Jack Kornfield Mind Quotations

The awakened heart and mind can be experienced as clarity itself, pure knowing.

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.

As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out. But if you say, 'This is what I am, it is a fact that I am going to investigate and understand,' then you can go beyond.

The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are.

There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart.

Train your mind the same way you’d train a puppy: Be patient, be consistent, and have some fun along the way.

Though outer events may be difficult, the key to our happiness is how our mind responds to them.

The quieting of our mind is a political act.

In the West, there's a myth that freedom means free expression-that to follow all desires wherever they take one is true freedom. In fact, as one serves the mind, one sees that following desires, attractions, and repulsions is not at all freedom, but is a kind of bondage. A mind filled with desires and grasping inevitably entails great suffering. Freedom is not to be gained through the ability to perform certain external actions. True freedom is an inward state of being. Once it is attained, no situation in the world can bind one or limit one's freedom.

Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.

Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.

The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind.

The purpose of spiritual life is not to create some special state of mind. A state of mind is always temporary. The purpose is to work directly with the most primary elements of our body and our mind, to see the ways we get trapped by our fears, desires, and anger, to learn directly our capacity for freedom.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

In my experience, psychotherapy at its best is like dual meditation - it's like a container in which you can be compassionate and mindful toward yourself.