Jack Kornfield

And in every moment of your life there are millions of humans just like you all over the world who are being confronted by situations just like yours, some that are joyful and some that are overwhelming where they are struggling to somehow learn how to survive them. As George Washington Carver said, “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong … because some day in life you will have been all of these. After you learn to see what’s in your mind and learn to release or disidentify with the unhealthy patterns, you will discover a deeper level of liberation. ” When you rest in the present moment with mindfulness, you open to a loving presence which is timeless and beyond the understanding of thought.

How can we cultivate the qualities of mindful loving awareness? How do we listen to the pulse of the world? Mindfulness becomes a gateway for our healing and liberation. The Buddha said there is a healing that takes place when you bring loving awareness to the body.

We can observe wanting and grasping without condemning it, and begin to learn to be aware of this aspect of our nature without being caught up in it. We will gradually see that there are healthy desires and unhealthy desires, those that lead to well-being and those that lead to suffering. As you name the wanting mind and feel it carefully, notice what happens just after it ends, and notice what states then follow. When this happens, some people may feel that their spiritual life has gone awry, but this is the necessary process of unmasking the grasping mind.

In this podcast I’m joined by Chade-Meng Tan for an exploration of how spiritual practice and the search inside ourselves can guide us through our human predicament. Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is an award-winning engineer, international bestselling author, thought leader, movie producer, and philanthropist. Meng led the creation of a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course at Google called Search Inside Yourself and is work has received eight nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Buddha recognized something very important about what happens when we practice the teachings of the Dharma.