“There are many gates into awakening, each drawing us back to the mystery of who we really are.” – Jack Kornfield
Dear friends,
People often imagine the spiritual journey begins with a mystical experience or a moment of profound insight. Many of us have had openings to awe and vastness walking in the high mountains or at the birth of a child. Yet others arrive on the path because something has broken their heart or shaken their life. The death of someone they love. The end of a marriage. The loss of a business. A moment when they thought they knew who they were and where they were going, and suddenly the world fell apart.
I would never wish this kind of suffering on anyone. Yet for many, it becomes the beginning of a deeper question: How do I hold this loss? How do I continue? There are many gates into awakening. It can happen in tragedy. It can happen in blissful ways. This is simply a description of what opens us.
In the video above, I describe four of the most powerful gates of awakening and the gifts each one brings.
First is the gate of sorrow. Loss has a way of softening the heart. It asks us to find a compassion larger than our grief, to discover that love is greater than the tears we carry.
The second is the gate of emptiness. We begin to see that everything we thought was so solid is always changing. The past is memory. The future is imagination. What we truly have is this living moment.
The third is the gate of the eternal present. By “eternal,” I don’t mean endless time. I mean the timeless awareness beneath the thinking mind. Time is created by our thoughts, but beneath them is a vast stillness that is always available.
The fourth is the gate of oneness. Our sense of separation is, in many ways, a fiction. Every breath we take has been shared with countless beings before us. We belong to one another, to this living earth, and to the great mystery of life itself. As Alice Walker wrote, there comes a moment when you realize that if you cut a tree, your own arm would bleed.
However we enter, each gate points us toward the same discovery: that we are far more than this skin-encapsulated body. Beneath every joy and every sorrow is the loving awareness that is our true nature. May you always remember this.
Metta,
Jack
