Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.
Jack KornfieldRead
Wherever you are is the perfect place to awaken. This moment is the exact place to practice compassion and loving awareness. You have all the ingredients to breathe and find freedom just where you are.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that the present moment is the ideal time to cultivate compassion and awareness, regardless of circumstances.
Jack Kornfield's quote suggests that, no matter your location or situation, you have the power to awaken to the present moment and practice compassion and loving awareness. It reminds us that true freedom and the ability to create positive change start from within, and that we have everything we need to embrace our experiences and foster kindness towards ourselves and others.
In practice
During a mindfulness workshop, you might say this quote to encourage participants to embrace their current experience.
Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.
We need courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit. But the place for this warrior strength is in the heart. We need energy, commitment, and courage not to run from our life nor to cover it over with any philosophy-mate rial or spiritual. We need a warrior’s heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities.
The questions asked at the end of lie are very simple ones: Did I love well? Did I love the people around me, my community, the earth, in a deep way? And perhaps, Did I live fully? Did I offer myself to life?
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.
According to Buddhist scriptures, compassion is the "quivering of the pure heart" when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of life.
Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.
People say, on the raft, you must have hallucinated. Baloney. We were sharper after 47 days than the day we started because our minds were empty of all the war and contamination; we had clean minds to fill with good thoughts. Every day we'd exercise our minds.
Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
Pin your faith to no ones sleeves, haven't you two eyes of your own.
Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities-minds unlike any others-and thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
To start from the self and try to understand all things is delusion. To let the self be awakened by all things is enlightenment.
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