Ep. 222 – Self-Acceptance and Opening the Heart

In this lively session, Jack illuminates how we can begin to open the heart through the transformational power of self-acceptance.

"Acceptance is the ground out of which true insight and understanding comes. It's an essential aspect of our practice. If we don't accept some aspect of ourself—some feeling, some physical sense of ourself aspect, some mental sense of ourself—then how are we to learn about it if we condemn it? How are we to discover it's nature? How are we to become free in relationship to it? Self-acceptance is not all of the practice, but it's a foundation and spirit which allows for attention and mindfulness to work." – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack mindfully illuminates:

• Transforming ourself and our practice through self-acceptance
• How true acceptance allows the practice of attention and mindfulness to work
• Don Juan, attention, non-self, and "dissolving the world"
• The power of accepting our non-acceptance
• Practice as a process of opening the heart and mind
• Dipa Ma as an embodiment of loving kindness, metta
• The gradual transformational created through the careful continuity of 'noting'
• Overcoming and integrating doubt, anger, guilt, and pain
• Resting in the present and the natural calming of the heart and the mind
• Impermanence and the Five Aggregates
• The spiritual question of 'free will versus determinism'
• Meditation and looking at our intentions
• Moving poems by Thich Nhat Hạnh and Hanshan

"Practice is a process of opening both the heart and the mind. To open the heart is to allow ourselves to begin to experience whatever there is in our being—in our walking, in our moving, in our eating—with a kindness, with a softness." – Jack Kornfield

"You can sit, and the intention to get up will arise, and if you really notice with continuity and care, you can notice maybe the attention to standup and walk because you're uncomfortable, or the intention to go take tea, or the intention to go to the bathroom. And if you notice sometimes you'll see the intention arise as that quality, 'About to do something...', and you note it, and it disappears, and there you are still sitting there. You watch the breath for a while and the intention comes again, and you begin to see how intention functions, and that it too is impersonal. It's not something you can say is, 'I, me, or mine.'" – Jack Kornfield

This Dharma Talk from 10/16/1983 at Insight Meditation Society was originally published on DharmaSeed.

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