Book: "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life" by Jack Kornfield
Path to Discovery: This book was on New Ventures West's Coaches Bookshelf (a recommended book list for coaches embarking on a year-long coaching learning program). A friend (who was also in the program) inspired me to read it when she shared what she was learning through journaling on the meditation questions offered in each chapter.
The essence of this book is a call to spiritual practice. The heart of this practice is meditation and related practices for tuning into body, heart, and mind. The outcome includes a deeper and greater capacity for accessing wisdom and perspective.
When we meditate, we bring our attention back again and again to our current experience. (This is one type of meditation - distinguished from the type where we seek to transcend experience). We use gentleness to return our attention (vs. force).
Our first instinct may be to run from difficulty or attempt to bypass it. This book advocates putting our attention to it, gently, just as we do in meditation. Placing our attention on it allows difficulty to become our teacher. As we allow our awareness instead of stifling it, we receive new information that can help us discern wisdom from it. There is a guided meditation to use, to help us with this (p. 81). I used this one as a daily journalling practice while on vacation to Hawaii. While it may not seem possible to have one single difficult moment during a vacation to Hawaii, I managed to have one. Our hotel room mid-way through the trip was dank, dark and moldy. I had imagined using time on this trip to write in some beautiful, pristine, light-and-air-filled hotel room, and here I was, surrounded by mold. No way is this a matter to complain about in the face of the world's issues (war! hunger! deforestation!), but the mood had (literally) dampened into larger doubts about my vocation, life purpose. You name it, doubt had crept in. The mood was as now as dark and smelly as the room. I used the meditation questions as daily journalling questions, and not only did I learn something, I also changed the purpose of my trip to glorious outdoor time and body movement. From then on, I got out of the hotel room. We learned to stand-up paddle and did it daily; we snorkeled and hiked. The trip became 1000% times richer than I'd planned, when body work and outdoor experience overtook my original dream of sitting indoors like an ascetic, writing. When the hotel manager changed our room, it didn't matter so much any more - the learning had taken hold; the mood had shifted. I learned that tuning into momentary misery (instead of judging it or trying to ignore it) and sensing into its invitation can generate movement into a different direction - and unintended joy.
One of the ways to place attention on difficulty is to name it (or name the quality that we sense within ourselves - doubt, anxiety, etc). We name it without judging it. As we name it, we can notice the sensations in our body, and any thoughts that may relate to it. We can start to sense patterns. Gently naming both helps us integrate ourselves into wholeness, and also helps us access inner wisdom (which cannot be accessed very well while we are rejecting a part of ourselves). Guided meditations for naming are on p. 100.
I'll skip now to one other concept introduced by the book: finding a teacher. Jack Kornfield spends time talking about the importance of finding a teacher; how to find one; the qualities of a good teacher. He's specifically talking about spiritual teachers, but I can broaden the message to any discipline. There could be cycles in our lives, where we study alone; then study with a teacher; and then go back to studying alone again. A teacher can help us understand wisdom more accurately and see through our blind spots. A teacher can diagnose accurately what our needs are, so that we don't take generic teaching and apply it to ourselves, when actual the opposite would be true for us. My favorite metaphor is a student on a path: If the goal is to get them to walk in the center, we would tell a student who is veering left to aim right, and a student who is drifting right to aim left, and these very different prescriptions would move each to center. This is why there is no one size fits all prescription for life, or even for our practices. If we read somewhere "go right" (so to speak), and we follow it blindly, we may careen towards the cliff. If we work with a teacher, this person can help us understand the practices to subtly shift us towards center and towards the work that will be most helpful for us personally, at this time in our lives.
In brief: What did I take to heart?
(A few things I want to remember - not a summary of the whole book)
(A few things I want to remember - not a summary of the whole book)
The essence of this book is a call to spiritual practice. The heart of this practice is meditation and related practices for tuning into body, heart, and mind. The outcome includes a deeper and greater capacity for accessing wisdom and perspective.
When we meditate, we bring our attention back again and again to our current experience. (This is one type of meditation - distinguished from the type where we seek to transcend experience). We use gentleness to return our attention (vs. force).
Our first instinct may be to run from difficulty or attempt to bypass it. This book advocates putting our attention to it, gently, just as we do in meditation. Placing our attention on it allows difficulty to become our teacher. As we allow our awareness instead of stifling it, we receive new information that can help us discern wisdom from it. There is a guided meditation to use, to help us with this (p. 81). I used this one as a daily journalling practice while on vacation to Hawaii. While it may not seem possible to have one single difficult moment during a vacation to Hawaii, I managed to have one. Our hotel room mid-way through the trip was dank, dark and moldy. I had imagined using time on this trip to write in some beautiful, pristine, light-and-air-filled hotel room, and here I was, surrounded by mold. No way is this a matter to complain about in the face of the world's issues (war! hunger! deforestation!), but the mood had (literally) dampened into larger doubts about my vocation, life purpose. You name it, doubt had crept in. The mood was as now as dark and smelly as the room. I used the meditation questions as daily journalling questions, and not only did I learn something, I also changed the purpose of my trip to glorious outdoor time and body movement. From then on, I got out of the hotel room. We learned to stand-up paddle and did it daily; we snorkeled and hiked. The trip became 1000% times richer than I'd planned, when body work and outdoor experience overtook my original dream of sitting indoors like an ascetic, writing. When the hotel manager changed our room, it didn't matter so much any more - the learning had taken hold; the mood had shifted. I learned that tuning into momentary misery (instead of judging it or trying to ignore it) and sensing into its invitation can generate movement into a different direction - and unintended joy.
One of the ways to place attention on difficulty is to name it (or name the quality that we sense within ourselves - doubt, anxiety, etc). We name it without judging it. As we name it, we can notice the sensations in our body, and any thoughts that may relate to it. We can start to sense patterns. Gently naming both helps us integrate ourselves into wholeness, and also helps us access inner wisdom (which cannot be accessed very well while we are rejecting a part of ourselves). Guided meditations for naming are on p. 100.
I'll skip now to one other concept introduced by the book: finding a teacher. Jack Kornfield spends time talking about the importance of finding a teacher; how to find one; the qualities of a good teacher. He's specifically talking about spiritual teachers, but I can broaden the message to any discipline. There could be cycles in our lives, where we study alone; then study with a teacher; and then go back to studying alone again. A teacher can help us understand wisdom more accurately and see through our blind spots. A teacher can diagnose accurately what our needs are, so that we don't take generic teaching and apply it to ourselves, when actual the opposite would be true for us. My favorite metaphor is a student on a path: If the goal is to get them to walk in the center, we would tell a student who is veering left to aim right, and a student who is drifting right to aim left, and these very different prescriptions would move each to center. This is why there is no one size fits all prescription for life, or even for our practices. If we read somewhere "go right" (so to speak), and we follow it blindly, we may careen towards the cliff. If we work with a teacher, this person can help us understand the practices to subtly shift us towards center and towards the work that will be most helpful for us personally, at this time in our lives.
What questions am I left pondering?
- From time to time, I'm still revisiting the exercises in the book. I'm using them both for meditation and journalling. The questions and the answers have a way of subtly shifting my perspective.
© 2015 Kristen Lee. All rights reserved
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