– Excerpt from A Path With Heart – Jack Kornfield

Even the most exalted states in the most exceptional, spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another in the life, we have been given,  with our hearts. In undertaking the spiritual life, what matters is simple; we must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. Many other visions are offered to us in the modern spiritual marketplace. Great spiritual traditions, offer stories of enlightenment, bliss, knowledge, divine ecstasy, and the highest possibilities of the human spirit . Of the broad range of teaching available to us in the west, often we are first attracted to those glorious glamorous and most extraordinary aspects. Well, the promise of attaining states can come true, and these states do represent the teachings, in one sense they are also one of the advertising techniques of the spiritual trade. They are not the goal of the spiritual life. In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or getting some extraordinary condition or special power. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves if we are not careful, we can easily find the great failures of our modern society –it’s ambition, materialism, and individual isolation – repeated in our spiritual life. In beginning of genuine, spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with our deepest love. Dan, and his teaching to Carlos Castaneda, put it this way. 

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this Path have heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.

The teachings are about finding such a path with heart. And undertaking a path that transforms and touches us in the center of our being. to find a way of practice that allows us to live in the world, whole and fully from our heart. 

It is possible to speak with our Heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart, as if it were a good friend. In modern life, we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have forgotten this essential art of taking time to converse with our own heart. When we ask it about our current path, we must look at the values we have chosen to live by. Where do we put our time, our strength, our creativity, our love? We must look at a life without sentimentality, exaggeration, or idealism. What we are choosing reflects what we most deeply value.

Tradition teaches its followers regard all lives as precious. The astronauts who leave the Earth have also discovered this truth. One set of Russian cosmonaut describe it in this way: we brought up small fish to the space station for certain investigations. We were to be there three months. After three weeks, the fish began to die. How sorry we felt for them. What we didn’t do to try try to save them. On earth we take great pleasure and fishing, but when you are alone and far away from anything to rule, any appearance of life is especially. You see how precious life is.

In the same spirit, one astronaut when his capsule landed open the hatch to smell the moist air of the earth and said “I actually got down and put it to my cheek. I got down and kiss the Earth. “

To see the preciousness of all things, we must bring our full attention to life. Spiritual practice and bring us to this awareness without the aid of a trip into space. As the qualities of the presence and simplicity begin to permeate more and more of our life, our inner love for the earth and all begins to express itself and brings our path alive.

To understand deeply, what the sense of preciousness and how it gives meaning to a heart, let us work with the following meditation. In Buddhist practice, one is urged to consider how to live well by reflecting on one’s death. The traditional meditation for this purpose is to sit quietly and sense the tentativeness of life. After reading this paragraph, close your eyes and feel the mortality of this human body That you have been given. Death is certain for us – only the time of death is yet to be discovered. Imagine yourself to be at the end of your life – next week or next year or next decade, sometime in the future. Ask your memory bank across your whole life and bring to mind two good deeds that you have done, two things that you did that were good. They need not being grandiose; let whatever wants to rise show itself. And picturing and remembering these good deeds, also become aware of how these memories affect your consciousness, how they transform the feelings and state of your heart and mind, as you see them.

When you have completed this reflection, look very carefully at the qualities of the situation, at what is comprised, in a moment of goodness, picked out of a lifetime of words and actions. Almost everyone who was able to remember such deeds in this meditation, discover them to be remarkably simple. They’re rarely the deeds Would put into a résumé. Some people moment of goodness with simply the one when they told their father before he died that they loved him, or when they flew across the country in the midst of their busy life to care for their sisters children, as she was healing from a car accident. One elementary school teacher had a simple vision of those mornings when she held a child who was crying and having a hard day. In response to this meditation, someone once raised her hand, smiled and said “On crowded streets when we get to the parking space at the same time, I always give the parking space to the other person.” This was her good deed. 

Another woman, a nurse in her 60s who had raised children, and grandchildren, had lived a very full life, came up with a memory: she was six years old when a car broke down in front of her house, steams spouting from under the hood. Two elderly people got out and looked at it, and one went after the corner payphone to call a garage. They returned to sit in the car and wait for much of the morning for a toe. As a curious, six-year-old child, she went out to speak to them, and after seeing them wait for a long time in the hot car, she went inside without even asking, she prepared a tray of ice tea sandwiches and carry the tray out to them on the curb.

I think most our lives are not grand. They are the moments when we touch each other when we are there in the most attentive or caring way. simple and profound intimacy is the love that we all along for. Those moments of touching and being touched can become a foundation for a path with heart, and they take place in the most immediate and direct way. Other Theresa put it like this:“ In this life, we cannot do great things we can only do small things with great love.”

Some people find this exercise very difficult. No good deeds will come to their mind, or a few may arise only to be rejected immediately because their judge superficial or smaller impair or imperfect. Does this mean that there are not even too good moments in a lifetime of 100,000 deeds. Hardly. We have had many. It has more profound meaning. It is a reflection of how hard we are in ourselves. We do ourselves so harshly. Many of us discover we have a little mercy for ourselves. We can hardly acknowledge the genuine love and goodness can shine freely from our own hearts. Yet it does.

To live a path with heart means to live in the way, shown us in this meditation, to allow the flavor of goodness to permeate our life. When we bring full attention to our act, we express our love and see the preciousness of life, the quality of goodness. A simple caring presence can begin to permeate more moments of our life. And so we should continue to ask our own heart, what would it mean to live like this. Is the path – the way we have chosen to live our life – leading to this?

In the stress and complexity of our lives, we may forget our deepest intentions. But when people come to the end of their life and look back, the question that they most often ask or not usually, “how much is in my bank account?” or quotation how many books did I write??” or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is aware at the time of his or her death, you find the question such persons asked are very simple: Did I live well? Did I live fully? Did I learn to let go?

The simple questions go to the very center of the spiritual life. When we consider loving well and living, well, we can see the ways are attachments and fears have limited us, and we can see the many opportunities for our hearts to open. Have we let ourselves love the people around us, our family, our community, the earth upon which we live. And did we also learn to let go. Did we learn to live through the changes of life with grace, wisdom, and compassion. Have we learned to forgive and live from the spirit of the heart, instead of the spirit of judgment?

Letting go of Central theme in spiritual practice as we see the preciousness and brevity of life. When letting go is called for, if we have not learned to do so, we suffer greatly, and when we get to the end of our life, we may have what is called a crash course. Sooner or later, we have to learn to let go allow the changing mystery of life to move through us without our faring it, without holding and grasping.

I knew a young woman who sat with her mother during extended of cancer. Part of her mother was in the hospital, hooked up to dozens of tubes and machines. Mother and daughter agreed that the mother did not want to die this way, and when the illness progressed, she was finally removed from all the Medical devices and allowed to go home. Her cancer progressed further still the mother had our time accepting her illness. She tried to run the household from her bed, to pay the bills and oversee all the yuzool affairs life. She struggled with her physical pain, but she struggled more with her inability to let go. One day in the midst of the struggle, much sicker now and a bit confused, she called her daughter to her, and said, “daughter, dear, please now pull the plug,” and her daughter gently pointed out, “mother you’re not plugged in.”  Some of us have a lot to learn about letting go. 

Lighting going and moving through life from one change another brings them of our spiritual being. In the end, we discover that to love and let go can be the same thing. Both ways do not seek to possess. Both allow us to touch each moment of this changing life. And allow us to be, therefore, for whatever rises next.

There’s an old story about a famous rabbi living in Europe, who was visited one day by a man who had traveled by ship from New York to see him. The man came to the great rabbis dwelling, large house on a street in a European city, and was directed tothe Rabbi’s room, which was in the attic. To find the master living in a room with a bed, a chair, and a few books. The man had expected much more. After greeting, he said, “Rabbi, where are your things?, the Rabbi asked in return, “Well, where are yours??” His visitor replied, “But Rabbi, I’m only passing through”, and the master answered, “So am I, so am I. “

To love fully, and live well, requires us to recognize finally that we do not possess our own anything – our homes, our cars, our loved ones, not even our own body. Spiritual joy, wisdom do not come through this decisions, but rather through the capacity to open, to love more fully, and to move and be free in life.

This is not a lesson to be put off. Great teacher explained it this way: “the trouble with you is that you think you have time.” We don’t know how much time we have. What would it be like to live with the knowledge that this may be our last year, our last week, our last day. The light of this question, we can choose a path with heart.

Sometimes it takes a shock to awaken us, to connect uswith our path. Several years ago, I was called to visit a man in San Francisco hospital by his sister. He was in his late 30s and already rich. He had a construction company, a sailboat, ranch, a townhouse. One day when driving along in his BMW who blacked out an examination showed that he had a brain tumor a melanoma, a rapid growing kind of cancer. The doctor said we want to operate on you but I must warn you that the tumor is in the speech and comprehension center. If you remove the tumor, you may lose all of your ability to read, write, to speak and to understand any language. If we don’t operate, you’ll probably have six more weeks to live. Please consider this. We want to operate in the morning. Let us know by then.

I visited this man that evening. He had become very quiet and reflective. As you can imagine, he was in an extraordinary state of consciousness. The awakening will sometimes come from our spiritual practice, but for him, it came through these exceptional circumstances. When we, spoke, this man did not talk about his rancher sailboat. Where he was headed, they don’t take the currency of bank books and BMWs. All that is a value in times of great change is the currency of our heart – the ability and understandings of the heart that have grown in us

20 years before the late 1960s man had done a little meditation, had a little bit of Alan Watts, and when he faced this moment, that is what he drew on, and when he wanted to talk about his spiritual life and understanding of birth and death. After most heartfelt conversation, he stopped to be silent for a time and reflect. Then he turned to me and said, I’ve had enough of talking. Maybe I’ve said too many words. This evening it seems so precious just to have a drink of tapwater or to watch the pigeons on the windowsill of the medical center fly off into the air. They seem so beautiful to me. It’s magical to see a bird go through the air. I’m not finished with life. Maybe I’ll just leave it more silently.

So we asked to have the operation. After 14 hours of surgery by a very fine surgeon, his sister visited him in the recovery room. He looked up at her and said, “good morning.” They had been able to remove the tumor without his losing his speech.

When he left the hospital and recovered from his cancer, his entire changed. He still responsibly completed his business obligations, but he was no longer a workaholic. He spent more time with his family, and he became a counselor for others, diagnosed with cancer and grave illnesses. He spent much of his time in nature and much of his time, touching the people around him with love.

I met him that evening, I might have considered him a spiritual failure because he had done a little spiritual practice, and then quit completely become a businessman. You seem to have forgotten all spiritual values. But when it came down to it when he stopped to reflect in those moments between his life and death, even the little spiritual practice he had to touched became very important to him. We never what orders our learning, and we cannot judge someone spiritual practice quickly easily. All we can do is look into our own heart and ask what matters in the way that we are living. What might lead me to greater openness, honesty, and a deeper capacity to love.

Path include our gifts and creativity. The expression of our heart may be to write books, to build buildings, to create ways for people to serve one another. It may be to teach or to, to serve food or play music. Whatever we choose, the creation of our life must be grounded in our hearts. Our love is the source of all energy to create Connect. If we act without connection to the heart, even the greatest things in our life can become right up and meaningless, or barren. 

The longing for love and the movement of love is underneath all our activities. The happiness we discover in life is not about possessing our owning or even understanding. Instead, it is a discovery of this capacity to love, to have a loving, free, and wise relationship with all life. Such love is not possessive, but arises out of a sense of our own well-being and connection with everything. Therefore it is generous and awful, and it loves the freedom of all things. Out of love, our path and lead us to learn to use our gifts to heal and serve, peace around us, to honor the sacred and life, to bless, whatever we consider, and to wish all things well all things well.

Spiritual life may seem complicated, but in essence it is not. We can find a clarity and simplicity, even in the mist of this complex world when we discover that the quality of the heart we bring to life is what matters most. The beloved poet Ryokan summed this up when he said:

The rain has stopped, the clouds drifted away, and the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure…

Then the moon and the flowers will guide you along the way.

All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states in the most exceptional, spiritual accomplishments are unimportant we cannot be happy, and the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live. This is why it is so difficult and so important to ask this question of ourselves: “am I living my path fully, do I live without regret?”,  so that we can say on whatever day is the end of our life, “Yes, I have lived my path with Heart.“

Healing HeartMind Meditation

Recording by Tarane Sayler