Rewiring our brains around difficulties, emptiness, fear, and longing, Jack highlights how we can connect our practice with our deepest love.

“When you get afraid or things are difficult, fear is simply the signal that you’re about to learn something new. When you feel afraid it’s like the little light comes on that says, ‘About to grow.’” – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack contemplates and explores:

• The times in our lives where we feel truly connected to our hearts
• Ajahn Jumnian, motivation for practice, spiritual thirst, and working with addiction
• Bringing awareness to the truth of emptiness and nature of joy and sorrow
• Reincarnation and seeing everyone in the world as your mothers, fathers, and children
• Finding that what we really want is simple heart connection
• Emptiness, longing, and feeding the hungry heart
• Stillness and living from our fundamental nature of love and caring
• The difficulties in life as part of the spiritual path
• Seeing life as a continuous flow of mistakes to learn from, and fear as a signal that you are about to grow

“To study emptiness means to accept without resisting, to not push away or not distract ourselves from the emptiness that’s within us that we half-feel and keep trying to fill up through all of our sense of longing and deficiency. Instead, it’s to sit and say, ‘Alright, let me feel that longing, that emptiness, that space, that deficiency. Let me feel how deep it is, how big it is, and not just try to fill it right away.’ When we stop running and feel that, then something new comes alive in us.” – Jack Kornfield