communities, when we see each realm as a temple, as a place to discover that which is sacred.

No one knows how this world came into being. It is a creation of consciousness itself. It's extraordinary, a mystery.

For most of us, generosity is a quality that must be developed. We have to respect that it will grow gradually; otherwise our spirituality can become idealistic and imitative, acting out the image of generosity before it has become genuine.

The wholeness and freedom we seek is our true nature, who we really are.

Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim—arousing effort to aim the mind toward the object.

We each have been betrayed. Let yourself picture and remember the many ways this is true. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past. Now sense that you can release this burden of pain by gradually extending forgiveness as your heart is ready.

Refraining from stealing: care with material goods. Undertake for one week to act on every single thought of generosity that arises spontaneously in your heart.

We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life.

The way I treat my body is not disconnected from the way I treat my family or the commitment I have to peace on our earth.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

How well we have learned to let go

As desire abates, generosity is born. When we are connected and present, what else is there to do but give?

The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.

Great spiritual traditions are used as a means to ripen us, to bring us face to face with our life, and to help us to see in a new way by developing a stillness of mind and a strength of heart.

When you rest in presence and pure awareness, sometimes everything is experienced as love because you're connected with all that is, and love is simply the nature of being.

Taking the one seat describes two related aspects of spiritual work. Outwardly, it means selecting one practice and teacher among all the possibilities, and inwardly, it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding.

Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future.

Yes, there are troubles in the world. There's war and hatred, there's sickness and difficulty. And there is also an undying spirit, an inviolable consciousness that is born in each of us. It is who we are, and it's everything and it's nothing.

The longing for initiation is universal and for modern youth, it is a desperate need. When nothing is offered in the way of spiritual initiation to prove one's entry into the world of men and women, initiation happens instead in the road or the street, in cars at high speed, with drugs, with dangerous sex, with weapons. However troubling, this behavior is rooted in a fundamental truth; a need to grow.

The path of awakening begins with a step the Buddha called right understanding.

Whatever you believe cosmologically, we all know the tears of the world. We each carry a certain measure of those tears in our hearts.