I'm rereading Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart and (yet again) finding it wise and helpful. I hope to be able to put some regular snippets here over the next month.
Early in the book JK points us to the relationship between mindfulness and healing: healing of our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. Not surprisingly, he slows us down, taking the time to allow us to consider and begin to understand why this is so--and how mindfulness both invites and enables healing to happen.
I first read A Path with Heart about 6 years ago. Seeing it on my shelf a couple of weeks ago, part of me was thinking, 'I've already read this 3 times; it will probably be boring to read it again.'
Ha! It's just as stimulating and challenging as it was before. Though there is the difference of seeing how what I have been able to understand, take to heart, and practice has enriched my life over the past 5 years.
As the banner of this blog declares, "Slow transformation is way better than no transformation." All spiritual practice is a kind of Path-ing: setting deep intentions and following them. Going where we hadn't yet been and gradually incarnating our deepest and truest desires.
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Almost
everyone who undertakes a true spiritual path will discover that a profound
personal healing is a necessary part of his or her spiritual process. When this
need is acknowledged, spiritual practice can be directed to bring such healing
to the body, heart, and mind. This is not a new notion. Since ancient times,
spiritual practice has been described as a process of healing. The Buddha and
Jesus were both known as healers of the body, as well as great physicians of
the spirit.
Wise
spiritual practice requires that we actively address the pain and conflict of
our life in order to come to inner integration and harmony. Through wise
guidance, meditation can help bring to this healing. Without including the
essential step of healing, students will find that they are blocked from deeper
levels of meditation or are unable to integrate them into their lives.
Many people
first come to spiritual practice hoping to skip over their sorrows and wounds,
the difficult areas of their lives. They hope to rise above them and enter a
spiritual realm full of divine grace, free from all conflict. Yet at some point
we encounter all the unfinished business of the body and heart that we had
hoped to leave behind.
True
maturation on the spiritual path requires that we discover the depths of our
wounds: our grief from the past, our ceaseless longing, the sorrow that we have
stored up during the course of our lives. This healing is necessary if we are
to embody spiritual life lovingly and wisely. Unhealed pain and rage, Unhealed
traumas from childhood, abuse or abandonment, become powerful unconscious
forces in our lives. Until we are able to bring awareness and understanding to
our old wounds, we will find ourselves repeating patterns of unskilled desire,
anger, and confusion over and over again.
