Loving kindness with Jack Kornfield

Jack Kornfield (insightla.com); Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Crystal Q. (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

When's it safe to love? When's it safe not to?

The Buddha taught that we can develop loving kindness (metta) by visualizing how a caring mother holds her beloved child.

 

Altruistic love is our true nature, but it is often covered over by a protective layer of fear [bhava, the opposite of love, rooted in dosa, aversion/hate].

 

The Buddhist path uses systematic trainings to cultivate love. These trainings are found throughout the Buddhist world. They strengthen our capacity for love, compassion, joy, and peace. The practices that develop these qualities combine repeated thoughts, visualization, and feelings.

 

These trainings have been employed by millions of practitioners to transform their own hearts. 

 

Pick yourself up and love the world. (AP)

Loving-kindness is the first of these trainings. In loving-kindness practice, students visualize themselves and repeat four or five traditional phrases of well-wishing, such as “May I be safe and healthy. May I be happy.” Along with the recitation, a bodily sense of love is established, and feelings of loving-kindness are invited.

 

The marriage of wisdom and compassion

Loving-kindness develops as we repeat these phrases thousands of times, over days and months. I often recommend a year of developing loving-kindness for oneself.

 

Because of the shame and unworthiness most if not all of us carry, loving ourselves becomes a particularly powerful practice [a radical act of self-acceptance].

 

It doesn’t create love; it opens the pathway to the gold of our natural love. Then that love can spill over to touch and bless all that we come in contact with.

• Saturday with Jack Kornfield -- Awakened Heart/Awakening Together Day of Practice at InsightLA's 2018 benefit

Join in on a joyful day of transformative teachings, wonderful stories, heart practices, and awakening together. In these turbulent and divisive times, more than ever we need ways to steady our hearts, calm our minds, clear our vision and inspire our action. We will cultivate the qualities of courage and love, how to dwell in kind awareness, and how to enhance our natural capacity for care and connection, towards ourselves, our society and all beings. Metta and goodwill -- combined with compassion, forgiveness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity -- are the revolutionary and necessary powers that can transform our lives and mend our world.

• Awakened Heart with Jack Kornfield
• 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
• Saturday, November 3rd
• First Presbyterian Church
• Santa Monica CA

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