Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 42-minute 1977 meditation retreat teaching from Camp Cedar Glen, Jack Kornfield addresses fundamental questions about purpose and freedom that bring practitioners together, starting with the common illusion that enlightenment comes from pursuing an ideal rather than from seeing clearly. He emphasizes two foundational qualities: patience as a form of surrender and spaciousness without judgment, illustrated through stories of Zen masters like Su Yun and teachers from Burma who embody a long-enduring, unrushed mind. Kornfield walks through the natural difficulties that arise in early practice—sleepiness, restlessness, pain, self-doubt—explaining these as healthy release rather than failure, and addresses the common trap of judging one’s meditation against others. He concludes by teaching a loving-kindness meditation practice, which cultivates compassion alongside Vipassana awareness, emphasizing the balance of discipline and lightness needed for the practice to unfold naturally. The tone is warm and accessible, spoken directly to a group of beginning-to-intermediate retreat participants.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 C CG.mp3
UUID: ed47dfaf-fd15-4e20-85a3-9d8ab4390c45
Teacher: Jack Cornfield
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Jack Cornfield)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,928
This recording of Jack Kornfield was made on April third, nineteen seventy-seven at a two-week meditation retreat in Julian, California. Welcome to the steep path. Some people may be wondering, as Joseph mentioned last night, why they’re here or looking around. At times one gets the impression of rather than being at a meditation retreat, perhaps being at some kind of strange mental hospital. People walking around like zombies and eating slowly and kind of strange-looking society.
Perhaps we can find some perspective to understand what’s happening here in a useful way. We come for different reasons. Some people have come looking for some kind of happiness, supposed to come from meditation. Some people perhaps come for finding some kind of understanding or even enlightenment, some for peace of mind, others just to find out what this is about. But underlying all of these, I think we all share the same predicament, the same basic question.
And that is the question that could be posed as who are we? Or what is our life about? How come we were born into a human body in this form and grow old and die? What for? What is the purpose of this?
And what is the best way to work with it, to relate to it, to be fulfilled or peaceful or happy? There are a lot of difficulties at times in the beginning of meditation practice and a lot of distractions that occur. It’s helpful if we remember that one of the purposes of coming together is to take the time in our life to really look at this very fundamental kind of question. To take time away from having just to get enough money to feed ourselves or take care of our family or fulfill our job responsibilities. To really look into the more basic questions of what our life is about.
A very fundamental understanding in this practice and in spiritual practice in general is that enlightenment, liberation, freedom doesn’t come from something that you do. Doesn’t come from setting up an ideal and trying to attain it, doesn’t come from grasping or trying to become a certain way. Because as long as there’s still someone trying to become something, there’s a sense of struggle. There’s a sense of separation of an ideal as apart from what’s real. That in fact, understanding and freedom which comes from understanding comes from seeing clearly.
It comes from wisdom, comes from knowing through our direct experience the nature of things, of how things are. And the more clearly that we can see, be open to, experience what the nature of our body, of our mind, of our whole world is, more honestly we can see that, then the greater freedom we’ll have. That freedom will be a kind of relief, actually, from a struggle of trying to get it to be some particular way, the blessing of seeing how things really are, coming to a kind of peace. There are two qualities of mind particularly helpful in this early stage in practice for many of us and as practice goes along. The first of them, which I mentioned on the first evening, is the quality of patience, a kind of contentment and ability to be with things without a sense of rush.
You know, in our culture, for most of us, life is a very speedy affair. We rush a lot to get things, to become something, to finish something, to do something. Here, we’re taking the time to slow down, to stop the rush. We’re not really going anywhere. At times we’ve done the walking meditation, especially in crowded retreats, by simply having people walk in place.
You lift your foot and then you put it down. You lift the other foot and put it down. That’s really the essence of the practice, to learn to become aware without trying to gain something. You can see it when you walk back and forth on the path. And at first the mind says, well gee, you start to get caught up in how soon you’ll get to the end so you can turn around and then walk back to the other end.
After a while you start to learn. It’s interesting spending time again in Asia, especially the years I spent prior to this trip. It’s a more common thing in that culture than in American culture for people to be able to sit still and not do anything and feel okay about it. I used to have friends who would come and visit me. They would come into my house and sit down and share the space.
And then they’d get up and leave sometime later. In this country, you go into someone’s house, especially if they don’t have time to engage you in conversation. They’ll turn on the TV. They’ll give you something to read. Anything to make sure that you have something to do.
Heavens, to just sit and be bored, to be with yourself. Really unacceptable thing. So we take time to be still and to stop doing to some extent. Patience. Just learning to sit and be and be with our mind, to walk.
The first summer that Joseph and I began to teach in this country several years ago, we were teaching together at Naropa Institute, which is a Buddhist-style university in Colorado. And I remember one night in a talk, in the evening there were large lectures by Ram Dass and by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Lama. Someone who had been practicing the path of devotion got up in one of Rinpoche’s lectures and raised her hand. And in a very excited kind of emotional way said, Rinpoche, isn’t there anything like grace in Buddhism? And he responded, yes, which surprised a lot of people.
He said, patience. Patience isn’t that sense of waiting for it to get better, waiting for something else to happen. But it’s more a sense of surrender, of allowing yourself to be with what’s happening and to see it. The most famous Chinese Zen master of the century is a man named Xu Yun, and I studied with one of his disciples. He died in nineteen fifty-nine at the age of one hundred and twenty.
And there are several books around, translations of his talks and teachings. He started practice as a very young boy in China, and he spent ten years practicing mantra practice. Then he spent twenty years doing Zen practice in several different Zen monasteries. He spent ten years on a pilgrimage walking from China to India to different holy places. He spent five years walking around a holy mountain in the Himalayas, prostrating every step.
He spent ten years doing Pure Land practice. And when he became aged, about seventy, he started to teach. And he taught for fifty years after that. One of the messages that he repeated often in that which is translated of his teachings is to cultivate what he called a long-enduring mind. That there’s no rush, that a sense of rush of attainment of trying to get something is really a very different direction than that of spiritual practice. Patience.
To allow yourself to be with and settle into what your experience is rather than trying to create it or change it to be different. In the Christian tradition, there’s a beautiful book by Saint John of the Cross called Dark Night of the Soul, which talks about someone’s spiritual journey and the patience and the difficulties at times involved with that. Suzuki Roshi, when talking about patience, said something very helpful. He said, in fact, patience for him wasn’t the right word, again because it implied some dissatisfaction. And so his word was to use the word constancy, to learn how to be with that which is in each moment in a full and a total way.
Patience with yourself. Patience with the people around you. One of the repeated messages of my teacher, Ajahn Chah, was to pay attention to your own practice. It was very easy in the beginning of practice when I was in this monastery, as things were difficult, and they are when you begin practice, I began to get annoyed and I would look around and find fault with everyone around me. These monks aren’t practicing the right way and the practice, the schedule was wrong. If it were a little different, then it would be okay and it would work right.
And the mind, on finding the discomfort of stopping with very little to do, fills itself often with worries, with looking outside of itself, with comparisons and judgments, all kinds of old tapes and resentments, health problems. People come to retreats and all of a sudden they discover they have horrible diseases. Or they remember important unfinished business that they had years to do, but now is the time they have to go and finish it. And the mind is full of tricks. At times it can be entertaining if you’re willing to be light and laugh about it.
At times it’s less than entertaining, you can see. And then all the questions, am I doing it right? Maybe I should sit in a different posture. My breath is faster than it should be, slower than it should be. All these kind of things coming up. Natural.
Really very much a part of the beginning of a retreat. In doing interviews today, almost everyone came to me and said they were doing okay and they had these kind of difficulties. And they said, everyone else seemed so still. Seemed like everyone else was doing so well but them. Sitting and I’m feeling terribly sleepy and everyone else seemed so bright.
Or my mind is so restless and everyone else seems so peaceful and calm. If it were possible to tap into the minds in this room and put them on a loudspeaker, the din, I’m sure. About a third of you are sleepy and a third of you are restless and a third of you are having trouble with boredom and pain. And once in a while you switch.
There are exceptions. It’s all really natural in the beginning. It’s kind of a process of healing in a sense, you know, healing in the mind as well as healing in the body, making space. If you cut yourself, if you cut your hand, the best way for it to heal is for you to keep it clean and perhaps put some antiseptic on it so the bacteria and things don’t grow too much, and then to give it space and time for it to heal itself. And that’s really very much true with the mind as well.
We’re kind of going through a process of release with the body. You can feel it, pains and tensions. A lot of that is a release. And equally much with the mind, making a kind of space in which all kinds of stuff will come up and be there for a while. And if you’re not reacting too much, not too caught up, there’s a kind of release and the mind settles, comes to its own natural balance.
The keys are a kind of spaciousness and not judging, an open kind of awareness. The process goes by itself. You don’t have to worry about if the retreat is going right or if your practice is right. Just to put in the time and be present, be patient. I went to Ajahn Chah one time, my teacher, and I said, gee, isn’t meditation sort of like a kind of hypnosis, learning to hypnotize ourselves?
He said, in fact, it’s much more like dehypnosis. Most of the time we’re so caught up in our habits around eating, around relating to one another, relating to ourselves through the day. Beginning to slow down and take the space to act not just out of habit, to be able to see intentions and things arise in the mind and to act in such a way that there is choice, that we can see more clearly. Yet the stuff keeps coming up.
Don’t think it’s going to end. You’re patient. You have to be patient a long time, a long-enduring mind. There was a student of ours, I’ll mention her by name, I think she would like it actually, who’s a psychologist some of you may know named Stella Resnick. She came to a retreat in Massachusetts, and she’d done a lot of kinds of awareness training and different kinds of practice before coming to the retreat.
And unfortunately came several days late, which made it even more difficult to start. She came to sit and practice, and she was doing the practice of paying attention to the rising, falling movement of the abdomen. The first day she sat and, thinking herself having had much training in awareness and in working with the mind, she expected she would be able to do it very easily. And it was difficult. And the second day came, it was even more difficult.
And she got more frustrated, trying to make the mind stay and the mind wouldn’t. And she said at some point, sort of halfway through the second day, she was listening to herself through the meditation: rising, falling. And it had changed in her mind somehow instead to be rising, failing, rising, failing. Besides a sense of patience, of constancy, the other element, the other quality that’s really helpful is a sense of humor about your practice, a kind of spaciousness, a kind of love in your mind that doesn’t get caught up and isn’t judgmental. Keeping a beginner’s mind.
And it’s as important for old students, people who’ve done many retreats and lots of practice, as it is for new students not to have expectations, to be able to see when you sit down what’s going to happen, to be open to that rather than having some idea of what’s going to happen. Sit down and see what will happen this time, keeping a kind of sense of humor and a spaciousness that can be translated in other terms as loving-kindness. Being loving, compassionate towards yourself, other people. And the trip that we took was interesting. We met both some young teachers and some older, more established teachers.
One very interesting and helpful teacher we met in Burma was named U Janaka Sayadaw. He was fairly young, and he asked us about our practice and told us about his teaching and was very excited about the Dharma training in America and wanted to come and teach lots of people, and it was a wonderful energy to experience. And we went and talked to a teacher who was his teacher, a senior monk in his late sixties or seventies. And there was a very different feeling from him. He wasn’t at all anxious to spread the Dharma or not to spread the Dharma.
He was just there. And the more kind of senior and the more that the teachers we met had been teaching, the more settled and more accepting and the more allowing was the space around them. Very, very loving and very undemanding. Demanding of practice, yes, but undemanding that things should happen in a particular way. One of the teachers that I visited was a man named Ajahn Jumnien, well known for his loving-kindness and his compassion.
He had many, many followers, monks and nuns and many laypeople who had come. He was very charming and handsome, and he radiated a great deal of light and love. And I asked him about the difficulties he had in teaching, trying to learn from him. He said the greatest difficulties were when he wanted people to get it, to understand, to come to some different place than where they were. And he said for the first number of years of his teaching, he had been caught up in a struggle trying to get people to see something in a particular way.
And he said even though that was motivated by love and by compassion, it was still a problem. It was still a difficulty. And it was only after he learned that people, each person, blossoms at their own pace. It’s like the plants around here. There are crocuses that are coming up already. You can see the yellow flowers and like daffodils.
And there are some trees that are still very barren but that are soaking in the rain and sun and that will leaf later on. And the whole of nature is going to go through its cycles through this year as it does every year. Don’t have to rush it or make it all bloom at the same time. Each one of us has our own pace and our own time, our own growth. Saint Francis de Sales says, if the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently.
And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed. A thousand times, two thousand times. The process of learning to be here and to become aware is one of more and more moments of awareness coming closer together. And at first they’re often very far apart. In, out, touching, and then ten minutes of thoughts and memories and plans.
And then, oh yes, here I am again coming back. Again and again a thousand times. Gentle but yet persistent, without judging, without impatience. Really have to start to become loving towards yourself, spacious, open. You can see the difference.
If you meet people in your life and there’s something that you want from them, as soon as you’re with them, all that you see is, will that person get me what I want? Will they admire me, or will they give me the thing that I want, or will they do that thing for me? If you can meet someone without wanting anything from them, then you can see them in a very different light. Can see the whole of them and not just that which will fill that one desire. You can see their light.
You can really love them, appreciate them. Same is true in your own mind. To let go of expectations, will it do what I want? Will it get what I want? Will it become that?
Instead, to step back, to settle, and make the space to feel your own love and acceptance and to learn from what you see rather than trying to make it a certain way. A quote from the Tao says, the secret waits for the insight of eyes unclouded by longing. Those who are bound by desire see only the outward form. To let go, to open up to what is, become loving. You know, it’s interesting.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who is a teacher in this country, teaches especially about death, working with the dying. She talks about the experience of some of the people who she’d worked with who had seemingly died, clinical deaths, and been dead for a period of time and then for some reason come back, not fully died. And a number of them described an experience which has been written about for many centuries of seeing their whole life pass before them in that short time around the time of death. And the way the experience was described was that they were there, and in a sense, they were the judge of that experience.
That there was no one, there was no God, or there was no judgment sitting there on them, but rather it was they themselves that were put in the place of seeing and judging that which had happened for this lifetime. It’s a really profound teaching and understanding to see that judgment, good and bad, really don’t come from outside ourselves at all. It comes from our own mind. And if you can begin to see that and understand that, you can see the power, the possibility, the joy of becoming loving towards yourself and open rather than judgmental. You have the choice of creating the space, creating the kind of world that you live in.
There’s a great possibility for that kind of openness and love. No one else. There’s a particular practice, meditation practice, that is used to cultivate thoughts and feelings of loving-kindness that is a good complement to the Vipassana practice that we’ve begun. I’d like to teach it to you now so you can use it also during the retreat. Please sit up, but in a comfortable way.
It’s difficult to do loving-kindness if you’re sitting in a lot of pain. Sit up. Close your eyes. First of all, just feel your body. If there are any places that feel particularly tense and you’re able to let go of that, do so.
Then come to your breath. Take a couple of deep breaths in and let them out just to let go. Keep your attention with your breath. Feel your breath as it comes in and goes out, almost as if it were a wave of the ocean coming in and just washing you out, leaving you relaxed and quiet. Just let yourself sit.
Feel the breath and be quiet, peaceful. In that space that you’ve made, in that stillness, begin to allow yourself to feel thoughts of love, feelings of love for yourself. May I be happy. Each one of us wants to be happy. May I be happy.
May I be filled with love, joy. May I be peaceful. Let those feelings fill you up. To be nonjudgmental, to be accepting of all the parts of yourself, allowing. Feel compassion for yourself.
Each of us has, among other things, a lot of pain in our lives and a lot of difficulty at times. To feel love for that also and compassion, acceptance. Feel a kind of lightness, sense of humor. You can smile at yourself inside too, at all the dramas that you do and all the dances that you do and trips you get caught in. It’s really like theater.
Smile and be open to yourself. Accepting. May I be filled with love, acceptance, compassion. May I be happy, peaceful. May I let go, come to peace.
Now think of someone whom you love a lot. Let them come to mind. Feel the same feelings. Share them. May this person be happy and peaceful.
May they not take themselves too seriously either, but be light. Feel compassion for them, for their pain, difficulty. May they be filled with love and peace, acceptance, understanding. Think of another person or two whom you feel love for. Picture them.
Again, share the feelings of love. May they be happy, peaceful. May they be filled with love also. Compassion for them. Now allow your feelings of loving-kindness to expand and fill the room so that all of us here share that peace and love.
Allow them to expand in all of the directions: above, below, to the left, to the right, in front, in back. May all beings everywhere be happy, peaceful. May all feel this love and acceptance. May all be peaceful. There’s an endless source of loving-kindness in the mind, acceptance and love, all parts of oneself, all other beings.
Feel that. Let it spread and be shared. May all beings be happy, peaceful. May all be free. The loving-kindness meditation is a concentration exercise.
And some people find it helpful just to create a kind of spaciousness and quietness of mind with which to then do their Vipassana practice. If you found it helpful, you can do it for a few minutes at the beginning of a sitting. Or if you like, you can do it at the end of a sitting after the mind has become still. Some people don’t find it a helpful exercise. They find it difficult or awkward.
It says nothing about how loving they are, but it’s just not a useful meditation for them. In that case, if that’s true for you, then be loving and accepting of that. Don’t bother with it, but continue with your Vipassana practice. Ultimately, the awareness of Vipassana and love come to be the same thing. A choiceless, balanced awareness which doesn’t judge, which doesn’t expect, which sees things in their true nature as they are.
Patience, which I’ve spoken of, and loving-kindness are the space in which the practice can grow. They’re a kind of nurturance for it. And there can be discipline and there can be work within the context of that space, within the context of patience and love. You can sit and walk and pay attention. Has to be a balance of both.
Keeping a sense of humor, staying light, letting things unfold as they will. Questions, please? Joseph tells a story, his practice for a number of years in India, of trying to invent or create the perfect meditation chair or place. He somehow managed to get a chair and put it up on blocks and cover it with a large amount of foam, very thick, so that everything would be well padded and nothing would be twisted or stretched in any unnatural way. Unfortunately, he discovered that it’s in the very nature of having a body that sometimes it hurts.
And even if you’re lying flat on a nice soft mattress, if you don’t move for a while, at times there’ll be pain. There’ll be the pain of release of tension. There’ll be all kinds of things that happen. It’s in the nature of our bodies as we feel it to go through periods and parts of pain and pleasure. And part of the meditation, the meditative process, is to begin to learn how to relate to all of those body experiences.
Tomorrow morning, the instructions at eight o’clock, we’re going to talk very specifically on how to work with pain when it arises. But understand for you and for everyone else that one part of what will happen here, and it’s not because we’re trying to make it, but simply in the natural course of sitting and having a body, we’ll be learning how to work with unpleasant sensations and pain when it arises. Early in your discourse, you mentioned a monk I think it was in Burma who did a great deal of discipline and purification practice until he was seventy and then went on to teach for fifty years. Does discipline and purification have a place in this practice? And if so, where and how and what value is it?
The monk I mentioned was the Chinese teacher Xu Yun, and he did a whole series of practices for quite a long time. Discipline, which Joseph spoke of last night, one kind of discipline is moral discipline. Another kind of discipline is disciplines of diet or of posture or of schedule. All of these things are useful tools in sadhana. In this particular practice, the discipline comes from the schedule and from the continuity of awareness.
There are other ways that you can work, but mostly what’s been laid out and what you’ve seen so far is how we’ll be working with the addition of attention to body sensations and thoughts and feelings and mind states as the days go on. But the discipline here is much more focused on working together as a group, surrender to the schedule. And then in terms of the practice, the discipline of trying to be really aware of what’s happening for you in each moment. It’s a precious thing for all of us to share this time together, to be able to take space away from our other worldly responsibilities, and to come together as a community with so many people in such a harmonious way. Please use this time and space well.
Sit, walk, do the walking for the full walking periods. Try not to come late to the sitting room, come in and out, disturb people. Stay with the practice, and at the same time let yourself feel light and patient with it. Let it unfold as it will. It will do that.
You don’t have to worry about it. But be here. Really do it. The more that you’re willing to be here fully, the sweeter the taste will be, the more full your experience will be, the more you will grow. Stay silent and stay with the schedule.
Keep slow is also very helpful. Try and do things one at a time. You’re doing the walking meditation and there’s something you want to look at, there’s a cloud or people walking by or a beautiful bird. Lovely. Stop.
Look at it. Be aware that you’re seeing. Don’t walk and look at the same time. When you’re done seeing and appreciating, being aware of that, then come back to your body again. Be aware that you’re standing there, and again begin to walk.
For this time, make your life really simple. One thing at a time, brushing your teeth, combing your hair. Do it. Be with it really fully. Slowly it will settle.
The practice will unfold. Okay. We have about forty-five minutes for walking meditation, then we’ll sit again.