This is an excerpt fro Jack Kornfield’s podcast, “The Perfection of Patience.”
Listening to his talks have helped me greatly and have given me a lot of insight into my own meditation practice. There is no goal in meditation. The point is to sit with what is here and see it for what it is. Thank you, Jack. You are a treasure.
When you sit in meditation, it’s not so much to gain something. Yes, you can learn to quiet the mind, you can have insights and visions. They’re beautiful things. Some of the time.
Sometimes you sit and what you get is the tension in your body or the unfinished business of the heart – the tears that need to be wept but you’ve been too busy to feel them; or the longing or the love that hasn’t been expressed and you go, “I have to tell that person I love them. I haven’t done that.”
Then you take your seat in the rhythms of birth and death, and gain and loss, and joy and sorrow as the Buddha that you are. And you say “Oh yes, these are the rounds of human incarnation. And now let me rest in the heart and live from a place of presence.”
