Going back to the basics, Jack explores how we can skillfully navigate our dynamic mood states by experiencing them as clouds of the mind.

“Moods are actually kind of mysterious and quite impersonal. They’re like the weather. It’s been kind of cool this year, then we get our rainstorms, and the sun comes in between, and the wind comes and dies down, and we don’t have any control over it whatsoever. It just comes. It’s due to certain conditions.” – Jack Kornfield

In this episode, Jack compassionately illuminates:

• Experiencing moods as clouds or weather—arising and passing naturally from impersonal sets of conditions
• The six flavors of experience in Buddhism
• Finding the middle ground between acting on feelings and suppressing them
• The “vipassana romance” and understanding the “siren call” of desire
• Diffusing desire with humor, mindfulness, and noting
• Moving past attachment and aversion by leaning into them
• Techniques for overcoming doubt
• Letting go and becoming more happy and more live

This Dharma Talk was originally recorded on 4/1/1988 at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

“The optimist wakes up and says, ‘Good morning, God!’ And the pessimist wakes up and says, ‘Good God! Morning…’ It’s the same experience, but the mood somehow changes it.” – Jack Kornfield

“One sits and practices, and let’s these experiences come and fill us. We bow to them, name them, soften in the heart and say, ‘Okay, show me your stuff, give me the whole thing.’ And you know what happens after a while? If you make this spaciousness in the heart and that still point, at some point it ends. Because everything does. You say, ‘Wow that was a big storm of desire, wasn’t it?’ And there you are, and there’s this sense of freedom that comes that that’s not who we are most fundamentally.” – Jack Kornfield

Want to learn how to follow the Buddha’s path to freedom in the modern world? Sign up for Jack’s new online course Walking the Eightfold Path with Jack Kornfield. The live version begins March 18!

For more podcasts like this from Jack, Trudy Goodman, Ram Dass, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein and more, please visit the Be Here Now Network family of podcasts.