“The invitation is not to hold on to the inhale. The invitation is to learn how to love the exhale too.” – Jack Kornfield

Dear friends,

After living several years as a monk, including a year long silent retreat, I returned home from Asia carrying the fruits of deep practice. I felt open-hearted, trusting, and free. I had spent countless hours in meditation, working through fear, forgiveness, and old wounds. I thought I had it all figured out. And then after a few months back, I fell in love.

Almost immediately, many of the old patterns I thought I had resolved came rushing back. Clinging. Self-judgment. Insecurity. Fear. The monastery had taught me many beautiful things, but it turned out there was no curriculum for intimate relationship, marriage, or raising a family. This is something many of us discover. We can have retreats with profound peace, clarity, and freedom. Then life presents us with a difficult conversation, a crying child, a strained relationship, or a loss we never expected. We wonder, “What happened to my spiritual practice?”

But perhaps nothing had gone wrong. Everything in nature opens and closes. The lungs expand and release. The heart beats. The seasons turn, the tides come in and go out with the phases of the moon. The whole universe is breathing, and we are part of that breathing. Yet we often imagine that the purpose of spiritual life is to arrive at some beautiful state and stay there forever. Life doesn’t work that way. There is joy and sorrow, gain and loss, praise and blame. The invitation is not to hold on to the inhale. The invitation is to learn how to love the exhale too.

One of the great lessons of maturity is discovering that awakening and humanity are not opposites. We are asked to remember our timeless Buddha nature while also tending the very real circumstances of our lives. Both belong. But because we don’t always remember this, we need one another. Community, friendship, spiritual teachings, wise counsel, caring therapy, shared meditation practice—these are not signs that something is broken. They are reminders that healing was never meant to be a solitary path. We don’t have to do this alone.

It turns out that the freedom we seek is not freedom from being human, it’s the freedom to meet our humanity with graciousness, wisdom, tenderness, and love. May this reflection help you trust and accept the natural rhythm of opening and closing, remembering that every season of the heart can become part of the path, this very day invites you into freedom, just where you are.

With metta,
Jack