transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] A good meditation teacher isn't just someone who meditates a lot. Guiding someone else through the experience of sitting with their own mind is a genuine skill, one that requires real training and an ongoing commitment to your own growth as a teacher and practitioner. Join renowned Buddhist teacher David Nicktern for a free online event on Tuesday, May 5th at 6 p.m. Eastern, exploring the key elements of teaching mindfulness meditation. He'll also discuss the upcoming Dharma Moon 100-Hour Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training. You'll have a chance to ask questions, meet the teaching team, and find out whether their program might be a good fit for you. Visit dharmamoon.com/elements. That's dharmamoon.com/elements for more information, and to reserve your spot for the free event on Tuesday, May 5th.

Speaker 2:
[01:10] There was something so liberating about Ram Dass, because he wasn't attached to who he was. He was truly playing with it. A beautiful quote from Ram Dass' great friend, Jack Kornfield, from this episode 321 of Jack's Heart Wisdom podcast, Ram Dass and the Freedom to Be Human. Thank you for joining us on this wonderful podcast. My name is Ganesh, Jack's assistant, and Jack and I were actually brought together by Ram Dass, so this episode really holds a special place in my heart. This talk was first given for the Spirit Rock Monday Night Dharma Talk on February 23rd of 2026, so it is quite fresh. And the wisdom in it truly exemplifies the Third Zen Ancestors quote, which Jack and Ram Dass use quite a bit. The great way is not difficult for those who are not attached to their preferences. And despite your unbridled non-attachment to your preferences, if you do happen to like this episode, then you will be able to enjoy it. Jack just put out a new course of sacred dialogues between him and Ram Dass over the years, stemming from Naropa 1974 and going all the way to their times in front of Ram Dass' puja on Maui in Ram Dass' final years. That can be found on jackkornfield.com, along with Jack's new year-long course, Living the Dharma in a Troubled World. This is a big one. A year of monthly hangs with Jack, some great question and answer sessions and opportunities to connect with him directly, as well as weekly modules to keep your year focused on steadiness, kindness, and wise response. This began in February, but you can hop in anytime, check out the backlog of teachings, the backlog of the question and answer sessions, and also hop in for future ones, which are always coming down the pipeline. So without further ado, I invite you to take a deep breath, focus in on your heart, and cozy up to Episode 321 of the Heart Wisdom Podcast with Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, and the freedom to be human. Namaste.

Speaker 3:
[03:53] And now I'd like to speak to you as a teacher. It's kind of my job. You've got to come here and say something. And I want to talk about freedom and liberation and love in a more embodied way. It's been some months since I've taught on Monday night. And I consider doing a traditional talk, the heart practices, the inner path of insight meditation, or the interpersonal steps of the eightfold path, right speech and right action and so forth. Then I thought maybe it would be interesting to be more informal tonight and talk about what life has presented me. In the months since I've been here with you, and I've been traveling and also engaged in teaching. I teach online, for example, the MNTCP Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program with Sounds True that's wonderful, and currently has 1,000 people in it. We've now had 8,000 people in 75 countries who've gone through this training, Plattar and Abrak and I and others do. So I teach in that, and it's very inspiring to have people in Nairobi working in a school with kids, or women in a women's center in Lahore, Pakistan teaching mindfulness and forgiveness and compassion. So along with that kind of teaching, Trudy and I were in Hawaii in December, not a hardship post. But we went as we do every year for the Ram Dass Legacy Retreat. We'd been with him for many, many years and then after he died, we and Krishnadasa and others kept it going. I love teaching with Trudy. Basically, I love being married to Trudy because she's like the coolest, best, amazing, wonderful woman I could be with. She's really extraordinary and I feel so grateful for her. Joyful, wise, dharma, playful spirit. And so there in Hawaii, there were Ram Dass teachings and stories and so forth. And I remember actually when I first met Ram Dass, and he was such an amazing teacher back in 1972. When I listened, he was such a great storyteller. I loved that channel of storytelling. Later on, when I worked with him and visited, he'd been listening, we'd been teaching there. He said, you know, you tell too many stories. And I said, Ram Dass, you know, I learned this somewhere and I still love doing it. And he laughed because what was beautiful when Ram Dass taught is he talked about the liberation of the heart and how we could love anywhere and love anything and what it was like to be with his guru who accepted every single part of him and saw no impurities, if you will. What it meant in India, it's called the glance of mercy. When someone sees into your heart and your soul and loves you, Ram Dass was so transformed by that. At the same time as he was teaching, he was this great public neurotic because he would talk about all the times he flunked the course. When he was a new teacher wearing the white robes and the beard and his beads, he said, I'd go out there and the first thing I'd do would be to count the house, see how many people came to see me. Of course, then he would share it. There was something so liberating because he wasn't attached to who he was. He was playing with it. His be here now, which changed much of the culture, really invited us into a field of aloha, of love using that Hawaiian expression. As it says in the Metta Sutta of loving kindness, omitting none. This is Sylvia Borstein's favorite phrase, to love, omitting none. And so there was such inspiration from Ram Dass, even at the last of his life, where he became so loving and pure-hearted, and there he was in his wheelchair. He'd been in a wheelchair with this major stroke for 20 years, couldn't move his arm and leg one side of his body, lots of pain and infections. And walking along in the house, he had a team of people who helped also take care of him. And someone who was visiting said, Ram Dass, are you in pain? And he said, yes, some. And he paused for a bit and he said, I love my pain. What an extraordinary statement. In the great teachings of Zen Master Singh Stan, the third Zen patriarch ancestor, he says, the great way is not difficult for those who are not attached to their preferences. And Ram Dass began to embody for all of us this extraordinary capacity. Yes, he had preferences, but not to be attached, to be free. And this is really the teachings. You know, if you look in the text of the Buddha, and he talks about the ways we get attached. And of course, my teacher Ajahn Chah was very much his simple teaching was to let things go. You come in, you know, he'd ask, were you suffering? And if you said no, he said, great. And if you said yes, he said, ah, something else to let go of. And when you read the teachings of the Buddha, and he talks about the way that we hold on to our views and criticism and praise and so forth. And he said, those, he said, first, to be liberated is to not be attached to your views, not to be fixed in the way you think things are supposed to be. And then he went on, this is one of the few times I think he was kind of making a joke in the text, where he said, those who cling to their opinions go around the world bothering everyone else. And so there was this invitation for a gracious heart, peaceful smiling, not attached to our views and opinions, or as the great way is not to be, the great way is not difficult if you're not attached to your preferences of any kind. So there we are. It was very pure-hearted at the end of Ram Dass' life, and it inspired me, and it should inspire you, because this is the invitation to freedom, not your opinions, and not the way it's supposed to be. Sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it's pleasurable, and it just is what it is. Who you are is the space of loving awareness, the witness, the consciousness. So then we went on to Costa Rica to teach Trudy and I where we've been going now for several years to write and teach, and Trudy calls it Adult Summer Camp, because we're there with Dan Siegel and Alyssa Epple and Roshi Joan Halifax and Bethel Van der Coke and others. And one of the most inspiring people we were sitting with was Christina Figuera, whose father was the founding president of Columbia who disbanded the army and said, we'll put all the military money into healthcare and education. And you may have heard this story. We were talking about climate change, inner and outer. And before the Paris Climate Accord some years ago, she was a UN diplomat in charge of organizing it, and it was terrible and no one would, there was so much infighting between the different countries and whose fault it was and who was going to pay. And she was kind of desperate. And her friend said, you know, there's this place in southern France with a Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, I think you should go visit him. And so in the midst of this terrible time, she went down and spent a couple of weeks with Thich Nhat Hanh, and it's changed everything. She sat and he showed her what it was like to live with a peaceful heart, what it was like not to be attached to your opinions. And he had the deep teaching of interdependence that she now teaches, freedom from separation. And well, this is a shameless commerce moment. My new book isn't titled All in This Together. But she knew when she spent that time with him, that she had to step out of all the conflict of her life. And he said, walk with me so slowly. Sit, feel how you're connected with everything. It all breathes together. And it changed her. And she went back to Paris and instead of seeing the enemies and who was at fault and who was to be judged and who owed money and who was the victim, which is how the consciousness of that movement there. She understood from Thich Nhat Hanh that it was all a big family. Of course, you know how families are. They're not that easy. But they were all there together. And it changed everything. And she was able to get whatever it was, 198 countries to sign on the Paris Climate Accord. And of course, our conversation went on. Well, what about now where it's being undone? But it's not completely undone. We have to stand up and work for it. But the consciousness of humanity has changed in many cases. And there was a sense of freedom. It's the freedom of separation that the Buddha taught, of liberation, that you're not separate. A poem from Alison Luterman. Sun drapes a buttered scarf across my cheek. Rose opens herself to my glance. Rain shares its divine melancholy. The whole world keeps whispering to you, nibbling your ear like a neglected lover. Sun drapes a buttered scarf across your cheek. Rain opens, Rose opens herself to your glance. Rain shares its divine melancholy. The whole world keeps whispering to you. And she embodied this. And this was the teachings in the Forest Monastery. It was the teachings of staying connected to the natural world. If you feel bad, raise your hand, don't even bother. If things seem really dire, go out and put your hand on a tree and stand there for five or ten minutes and let it speak to you and listen to you. Feel the depth. Remember that after the Buddhist enlightenment, at least as the story goes, he moved away from the Tree of Enlightenment and sat there for six days and nights in gratitude to the tree, just gazing at the tree and the life and the enlightenment that it allowed him to have. So when you're lost like Christina was, find a tree, find a place in nature. And then staying in Costa Rica, I got sick. I'd actually been a little bit sick before I left. And then I had this systemic infection, and I ended up having to go in the hospital for five days. Now I'm quite fine. But I thought, ah, hospital, I can practice. I do my breath, I do mindfulness, whatever, it's okay. And the staff was immensely caring. In Costa Rica, the greeting is pura vida, pure life or pure heart. And they say it and they mean it. And nobody sues, it's sort of national health care. So you don't have to worry about litigation. No one scares you and tells you, here's all the horrible things I need to tell you so you don't sue me. And instead what you get are these loving, caring doctors and nurses and health people. And I thought, okay, so I go in the hospital. I'm cool with it. My daughter came down and she said, Dad, you're 80 years old, you're in the hospital. I have to spend some time with you. And we had a beautiful time together. Trudy couldn't come because she had a bad cold and she didn't want other people to get sick. And after my daughter left and I still had all these tubes poked into me, they wake you up at night and they, you know, stare you and they do all this. I had a kind of rough night thinking, God, how long will this go? Maybe I'll be stuck here for weeks. Maybe I'll die here, whatever. You know how the mind is. How long will it be? What happens? And then I remembered visiting Ajahn Chah after he was in his late sixties. He had diabetes. He had water in the brain. He was in the hospital and had a shunt put from his brain down. He went through a really very difficult physical time. And I was visiting him and I said, I'm glad you're out of the hospital. And I said, of course, from the beginning, you always gave us the Buddhist teaching that this human life also has old age, sickness and death. It's kind of like a Buddhist mantra. And I said that to him and he looked at me and here he was like 68 and I was like 28. And he shook his head. He said, don't you say that so lightly. You know, it all passed, but it doesn't mean that it's easy. I like Suzuki Roshi's phrase, it's suffering Buddha, sun Buddha, moon Buddha, joyful Buddha, suffering Buddha. This is the dance of human incarnation. And then when you read the texts of the Buddha and things that are difficult to rise, sometimes there's the phrase, bear it as a noble one, bear it with dignity. And that's your freedom. Not that it's not difficult, but it's all part of the game, because who we are is the loving witness of it. And our body goes through all the things it does, all these teachings. So I got this message. Would I do some teachings for the Mantra Festival in Ukraine? I said, what do you want me to do? And they said, well, we have 10,000 people who come online mostly, who've been experiencing so much loss, so much grief or fear, cruelty, kind of such deep uncertainty. And we want to know if there's some way that you can help us to be with all of this and not let it poison our hearts, not let it poison, not let it harden our hearts. And of course, I thought about that statement from the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree when he was attacked by the armies of Mara, first all the desire and temptation, and then by spears and arrows and armies, and finally by doubt itself, what right you have to sit here. And the Buddha's response was to reach down with one hand and say, the earth is my witness. The earth is my witness that I have the right to sit here as a human being with dignity and care, to be here with compassion for all, to be free. And this is the invitation for you. And when I think about what I'll be saying to the people in Ukraine, I think about how Ajahn Chah's Forest Monastery, which was in the Ubon Province on the border of both Cambodia and Laos during the American bombing, who had those countries' enormous amounts of bombing, and the jets and bombers would go overhead, and people would say, well, you have to do something. You have to get out and stop the war. And Ajahn Chah would say, you have to stop the war where it begins in your own heart, to learn to sit and stop the war. He said, war is come and go. Yes, you can go out and do what you can, but the monastery is a living library, a living legacy to teach you that there can be a place of peace. The jets overhead, activists coming, people who've been soldiers and so forth. And you'd enter into the monastery in this forest and people were so respectful and loving. And you'd remember, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be wise? Now it's not that easy. And I don't know what I can say to the people of Ukraine because I can barely imagine living through what many of them have. But I do know what it's been like to work in the past with people who literally survived the holocaust in Nazi Germany or survived genocide, Rohingya or Darfur or so forth. And I pass on the teachings of the Buddha and my own understanding, which is kind of limited in that. But I also borrow the moral authority of my teachers. I may not be able to say to a holocaust survival what they should do about forgiveness or releasing the burdens of their heart, but I can tell them about Mahagosananda. After all 19 members of his family were killed and temple burned and the whole village destroyed and two million people killed in the Cambodian genocide. And I can describe him standing in front of these in the refugee camp, 100,000 people chanting hatred never ends by hatred, but by love alone is healed until they all began to chant with him. To borrow the moral authority of the Dalai Lama and Gosananda and others, and say, this is possible, and it's possible for you. Don't let them poison your heart. I've been working with various philanthropists, and I think of this one great philanthropist who's kind of like George Soros, enormous benefit, and been attacked as George Soros has, and I said to them, all the attacks you're getting for supporting things that we might, some of us anyway, might be in favor of, of mitigating climate change or greater equality or things like that, or education for everyone, or care for the poorest, or the health care across Africa or whatever. And it happened to be lots of those. And I knew how difficult it was. And I said, you know, you need backup. And they said, what do you mean by backup? And the next week I went to visit them and I brought about a dozen or 15 photographs, one of Martin Luther King, and one of Leymann Gabboui who got the Nobel Prize in Liberia, and Wangari Mathai who got the Nobel Prize for the Canyon Green Belt in East Africa, and Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, and Mahatma Gandhi. And I filled out this big table in their office. And I said, I want you to sit with them and gaze at them and imagine them gazing back, because what's happening to you, it's not new. They've been through it. All of them were attacked. Many were imprisoned. And feel the dignity and the character and the dharma of wisdom and compassion they carried. And this is you. This is your birthright. These are your people. And we sat and we practiced together. Bear it with dignity. I'm supposed to go teach at Oxford, Trudy and I both, in September. And it's one of the biggest trauma conferences in the world. And it has the usual great trauma leaders of this time. It has Dick Schwartz, Internal Family Systems, and Bessel van der Coke, The Body Keeps the Score, and Dan Siegel, and again, probably, Alyssa Apple, and many of these people were friends of mine. And I thought, what am I going to teach there? Because, you know, all these people gathered at this great conference, and there are already so many people who are helpful for trauma. And I realized that I had something to say. When I trained as a psychologist 50 years ago, half a century, trauma was hardly mentioned. It wasn't there much in the clinical world. People were dealing with other things, your family, or your, you know, the judgment inside, or all the fears, or all that stuff. And then in the decade since, there's been this revolution, when very, very fine teachers and people have found ways to help with trauma. Peter Levine, Somatic Experience, working with the way trauma is held in the body. And again, Bessel van der Coke, or the EMD work, line movement that really helps with trauma. Or again, Dick Schwartz and Internal Family Systems, Francine Shapiro, EMDR. So all this is great, but it's gotten out of balance the other way. Initially, there was not much attention to trauma, and now it's swung so that everything is trauma. Tell me your name and what's your trauma. People are characterized that way. And the problem is that they identify with it. And the truth is, we all carry trauma, but the trigger warning thing, oh, you have to be careful, I'm gonna talk about the Cambodian genocide or the Holocaust. I better warn you first. When you went to see Ajahn Chah in his forest monastery, he had at his fingertips the medicine of the Dharma. So if you came in and you were a farmer and your barn burned down, he would help you with that grief. If you came in and you'd been a soldier and you had regrets for what you did, he would give you practices for healing. If you came in and you couldn't steady yourself because you were in a circumstance where you might lose your job and you were frightened and you didn't know what to do, he gave you a practice. If you came in and your children somehow were in danger, he would offer a practice. For some people, it would be sitting meditation. For others, it would be loving kindness for themselves or someone else. For some who couldn't even sit still, he would say, come here for a week or two and just do walking meditation. Feel your feet on the earth or maybe touch the tree. For some people who are so discombobulated, you say go and join this monk and the lay people in the kitchen and spend a few weeks preparing food for others to eat and let it help regulate you. All this stuff will come. We would sit and we would do some chanting of all things are impermanent, let's hold them all with compassion and loving kindness, the Four Noble Truths, all of that. But he had the medicine because it was actually not trauma, it was suffering. It was our universal human condition. He didn't make it special or say, you're the one or all of you have trauma. What you have is a human incarnation. Then he offered it in a beautiful way, like the Buddha had said in the Anguttara Nikaya, just as if there were a beautiful pond with pleasant shore, its water being clear, agreeable, cool, transparent. And a person came by scorched and exhausted by heat, fatigue, parched, thirsty, having suffered greatly. And they would step into the pond and bathe and drink, and all their plight and fatigue and feverishness would be allayed. And so, my friends, whenever one hears the Buddhist Dharma and teachings, whether it be discourses, poetry, prose, explanations, marvelous statements, all one's plight and fatigue and the feverish burning of the heart are allayed. And this is what it was in that monastery. It wasn't you were traumatized, but you're human. And of course, we've all suffered loss and disappointment. We've all had this because it's being human. And yet, the heart is big enough to hold it all and find a place of peace and dignity and loving awareness amidst it all.