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Awakin Weekly: Path With Heart

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InnerNet Weekly: Inspirations from ServiceSpace.org
Path With Heart
by Jack Kornfield

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2365.jpgIn undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. In the end, spiritual life is not a process of seeking or gaining some extraordinary condition or special powers. In fact, such seeking can take us away from ourselves. If we are not careful, we can easily find the great failures of our modern society—its ambition, materialism, and individual isolation—repeated in our spiritual life. In beginning a genuine spiritual journey, we have to stay much closer to home, to focus directly on what is right here in front of us, to make sure that our path is connected with our deepest love.

When we ask, “Am I following a path with heart?” we discover that no one can define for us exactly what our path should be. We must look at the values we have chosen to live by. Where do we put our time, our strength, our creativity, our love? We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration, or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value? If we are still and listen deeply, even for a moment, we will know if we are following a path with heart.

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another, when we are there in the most attentive or caring way. This simple and profound intimacy is the love that we all long for. These moments of touching and being touched can become a foundation for a path with heart, and they take place in the most immediate and direct way. Mother Teresa put it like this: “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”

In the stress and complexity of our lives, we may forget our deepest intentions. But when people come to the end of their lives and look back, the questions that they most often ask are not usually, “How much is in my bank account?” or “How many books did I write?” or “What did I build?” or the like. If you have the privilege of being with a person who is conscious at the time of his or her death, you find the questions such a person asks are very simple, “Did I love well?” “Did I live fully?” “Did I learn to let go?”

These simple questions go to the very center of spiritual life. When we consider loving well and living fully, we can see the ways our attachments and fears have limited us, and we can see the many opportunities for our hearts to open. Have we let ourselves love the people around us, our family, our community, the earth upon which we live? And, did we also learn to let go? Did we learn to live through the changes of life with grace, wisdom, and compassion? Have we learned to shift from the clinging mind to the joy of freedom?

All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live. This is why it is so difficult and so important to ask this question of ourselves: “Am I living my path fully, do I live without regret?” so that we can say on whatever day is the end of our life, “Yes, I have lived my path with heart.”

About the Author: Jack Kornfield has been a spiritual teacher for decades, authored many books, and is the founder of Spirit Rock Meditation center.

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Path With Heart
How do you relate to the notion that the things that matter the most to us are not fantastic and grand, but the moments in which we are caring and attentive toward each other? Can you share a personal story of a time you saw many opportunities for your heart to open and took them? What helps you live your path with heart?
David Doane wrote: It’s been said to put your money where your mouth is. At least as important is to put your path or make your path where your heart is. All existence is one. We are one. What we do to anyone we do …
Jagdish P Dave wrote: The fist sentence of thispassage by Jack Kornfield says it all. "In spiritual life, what matters is simple:We make it certain that our path is connected with our heart. Our spiritual journeyis a …
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Some Good News

• Finding Time: Slowness is an Act of Resistance
• Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People
• Love Letters from Seaweed

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• Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships in Nanjing

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Global call with Rev. Heng Sure!
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Back in 1997, one person started sending this simple “meditation reminder” to a few friends. Soon after, “Wednesdays” started, ServiceSpace blossomed, and the humble experiments of service took a life of its own. If you’d like to start an Awakin gathering in your area, we’d be happy to help you get started.

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Love Letters from Seaweed

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DailyGood News That Inspires

May 31, 2021

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Love Letters from Seaweed

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

– Alan Watts –

Love Letters from Seaweed

“Love Letters from Seaweed was created during the summer months I spent exploring mid-Coast Maine. Each day just before sunrise, I biked to Birch Point Beach to witness the shores changing topography and the traces of ocean life spilled by the tide. Intrigued, I photographed spontaneous configurations of seaweed and natural artifacts in unworldly colors, brought together by spume and sand.” Visual artist Katherine Minott shares more. { read more }

Be The Change

“Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea” is a line from this stunning short poem by A.S.J. Tessimond, titled “Daydream.” Read it here. What does it evoke in you? { more }

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To Become a Better Leader, Question Your Assumptions

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May 30, 2021

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To Become a Better Leader, Question Your Assumptions

We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.

– Adam Grant –

To Become a Better Leader, Question Your Assumptions

“When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new ideas, based on systematic evidence.” Here he discusses why it’s important for leaders to question their assumptions around engagement and communication at work. { read more }

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Rumi, Grace & Human Friendship

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DailyGood News That Inspires

May 29, 2021

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Rumi, Grace & Human Friendship

Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with, as rose oil imbibes from roses.

– Rumi –

Rumi, Grace & Human Friendship

Tami Simon speaks with Coleman Barks– a leading scholar and translator of the 13th-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi– about the extraordinary friendship between Rumi and his teacher Shams Tabrizi. { read more }

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For more inspiration, here is a verse by Rumi, “The Root of the Root of Yourself.” { more }

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3 Conversations in 3 Continents …

Incubator of compassionate action.

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Richness of resilience.
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Some years ago, a local Zen monastery was ravaged by fires. The day it subsided, the abbott gave a talk that opened with a remarkable example: some seeds only sprout under the extreme duress of a fire.
This month, amid the blazing conditions of India’s covid crisis and violence in the Middle East, we have some uncommon dialogues that build on the richness of resilience. From Australia, Rev. Heng Sure will share how he persevered through a 800-mile bowing pilgrimage on the streets of America. Next weekend, Wakanyi will speak about her African Folktales Project and how stories can offer us the strength to stay “boundless”. And the week after, Maki will be in conversation around death and dying, as the founder of a rarely found hospice in Japan. Oh, and on the heels of the Rumi Pod and Qigong Pod is the upcoming Noble Friendship Pod!

rz_ssp_60a14c629ce53.jpg Last month, on a couple day notice, we hosted an interfaith prayer circle for India. We didn’t know what would emerge but 1300 of you from 43 countries signed on to co-create a profoundly sacred space. If “faith is a withholding of conclusion so we allow what-is to arise” (Adyashanti), it was so moving to see how such deep faith brought us to the doorsteps of our innate compassion and connection. Seeing the long list of prayer requests, all kinds of open-hearted circles started flowing

Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships

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Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships

All serious daring starts from within.

– Eudora Welty –

Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships

Change means movement. If you want change you have to disrupt something. See how one skateboarding park in a rural Indian village rippled out into changes in gender restrictions, caste restrictions and poverty restrictions through the voices of Ulrike Reinhard, the founder of the skateboarding park, and Asha Gond, a young member of the tribal community in the village of Janwaar. { read more }

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Where might you be able to create the movement of change and disrupt the status quo in your own community? How might you channel the energy of rebellion in a positive direction?

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Spotlight On Kindness: Teaching Kindness

Time and again, we run across stories of children and youth showing wisdom beyond their years. Most of them have an innate ability to express compassion and love. As much as we like to think that we are teaching them, more often than not, I find myself learning from their unsullied hearts when it comes to what is essential. Although their lives are no less complex than our own, their ability to remember kindness received or creatively express their own empathy at such a young age is inspiring. It gives me hope in the coming generations. –Guri

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Editor’s Note: Time and again, we run across stories of children and youth showing wisdom beyond their years. Most of them have an innate ability to express compassion and love. As much as we like to think that we are teaching them, more often than not, I find myself learning from their unsullied hearts when it comes to what is essential. Although their lives are no less complex than our own, their ability to remember kindness received or creatively express their own empathy at such a young age is inspiring. It gives me hope in the coming generations. –Guri
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Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships in Nanjing

This week’s inspiring video: Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships in Nanjing
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Video of the Week

May 27, 2021
Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships in Nanjing

Asha Gond at the Skating World Championships in Nanjing

Change means movement. If you want change you have to disrupt something. See how one skateboarding park in a rural Indian village rippled out into changes in gender restrictions, caste restrictions and poverty restrictions through the voices of Ulrike Reinhard, the founder of the skateboarding park, and Asha Gond, a young member of the tribal community in the village of Janwaar.
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We’re Gonna Carry That Weight A Long Time

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May 27, 2021

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We're Gonna Carry That Weight A Long Time

Where thou art, that is home.

– Emily Dickinson –

We’re Gonna Carry That Weight A Long Time

“All houses have memory. Life’s big occasions–the triumphs and heartbreak–drift through like smoke, leaving barely a trace. It’s the small moments they remember: the hollow at the turn of the stair, the scratches around the keyhole, or wood darkened by touch. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote Annie Dillard, and the houses we spend them in record it all.” { read more }

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Reflect on the different homes you have lived in and how they have shaped your life.

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Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People

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Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

– William Blake –

Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People

“This little book, written during the last months of peace, goes to press in the first weeks of the great war. Many will feel that in such a time of conflict and horror, when only the most ignorant, disloyal, or apathetic can hope for quietness of mind, a book which deals with that which is called the “contemplative” attitude to existence is wholly out of place. So obvious, indeed, is this point of view, that I had at first thought of postponing its publication. On the one hand, it seems as though the dreams of a spiritual renaissance, which promised so fairly but a little time ago, had perished in the sudden explosion of brute force. On the other hand, the thoughts of the English race are now turned, and rightly, towards the most concrete forms of action–struggle and endurance, practical sacrifices, difficult and long-continued effort–rather than towards the passive attitude of self-surrender which is all that the practice of mysticism seems, at first sight, to demand.” Evelyn Underhill’s book, ‘Practical Mysticism’ was first published in 1915, and is now a classic in the field. { read more }

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What practices help you ‘cleanse’ the doors of perception? Have you experienced glimpses of the infinite on your own path?

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