A Talk On Healing

Drawing on a range of different schools of wisdom, Jack Kornfield offers us a highly insightful and thought provoking talk on the relationship between healing and mindfulness. Jack's profound insight is both inspiring and empowering.

Transcript

As you listen,

You don't really have to remember anything.

No quiz at the end,

No grades.

This is more than anything a reminder of something you already know.

And if it rings true to you,

Wonderful.

And if it doesn't,

Just let it go.

So I'd like to talk about healing tonight,

But healing is a dimension of liberation.

So we have all these ideas about the world and about one another.

And what does it mean to bring a kind of healing from the disconnect to one another?

You know,

The continuous war and racism and environmental destruction that happens around the world,

Is the separation of people in crazy ways,

Or healing to ourselves.

Now the most important meditation instructions in this insight meditation tradition,

The path of mindfulness,

The Buddha says there is a most wonderful way for living beings to realize purification,

To overcome directly grief and sorrow,

To end pain and anxiety,

To travel the path of compassion and understanding and realize liberation.

And this is the establishment of mindfulness.

There are four establishments of mindfulness,

My friends.

The practitioner remains established in mindfulness of the body in the body.

Very interesting phrase.

Established of mindfulness of the feelings in the feelings.

Established in mindfulness of the mind in the mind.

Established in the mindfulness of the Dharma,

The laws that govern life in the Dharma,

With attention,

Clear,

Mindful,

Free understanding.

And from this,

It goes on,

This is an invitation to freedom,

To the deathless.

So this is healing,

The ending of sorrow and grief,

The coming of liberation through attention and mindfulness.

What's sometimes called the sure hearts release,

Another language for liberation,

In ourselves and in our connection to the world at large.

So how does this happen or grow out of mindfulness?

It comes from the capacity for deep listening.

But a deep listening,

Not the listening with the ears,

But a listening with the heart or the soul or one's being in a way that we don't usually do.

And this comes,

This comes in part by not doing anything.

We're such a busy doing culture.

Mindfulness becomes the quality with which we can actually bring a full presence to the world and say,

Oh,

This is how experiences with its sorrows and its joys and its praise and its blame,

It is a space of attention that liberates us from reacting to and being caught.

So I have a story for you because stories are also the way that we learn.

This is written by Richard Selzer,

Who's a surgeon at Yale.

On the bulletin board in the front hall of the hospital where I work,

There appeared the announcement,

Yeshe Danden will make rounds at 6 o'clock on the morning of June 10th.

The particulars were given followed by the note,

Yeshe Danden is personal physician to the Dalai Lama.

I'm not so leathery a skeptic that I would knowingly ignore an emissary from the gods.

So on the next morning,

June 10th,

I joined the clutch of white coats in the small conference room.

The air in the room is heavy with ill-concealed dubiety and suspicions of bamboozlement.

You know,

Surgeons,

Whatever.

At precisely 6 o'clock,

He materializes a short,

Golden,

Barrel-y man dressed in a sleeveless robe of saffron,

His scalp shaven.

Only visible hair is the black line above each hooded eye.

He bows in greeting while his young interpreter makes the introduction.

Yeshe Danden will examine a patient selected by a member of the staff.

The diagnosis is unknown to him as it is to us.

It will take place in our presence and afterward we will meet and discuss his diagnosis.

We're further informed that for the past few hours,

Yeshe Danden has purified himself by bathing,

Fasting,

And prayer.

I who just gobbled down my breakfast and performed only the most desultory of ablutions have given no thought at all to my soul,

Glance and suddenly my fellow physician seem a rather soiled and uncouth lot.

The patient was awakened early and told that she was to be examined by a foreign doctor and had been asked to produce a fresh specimen of urine.

So when we entered her room,

She showed no surprise.

She had long ago taken on that mixture of compliance and resignation that is the face of chronic illness.

This was another in an endless series of examinations.

Yeshe Danden steps to the bedside while the rest of us stand apart watching.

For a long time he gazes at the woman favoring no part of her body with his eyes but seeming to fix his glance at a place just above her form.

I study her too.

There's no physical sign or symptom that gives a clue to her disease.

At last he takes her hand raising it in both of his own and now he bends over the bed in a kind of crouching stance,

Head drawn down into the collar of his robe.

His eyes are closed as he feels for her pulse and in a moment he's found the spot and for the next half hour he remains thus suspended above the patient like some exotic golden bird with folded wings,

Holding the pulse of the woman beneath his fingers,

Cradling her hand.

All the power of this man seems to be drawn down to the palpation of pulse and where I stand it is though he and the patient have entered a special place of apartness about which no violation is possible.

After a moment the woman rests back on her pillow.

From time to time she raises her head to look at the strange figure above her and then sinks back.

I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is intimate,

Exclusive,

His fingertips receiving the voice of her body through the rhythms of her wrist.

But all at once I am envious,

Not of him,

Not of Jaish-e Dundon for his gift of beauty and holiness,

But of her.

I want to be held like that,

So touched,

So received.

And I know that I who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses have not felt a single one.

At last he straightens,

Places the woman's hand gently on the bed and steps back.

The interpreter produces a small wooden bowl and two sticks and he pours a portion of the urine specimen in the bowl and whips the liquid for several minutes until the foam is raised.

When bowing to the bowl he inhales the odor three times,

Sets the bowl down and turns to leave,

All this without uttering a single word.

As he nears the door the woman raises her head and calls out in a voice urgent and serene,

Thank you doctor,

Thank you,

And touches with her other hand the place he held on her wrist as though to recapture something important that had visited her there.

As she Dundon turns back for a moment to gaze at her and steps into the corridor,

Rounds are at an end.

We're seated in the conference room and he begins to speak in soft Tibetan sounds translated through the young interpreter,

A bilingual fugue like the chanting of monks.

He speaks of winds coursing through the body of the woman,

Currents that break against barriers eddying.

These vortices are in his blood,

He says,

The last spendings of an imperfect heart.

Between the chambers of the heart,

Long before she was born,

A wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must never be opened.

Through it charged the full waters of her river as the mountain stream cascades in springtime,

Battering knocking loose the land and flooding her breath.

He speaks thus in his silent.

May we now have the diagnosis the professor asks.

The host of these rounds,

The only man who knows answers,

Congenital heart disease,

Interventricular septal defect with resultant heart failure.

A gateway in the heart,

I think,

That must not be opened.

Through it charged the full waters that flood her breath.

So here then is the doctor listening to the sounds of the body to which the rest of us would only aspire.

He is more than doctor,

He is priest.

I know the doctor to the gods is pure,

The doctor to the gods is pure knowledge and healing.

The doctor to humans must stumble,

His patients must die as must he.

But now and then it happens as I make my own rounds that I hear the sound of his voice like an ancient Buddhist prayer,

Its meaning long since forgotten,

Only the music remaining.

And then a jubilation possesses me and I feel myself as if touched by something holy.

Here,

In this simple story of Yeshe Danden taking a pulse,

This is the power of the listening heart.

Even in the face of the truths of suffering and potential death and illness and impermanence,

Of the sorrows of the world,

The quality of listening is what allows us to find healing,

To find our right relationship,

Our way through.

There is when we listen,

As Yeshe Danden did,

A trust in the capacity of the heart to face the reality that is in front of us.

The sorrows and the potential dying of this woman in that hospital room and the beauty,

The almost unbearable beauty of life and its great sorrows.

In listening,

The listening heart has the capacity to say,

Ah,

This is the way that it is.

And when we begin to be mindful in this way,

We rest not in the contents of experience,

Although we listen well,

But there comes a way that we listen from the space of awareness itself,

Which is this quality of presence,

Attention.

I sometimes translate mindfulness as a kind of sacred attention because it has such a respect or care in it.

And there's an alchemy that happens when we listen in that way.

I mean,

I remember Voltaire,

I think,

Was the one who said that most of medicine consists of the doctor amusing the patient while nature heals or something like that,

Right?

Because in truth,

Medicine,

Even the great stuff in modern medicine,

Very rarely is actually the healing.

It cleans things,

It provides the opportunity for the body and life force to heal itself.

So how does this connect with mindfulness,

The foundations of mindfulness as the gateway to liberation and healing?

First,

The body in the body,

That phrase.

And there are different extremes as we pay attention to this weird thing called human incarnation that I like to talk about,

This thing with the hole at one end and with the witch who regularly stuff dead plants and animals and glug them down through the tube.

It's bizarre.

And then you're in there,

Here you are,

Okay,

You're stuck,

You're human.

So one extreme is to fear about the body,

Oh my God,

And grasp it and try and botox it and exercise it.

And those are,

They're fine,

But in some way in which you get really overly attached to it.

That's one extreme.

The other side is to ignore it.

Mindfulness,

The Buddha's invitation for wisdom and healing is to come into a mindful relationship of the body in the body,

To rest in the breath and the awareness of what is so within this very body.

And of course as you sit down to meditate and you think,

Okay,

I'm now going to get nice and peaceful and quiet,

With the body,

One of the first things that happens is all the stuff that you carry,

Because you've been running around busy and whenever there was conflict or difficulty,

Your jaw gets tighter,

Your back gets tighter,

All the places you hold the tension,

You get nice and peaceful and then your body says,

Hey,

Remember me,

And you feel your jaw and you feel your shoulders and the tension and pains and troubles that you carry reveal themselves.

The body presents its bill,

Basically,

If you haven't paid attention to it,

If you haven't paid the bill,

It presents it,

It does.

So you sit in meditation and sometimes it's painful and sometimes it's pleasant,

Sometimes tingling and hot and cold and release and all of these different things that come and sometimes the deeper wounds of the body.

And the big question is,

How do you touch this body?

Always trying to fix it,

Oh,

Let me lower the shoulder and change this and do that,

You know,

Or trying to get away from it because I don't like the way it looks,

You know that one,

Or scared by it because it's getting older or it hurts or who knows what could happen,

Ignoring it.

How do you touch it?

And how do you touch the difficulty in the body?

To touch it with mindfulness is the benevolent attention,

It's really this space of love and it's also fearless.

It says,

Yes,

This is the human life we've been given,

Let me pay deep attention.

It's like when things are difficult,

You hold the child who is ill,

You know,

Sometimes the child's crying and you've given this baby medicine and they're still crying,

They're still sick.

You hold that which is difficult in the body like a child and all of a sudden the place that was tight or hurts or wounded or all the things that are there,

It starts to open and say,

Yes,

Energy comes back,

Life comes back.

So with mindfulness we begin to pay attention and begin to notice what it's like to stay in the presence of this body and to listen to it.

And as we listen deeply,

The way Yeshe Dandana listened,

First there's a healing that comes just in the attention,

You know this,

Just being held.

Then there's a healing because understanding comes,

Should we be eating this,

Should we not,

We pay attention to what goes in the body,

Should we be acting this way or not,

The body teaches us.

And maybe even more deeply,

It teaches us the reality of its vulnerability,

Its aging,

Its inevitable sickness,

That you don't own it.

I mean if you look in the mirror,

As I like to say,

You notice that the body is aged,

Right?

Come on,

Right?

Less hair here,

Wrinkles there,

Whatever.

But the weird thing is that you don't feel older.

And that's because it's only the body that's aged.

And from the perspective of looking in the mirror,

It's a quite wild thing for a human being to do because there's a place of knowing,

The space of awareness or consciousness that sees that's not the body.

It says,

Oh look,

It's gotten older,

It's droopier,

It's doing this or that,

You know.

That's not who we are.

We rent it,

We use it,

We have it,

We can treasure it,

But you're not the,

How did you get in there?

I mean come on,

You know.

And so mindfulness allows both the healing attention and also the wisdom to see not the fear of the body,

The fear of the attachment,

But the wisdom of the body,

That it's a vehicle.

Reflect for a moment,

How have you listened to your body,

How have you touched it?

What kind of attention would it want?

What is the deep truth that your body is teaching you?

When you listen in this way,

You also discover that it's not your body,

It's the earth's body.

It's made of calcium and the various minerals that make up your bones and the sea water that's your blood,

Your rain water and you know,

Not to speak of asparagus and French brie and all those things that you,

I mean that's what your body,

You are of the earth and because you're of the earth,

It's not just the body but something bigger that you extend to,

You're the earth come alive.

It turns out that as we listen deeply,

The body also connects us back to the earth and we start to sense in this profound way that we are not separate,

But that to take care of our body means to take care of the streams and the rivers and the earth.

If I had the influence with the good fairies who are supposed to preside over the birth of all children,

Wrote Rachel Carlson,

I should ask one thing,

That her gift to each child in this world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout their life and especially wonder for this world we're in,

The breath of the mist that comes over the Golden Gate Bridge.

There's a healing and you know it that comes in attention to the body in a wise way,

This mysterious body and the body of the earth and the listening that we need individually and collectively.

One foundation of mindfulness is feelings in the feelings.

It's hard to tell what's the most important,

You know this is a really important one too because all this insanity happens in the world,

People don't know what to do with their emotions,

Nuclear giants and emotional infants.

But what is healing and liberation with feelings,

Just as there's liberation with the body to know that it's the body's body,

We can tend it but we can't own it.

That's not who we are.

With feelings in the feelings.

I have this list,

I started a copy from some psychological text of 500 feelings,

Affectionate,

Ambitious,

Aggressive,

Angry,

Amused,

Antagonistic,

Antsy,

Apathetic,

Apoplectic,

Appreciative,

Argumentative,

Blissful,

Broken hearted,

Bored,

Bonkers,

Bad,

Calm,

Cheerful,

Claustrophobic,

Concentrated,

Contracted,

Curious,

Concerned,

Compassionate,

Defiant,

Delighted,

Depressed,

Disheartened,

Disillusioned,

Desirous,

Driven,

Dull.

I mean wow.

C.

S.

Lewis writes,

A zoo of lusts,

A bedlam of ambitions,

A nursery of fears,

A harem of fondled hatreds,

Look inside if you want to see the real zoo.

So what is mindfulness?

The first step is simply to know feelings.

And often Buddhism emphasizes emotions as problems,

Afflictive emotions,

Greed,

Hatred,

Jealousy,

Fear,

You know the fondled hatreds,

The nursery of fears that C.

S.

Lewis speaks about.

I don't think that's really that helpful.

William Blake,

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine and under every grief and pine runs a joy with silk and twine.

It is right it should be so for man was made for joy and woe and when this we rightly know through the world we safely go.

There's poems of innocence and experience from his mystical visions that joy and sorrow are woven together.

You can't have one without the other.

You can't have birth without death or pleasure and not pain or you can't have light without dark.

It doesn't work.

The fabric of duality which makes the universe from the big flash at the beginning that you are,

Stardust that's congealed on this planet,

It's what you are,

Works with duality.

And the wisdom of emotions is that the emotions themselves are not the problem.

It is what is our relationship to them.

Are we lost in them?

Are we frightened of them?

But if you can make space to see the emotions as they arise and to hold them with compassion and wisdom,

This is anger.

Anger has some truth in it.

It also has some delusion in it.

You can see it when you look clearly.

And this is love.

Love has some truth in it.

It also can have some delusion in it and I'm sure you've noticed,

Right?

And so the practice becomes mindful of the river of emotions.

Just as there's a river of sensations,

There's a river of emotions.

And sometimes when we begin to sit,

What happens is we feel the unfinished business in the heart.

You sit and try to get quiet and the person that you know you haven't mourned because you've been running around too much and that you lost or the relationship that ended or the thing that was so painful,

It comes and it knocks and it says,

Remember me.

And you have the tears to grieve that are part of the way of meditation very,

Very deeply.

And sometimes in your meditation you weep for your own traumas and sorrows of your life or the suffering of the world around you,

This great pain that we carry.

And your meditation becomes like a shrine.

Many of you will know the very wonderful book Black Elk Speaks.

It's one of the great Native American medicine men of the last more than 100 years by John Neihardt's conversations with him,

Helping him write this.

In the last chapter of this amazing book,

Neihardt's there with Black Elk and he wants to take a final hike up this mountain,

Harney Peak.

And here he is,

The Sioux Holy Man,

Explained that when death approached,

A Lakota could climb this mountain to see if the Great Spirit approved of their life and rain would fall on those who had the Great Spirit's approval.

Rain was a blessing.

As a young man,

Black Elk had this great shaman's vision that told him how to save his people and homeland from the settlers and soldiers.

In all his years he worked to fulfill the vision of the world as a sacred hoop that contained room for all.

But he felt he may have failed in this and that the sacred hoop was broken.

The day of his climb,

Black Elk was an old man.

He dressed in red long johns,

Moccasins,

War paint,

And a feathered warhead dress.

Slowly and laboriously he climbed to the summit.

He was oblivious to the summer tourists who stared at him.

And Neihardt teased him that he should have picked a day with at least one rain cloud in the sky,

But Black Elk rebuked him saying the rain would have nothing to do with the weather.

And at the top of the peak,

Not far from all the tourists,

The old man lay down under a blue sky.

And to his astonishment,

Neihardt watched as a few small clouds immediately formed over Black Elk and a soft rain began to fall.

And Black Elk wept with relief.

He felt that even though he had not succeeded in fulfilling his vision,

The great spirit was signaling that he had done his best.

There's a kind of grace that comes when we're willing to sit and own our measure of fear and longing and the great love that's in us,

Which it is in every single one of us.

Our Buddha nature,

Our true nature wants to love and be loved.

And all the impediments that come as these emotions and a healing that takes place when we allow them to come and go and be met in the space of truth,

The space of awareness.

The feelings in the feelings,

They liberate themselves through our attention.

And we become the space of the Buddha that says,

Aha,

This too.

Gee,

I have a few more minutes and two more foundations,

No problem.

Mind in the mind.

Who is your enemy?

Asks the Buddha.

Mind is your enemy.

No one can harm you more than your own mind untamed.

It's truth,

Isn't it?

Not the worst enemy.

Who is your friend?

Mind is your friend.

No one can help you,

Not even the most loving mother or father,

More than your own mind and heart,

Wisely trained.

So what does it mean to be aware of mind in the mind?

Just as there's a river of these 500 emotions always passing through,

There's a river of thoughts.

You sit for a moment quietly and what happens?

Does the mind get quiet?

Most people find that what they experience is the inner waterfall,

This huge stream of thoughts.

It's like that cartoon I like to speak about from the New Yorker,

The car crossing the Utah desert,

This vast landscape and the roadside sign that says,

Your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles.

And the thing about the mind,

Someone said there are 67,

000 thoughts a day,

I think that's a little high,

Maybe it's 37,

000,

But whatever,

Is that it has no pride.

It will tell any kind of story and beliefs,

Trivia,

Movies,

Songs,

Commercials,

You know,

And mostly it's reruns.

It's like you pick up the remote and you're stuck in the middle of the night in a hotel room and it's only on one channel,

A bad channel,

You know,

Some combination of crappy jewelry mixed together with some kitchen supplies or something like that.

And then the story is about your last love affair and how you're a failure and what you're going to do and so on.

And you can't change the channel.

I mean,

It's crazy in there.

Have you noticed,

Mostly?

Marcus Aurelius writes,

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

But what do we do with these stories,

The stories of anxiety and fear?

I always quote Mark Twain where he says,

My life was filled with terrible misfortunes,

Most of which never happened,

Right?

So we know this,

I mean,

Fear is always something that hasn't happened,

Some imagination.

But then there's optimism on the other side.

Oh,

No need for a medical checkup,

Just a little lump,

Right?

Pessimism is equally bad.

We get blinded by thoughts and the thoughts have all these different characters,

The judge and the tyrant and the fussy child and the overzealous bureaucrat,

You know,

The bureaucracy of ego in there.

You've seen it,

Right?

And the,

You know,

The spiritual voice,

Right?

And the,

You know,

And there's the loving voice.

There's all these kinds of voices that come and all these reruns of stories.

So what do you do?

My teacher,

Nisargadatta,

Said,

The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.

Do you take your thoughts seriously?

I mean,

They're useful.

You need a plan to a certain extent and figure things out.

But you could do with about 90% less and do all the analysis you need.

I mean,

Who's the master and who's the servant here?

Thoughts make a good servant and not a terribly good master.

So we need to listen in a different way.

And in one way,

There's a limited way we can train the mind and quiet it some and purify it,

Like taking its pulse,

See its patterns,

See how impermanent thoughts are.

They're like clouds that come through,

All this whole stream of them.

You don't have to believe them all.

But the other,

Even more important,

Yes,

You need to see what's in your mind and see the patterns you get caught in.

This is part of the liberation of mindfulness.

But the other part,

Even deeper,

The healing,

Is to step into that which is timeless,

To rest in the eternal present of awareness,

To be here and now with the mind like sky and the heart open.

And you say,

Yeah,

There are all these thoughts and here we are.

Here we are in the presence of a person we love,

You know,

With a glass of Chardonnay or a beautiful spring pear tree that's blooming,

Being alive.

And so the mind creates the abyss.

These people are different.

I'm this way.

It should all be some other way than it is.

All those stories,

Some of which are useful,

Many of which aren't,

And the heart crosses it.

And the heart is the big heart,

The spacious heart that says,

Yeah,

Here are the stories and here are the visions and so forth,

But this is not who we really are.

Ajahn Chah,

My teacher,

Puts it this way.

He says,

We human beings are constantly in combat at war to escape the fact of being limited,

Limited by so many circumstances we can't control.

It's true,

Isn't it,

By our bodies and fate.

But instead of escaping,

We continue to create suffering,

Waging war with good,

Waging war with evil,

Waging war with what's too small,

Or waging war with what's too big,

Waging war with what's too short,

Or too long,

Right or wrong,

Courageously carrying on the battle.

Why not step out of the battle?

And to do this,

Mindfulness of the mind allows us to,

With the mind,

To observe the thinking mind.

And no,

That's not all there is to the mind.

The mind also has spaciousness and love and wisdom and intuition and a deep freedom that's not bound by the stories.

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity,

Writes Thomas Merton,

A silence that is a fountain of action and joy.

It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all creation.

This is meditation,

To rest in some vast silence which we are always surrounded by.

And the breath breathes itself and the feelings come and go and the body releases its tension and the thoughts,

The river stream comes and there's a sense of the vastness.

The question is not the future of humanity,

As I like to say,

But the presence of eternity,

The returning to that which is timeless,

From which wisdom in our own life and wisdom to those around us and wisdom to the earth that we share comes so naturally.

And the last of the foundations of mindfulness,

Mindfulness of the Dharma in the Dharma.

Dharma is a complicated word in Sanskrit because it has several meanings.

It means truth,

It means the path,

So the Dharma of the Buddha is the Buddha's way,

It means the elements that make up life.

But in this case it's really the truth of the way things are,

The process,

The very characteristics that make up incarnation in this world of physicality and spirit that we're born into.

And when we turn from the body in the body and make our peace with the body in a wise way,

The feelings in the feelings and see the river and understand that we contain it all and the mind in the mind and see all those thoughts and rest in the vastness,

Then there comes the Dharma in the Dharma,

An understanding and a healing of emptiness,

Openness,

Letting go.

See how I can describe this to you.

Every time we pay attention we become emptier and the more empty we become the more healing space there is to know what's so and rest in a place of wisdom and love.

And at the center of the Buddha's awakening on the night of his enlightenment he saw the truth of suffering,

That human life contains loss and suffering.

You really not have that.

So raise your hand,

You can have your eight dollars back.

Joy and sorrow,

Praise and blame,

Gain and loss,

Light and dark,

Pleasure and pain,

Birth and death,

It's woven in this way.

He saw that this was so.

He saw the river of life which is impermanent and that no moment can ever be repeated,

That it's always new.

And he began to rest in the reality of the present.

Zen Master Suzuki Roshi says,

When we realize the fact that everything is impermanent and find our composure in it,

We find ourselves in nirvana.

And so there sat the Buddha seeing the dance of life that you,

It's not something you have to fix,

You tend it and you love it,

But you can't fix impermanence and you can't fix the fact of aging or suffering,

It's just part of it.

You also can't fix joy and love,

Those are part of it and ecstasy and beauty.

He saw the dance of life and he saw how it could be lived from a small sense of self,

What we call the body of fear,

Clinging,

And he realized that that was the life of struggle and the life of sorrow and the life of confusion and of greed and fear.

And in releasing that,

He saw that life was open and free and empty,

That it could be for every single being.

Like a star at dawn,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

An echo,

A phantom,

A rainbow,

A dream.

And the whole sense of identity shifted.

You live in illusion and the appearance of things,

Says Kala Rinpoche.

You live in illusion and the appearance of things.

There is a reality but you do not know this.

When you understand you will see that you are nothing.

And being nothing,

You are everything.

That is all.

And this isn't a philosophy,

It's a direct immediate,

You could call it mystical but it's a human experience.

That the sense of separateness falls away and we all know it even in our own ways,

Making love,

Walking in the mountains,

Listening to amazing music,

You know,

You've tried it a hundred ways and you all know it's true.

And for the Buddha there was this shift of identity from the small sense of self to a space of infinite freedom.

And the same for you from mindfulness.

A bear paced up and down the twenty foot length of its cage when after fifteen years the cage was removed.

The bear continued to pace up and down the same twenty foot length as if the cage were still there.

It's a true story from a zoo.

We do the same thing,

We get this habit of who we think we are.

And there's conditions and we speak a certain language and have a culture,

That's not who you are.

That's conditions and culture.

Who you are is vastness.

And so there's this shift from the small sense of self to the space of freedom and presence and timelessness.

And with this comes a kind of deep listening that knows that we don't possess anything.

We rent the body like a car from Avis or something like that.

You have to care for it,

You know,

Otherwise you have to pay at the end,

Right?

But you don't own it.

You don't own your children.

They don't want to be owned.

You'll find that out.

They want to be loved,

Intended and cared for but they have their own sovereignty,

Their own life.

So you see with the deep listening like Yeshe Danden that you don't own things.

And instead there comes a spacious emptiness that gets filled with love.

Zhuang Tzu writes,

If a person is crossing a river in an empty boat collides with their own skiff,

They will push it away without shouting or without being angry.

But if there's a man in the boat,

They will shout at him to steer clear and shout yet again and become angry and all because there is someone in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

They would not be shouting and not be angry.

If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you and no one will seek to harm you.

And this is important to clarify because there are some people who have a kind of unworthiness and their boat is,

It's not empty,

It's actually full of unworthiness.

You understand what I'm saying?

And so you sisters and brothers of that kind,

You've got to stand up for yourself and fill your boat with a kind of wise emptiness and not unworthiness.

He's not talking about that.

He's talking about something you know what he's talking about.

He's talking about a space of freedom in the heart that's not about smallness or not owning the glory that you are but letting the glory that you are shine all by itself without making something special of it and combat with other.

Oh nobly born,

Say the Buddhist text,

Remember this true nature of awareness.

Rest in it.

Let the thoughts and feelings,

The body,

All these things come and go like clouds of the sky,

This mystery.

And live in joy even in the midst of this changing world.

There is in each of us a longing for wholeness and freedom.

We search for it in all different ways.

This little poem from Chief Crowfoot,

He says,

What is life?

It is the flash of a firefly in the night.

It is the breath of a buffalo in wintertime.

It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

It's ephemeral and precious and beautiful and mysterious.

And when we begin to train ourselves and return to this space of mindfulness which liberates us from fears and confusions and conflict and attachment,

Not because they're not there,

But because they're going to meet fears and confusion,

Conflict and attachment that show themselves.

Oh,

This is fear.

Fear,

Fear,

Fear,

Fear.

Oh God,

Terror,

Terror,

Okay.

This is attachment,

This is longing.

You get to know them all,

The menagerie.

But there is a way in which this liberation,

The space of knowing allows for it and you rest in the great heart of a Buddha.

As the Ojibwe say,

You've all heard this,

Sometimes I go about pitying myself when all the while I'm being carried by great winds across the sky.

And here's Yeshe Danden listening,

You know,

With this incredible art to the pulse of a person to know these,

You know,

Deep truths of their body.

Your body wants to be listened to and attended to and listened with compassion and wisdom,

Understanding.

Your emotions want this.

The mind wants understanding and more than that,

Your dance in the world and all those around you,

They want your listening too.

And it's not like it's some grim duty or some onerous thing that you have to do.

It's beautiful.

It's tough sometimes because you have to open to things that you might be frightened of,

But it's perfectly safe,

You know,

Because you're human and this is what you're supposed to do.

And in your humanity comes a kind of salvation.

In your humanity awakens your Buddha nature.

Thank you.

Reviews

Oh, the wisdom or however you use your words. Like a big beautiful hug for my brain.
I have much gratitude in my heart after listening to you. And so many others here on insight timer. 🌹🙏❤️

Wow, what an amazing, enlightening talk. Such beautiful wisdom so clearly spoken. Thank you! ❤️

Just what I needed for this time in my body’s experience of this life

You have a divine sense of humor! Your presentation was very insightful and profound. It was so full of wisdom. I will come back to this often.

A thoroughly enjoyable talk with so much wisdom shared in such a compassionate and comprehensible manner.

Thoroughly enjoyed this talk. A good reminder for how healing is an effort on our part and not solely in the hands of medical professionals. Highly recommend for those who are new to thinking about health and healing outside of the conventional western medical system.

Deeply moving, thought provoking and insightful talk. Definitely will return again. Namaste 🙏🏼

I've been listening to you ever din e you spoke on Maui some :0 years ago,
I found this talk to be so full of wisdom and compassion
Thank you dear one

Beautiful, deeply insightful and delightfully funny. Thank you!

Thank you for this powerful message. I had a DVT of my arm which my Dr disregarded as superficial and to keep training. I continued. Eventually my vein was completely hard. He never actually felt my arm as he had to interact with his laptop. I was treated for the clot in emergency with kindness and caring and listening. Your story includes so many lessons to tune into for healing and awareness. Thank you so much.

How was that?
I vote Jack Kornfield for president!

Great as always. Harmonious, insightful, clear, precise, relevant and entertaining.

Profound, thought provoking. Definitely deserves multiple listens.

So profound and healing 🤍 a great and ancient wisdom 🙏

What a lovely talk. His stories go straight to the heart. Straight to the depths.

Very detailed. The poetry was on point and relatable. Thanks

Beyond words. Thank you Jack. My best friend just lost her father unexpectedly and this was a beautiful comfort for me and I will share your words with her. As always have my unending gratitude 🙏. Thank you Jack! May soft rain fall upon you so that you too will know you have done your BEST.
Metta and love,
Patty

Jack is the best! His teachings are so appropriate for the western society beginner! I think his teachings will bring Buddhism to the American people who are less likely to believe in such things as rebirth or suffering as an opportunity!

You I felt my soul being healed by your inspirational message

Great talk with good meaningful stories, thank you 🙏