How to Trust Life When It Is Not What You Wanted | Jack Kornfield

Now I wanted to ask you about this quote from your book No Time Like the Present that I think is relevant here. You write, the best forms of healing, therapy, and meditation are all about learning to trust. So tell me about your journey of learning to trust and what that means. We think we're in charge of this dance and we're not. I mean we get a chance to act and create but really there's something so much bigger going and so that capacity to trust. So I learned it in the monastery because I went through the monsoons and the cold and I could do this. I began to trust myself. I learned how to trust that I could be with all the inner storms and fears and so forth. I learned more how to trust in relationship and that takes its own time. Whether it's the emotions or the images or the phases of our life, we are given the gift of life and it's not the way we want it. But it's what we need to open our hearts to learn whatever lesson there is to find freedom and I needed to learn that in all these different ways or I wanted to learn it. I don't know I was graced to learn it and now people call me in the middle of all kinds of things and I can listen or I can talk with them. I say yeah and it's okay and I mean it in the deepest deepest way. I mean it working in the refugee camps and meeting those people in the refugee camps where everything was taken and that there are certain people who carry a kind of dignity and love that no one can take from them. And I've seen it and I know it so it gives me a trust in the human heart and the human spirit. You've referenced, Jack, light. You talked about Thomas Merton, the light in everyone behind the eyes. I've been looking in your eyes as part of this conversation and I see the light in your eyes. It's beautiful. Thank you. It's beautiful and it made me curious. Is light a metaphor, an actual experience of the physical light we see and sense both? How do you relate to light? I'm an all of the above kind of person. When I sat in the monastery and again began to have the experiences that I wasn't this small sense of self that's sometimes called the body of fear. But things started to dissolve and open. I experienced my body dissolving into light. It was literal. In fact, I'd have to open my eyes sometimes because it was so bright. It's like is it lighting up the room? Am I bothering, you know, the monks in the part of the forest? It is literal. Consciousness itself in one of its forms is light. That's another, it's another way we perceive or know it and it's not just through our eyes but it's the inner eye and that sense of things filled with light. You could call it part of the mystic's vision or the ability to see that everything sparkles with the sacred and that that's experienced as light. It's just beautiful to see the light behind the eyes of everybody. It's who we are. Now, I'm glad you brought up this reference to the body of fear and how when you were in the monastery you had the experience of the body of fear dissolving into light. I think a lot of people, even if they've touched some type of mystical awakening, still if they were to tell the truth about their current experience would say, I am living with some type of body of fear. I feel fear a lot. I can sense it. I can sense it as kind of creating the architecture of myself and I'm curious what you have to say to that and how can you help that person who would like more of their fear to dissolve? Rather than dissolve, I would say thank it. You see, all those stories. I mean, Mark Twain said, my life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened, right? So fear has a bodily anxiety but it also usually has a whole lot of stories. It's trying to protect you. Your brain, your nervous system as an organism that moves around the planet has been tuned to threat and it wants to figure out things in advance. That's the fear of the fear. Instead, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, invite it for tea. Say, okay, I know you. Yes, your fear. Thank you for trying to take care of me. Actually, I'm okay right now. But you can relax. You can rest for a moment. I'm okay. Thank you. And that inner shift of living in the consciousness, what I call the small sense of or the body of fear, it's built in. And so, thank you for doing your job, but that's not who you are. I think a lot of my job has been to be with people and communicate a sense of trust that what's in there, whatever's opening, or the trauma that you have in there, really skillful ways to be with trauma, to resource and make a place where it's safe so you're not re-traumatizing and let it open from the body or tell a story. But underneath or around all that, it's just the sense of trust that we know how to do this. We can be present for this life with a tenderness and a love. And I was going to say, and a fearlessness that includes fear, that allows it to be part of the palette of life. Does fear arise for you in your life? And does thanking it? How does that roll for you, Jack? It arises occasionally. I don't live with a lot of fear, and maybe that's just a blessing in my life. But it will come on occasion, and thanking it helps. And also, it just acknowledges, oh, fear, I know you. You know, in the Buddhist mythology, Mara is the name for the Indian god who, the personification of all the difficulties of the world, and the Buddha seated under the Bodhi tree wants to get enlightened in this story or this myth. And then Mara comes first with all the temptations of all the most beautiful maidens and the best food and so forth, and the Buddha sits there. And then Mara comes with his armies of aggression, of fear and so forth, and the Buddha just sits there. And then Mara comes with doubt. Well, you can't do this. This is not possible. Nobody. And in all of these, the Buddhist looks out and says, oh, Mara, I see you. I see who you are. Not with judgment, but just saying, oh, I see you, Mara. And in that moment, the Buddha becomes the one who knows, becomes the place of wisdom in us that sees all of that. So yeah, I get caught. And there was a time of, you know, you may notice I have a bit of a tremor. And I always started passing out on stage in front of all these people. And I had more tremors and all this stuff happening in my body. It was about a dozen years ago. And I got every test, you know, they take you and they test you from top to bottom. And I got misdiagnosed with something that was like ALS, but worse. And they said, it's happening quickly, your body's going to deteriorate. Okay, I think I'm okay with death. And then they said, oh, and dementia comes with it. And I did not like that. That was not in my program. And I got really afraid, much more than I thought, because I've dealt with buying bodies, I've been in hospice, but dementia was not okay. So it activated a great deal of fear. Fortunately, some, you know, couple weeks later, it turned out wasn't the right diagnosis. I'm fine. But I remember going to talk to Ram Dass about it, and telling this story. And he listened and he smiled. And he says, Oh, yeah, I flunked the course a number of times myself. And it was just, it was so comforting. Because the idea isn't to be some way with or without fear or something like that. It's to be human and love it, to love it all, including, you know, the contraction, as well as the expansion, that who we are is bigger than all of that. Discover on demand videos and docuseries, explore a full schedule of daily life classes and become part of an incredible community. 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