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The Psychology of Loving Awareness with Jack Kornfield

The Psychology of Loving Awareness with Jack Kornfield, PhD
A Two-Day Training in Transforming Difficulty into Ease and Well-Being

Loving awareness, mindfulness, and compassion have enormous power to benefit every human life. These time-tested tools of Eastern psychology are widely supported by modern neuroscience in more than 3,000 studies and research papers from the past 25 years. With The Psychology of Loving Awareness, master teacher Jack Kornfield invites professionals and meditators alike to join him in a retreat-like setting in San Diego, California to discover the transformative practices from Buddhist psychology that are now being applied in therapy, education, medicine, business, law, athletics, the arts, and in the personal lives of millions.

This two-day training will offer the theory and practice of age-old methods for transforming difficulty into ease and well-being. Through guided practices, wisdom teachings, experiential exercises, case studies, healing stories, dialogue, and inner training, Jack Kornfield will provide an immersive demonstration of the most important principles of Buddhist psychology for awakening the heart and mind—offering skills to aid professionals and deepen the practice of meditators, including:

  • Directed healing
  • Inner witnessing
  • Compassion and forgiveness
  • Refining clarity of intention
  • Composure in stressful circumstances
  • Mindfulness towards the body, thoughts, and emotions
  • Fostering resilience, adaptability, and a gracious, wide perspective

When we see the spirit of a leader like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, or Aung San Suu Kyi, we come to realize what is possible when we meet the world from a place of loving awareness. By cultivating our capacity for balance and attunement, we can experience joyful embodiment of inner liberation, no matter what the outer circumstances.

Join us for two days of powerful practices, heartfelt reminders, clear teachings, personal skill-building, and clinical tools—shared in a warm, retreat-like setting with a loving and open community.

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The traveler of aloneness

A friend who regularly reads my personal blog asked if I would comment on what I saw as the difference between what she described to me as ‘loneliness’ and a related experience she referred to as ‘aloneness.’ Here is an excerpt of what emerged from our conversation…

At times, a very familiar sense of ‘loneliness’ can begin to color your world. You may wonder if it will ever go away, when it will yield to your deep longing for connection, and why all the work on yourself has not yet transformed the despair. The feeling of loneliness is a reminder of separation, and has a way of cutting into the aliveness of immediate experience.

The reality of ‘aloneness’, on the other hand, is translucent, in a way, and vibrantly alive. Despite your connection with others, you are asked to make the journey of the heart alone. No one can experience life for you, love and be loved for you, embrace and feel your tender heart for you, or die for you; likewise, you for them.

The traveler of aloneness is at home in this type of environment—and remains committed to it—knowing that organizing her reality around love will almost always trigger the experience of tender vulnerability and penetrating, transformative sadness. Living in the burning alive field of aloneness is so open, so unknown, and so unbearably touching; it is always uncertain and forever without ground or reference point. It reveals the truth that we can never fully look to the known to tell us who we are or anything certain about the nature of love. For love is of the unknown, infinitely creative, and emerging as a firestorm of grace in the radiant here and now.

Within the mandala of purifying aloneness, we know that at any moment our hearts may break, that we may fall in love in the most surprising way, that old dreams are sure to crumble, that what we thought we ‘knew’ *will* dissolve in front of our eyes, and that we *will* inevitably be asked to meet deep waves of feeling and sensation. As we commit to the very embodied path of the heart, only one thing is certain, really: that *everything* that has yet to be metabolized in our somatic environment will come on display, especially in intimate relationship, as it is seeking wholeness and integration.

There is a part of us that knows that as we open in this way, we will no longer be able to avoid the terror of intimacy, the surety of complete exposure, and the reality of crushing aliveness. We may realize that, without our conscious knowing, we have taken some forgotten vow to turn all the way into the preciousness of this life, willing to enter directly into such achy tenderness, into suffering, into penetrating melancholy, into the darkness, and into naked vulnerability—guided only by the unknown and by a love from beyond. It is not easy to live in such an open and unguarded way, but here we are: We have come here to give our hearts to others and to this world.

Though related, the experience of ‘loneliness’ is usually borne out of a resistance to our present experience—a subtle (or not so subtle) abandonment of feelings of grief, sadness, hurt, vulnerability, and shame. In our early environment, certain feelings were simply unsafe to touch, hold, and express—there was no true home made available for them. Because we are wired to do whatever we must to maintain the critical tie to our caregiving surround, we very intelligently and creatively chose to disembody and split off from these wild movements of fierce grace within. This was a very healthy, short-term strategy for a little boy or girl, yet here we are, several decades later, and burning to know the aliveness and mysteries of lover and beloved in this world.

When we are unable/ unwilling to meet these primordial companions—and are not able to stay with, hold, and metabolize them within our own somatic immediacy—we feel cut off from life, lonely, and disconnected. We yearn and long, at the deepest levels, to meet whatever guests appear in this sacred body, for we intuit that each is a special doorway Home. And we become lonely when we are not able to do so. It is the melting of these wounds and tangles that becomes the essence of the path of re-embodiment and opening the heart. The only way out is through; and the only way through is by love.

It is so bittersweet, really. Being an open-hearted human, who is always and eternally both broken and whole, can feel so fragile. Our old friends sadness, grief, jealousy, hopelessness, and raw vulnerability are so often sent away, out the back door of our hearts, and into a lonely forest. This is sad. Please, don’t go, friends! Stay close! Let us keep the door open to these ones, moment-by-moment crafting a warm home and safe refuge for the entirety of what we are. For in doing so, the path from loneliness to aloneness will become illumined, and we will provide safe passage for love in this world.

aloneness

 

Jack Kornfield: Difficult Times and Liberation

Tami Simon speaks with Jack Kornfield, the author of The Wise Heart and one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. Kornfield reflects on four decades of personal meditation practice and how this has informed how he works with students. He also explores how Buddhist insights can help us during challenging times, whether or not it is possible or not to be liberated even in spite of our neurosis, and what he means by “the crystal of liberation.” (48 minutes)

Tara Brach: Radical Acceptance

Tami Simon speaks with Tara Brach, an author, clinical pychologist, and founder and senior teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (District of Columbia). She’s the author of the Sounds True audio learning program Radical Self-Acceptance: A Buddhist Guide to Freeing Yourself from Shame and Meditations for Emotional Healing. Tami and Tara discuss radical acceptance in the face of difficult emotions. (54 minutes)

Adyashanti: Ultimate Flexibility

Tami Simon speaks with Adyashanti, a spiritual teacher trained in the Zen tradition who lives in Northern California. Adya (as he is called by friends and students) is often described as a non–dual teacher, someone who teaches about “awakening to oneness” or what he calls awakening to “non-division.” Sounds True has published many programs with Adya including Spontaneous Awakening, True Meditation, and The End of Your World. Adya discusses the way many contemporary non–dual teachers talk about how important it is to be “without position”—to not believe in the reality of any thought or belief or take a position on anything and how to make sense out of your thoughts. (36 minutes)

Mel Schwartz: The Possibility Principle

Mel Schwartz is an author, public speaker, and psychotherapist who has been in private practice for more than 20 years. With Sounds True, he has recently published the book The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon talks with Mel about the central ideas of quantum physics and how they can be applied to our day-to-day mental health. Mel describes the implications of quantum theory for perfectionists, as well as how the nanoseconds between thoughts contain near-infinite possibilities. In the same vein, Tami and Mel discuss the roots of anxiety and why it is so difficult to surrender to the uncertainty of the next moment. Finally, Mel leads listeners in a guided practice for letting go of our sense of safety in order to align completely with the flow of life. (67 minutes)

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