Jack Kornfield Interview

When I first arrived in the forest monastery of Ajahn Chah, he looked at me and said, “I hope you’re not afraid to suffer.” I said, “What do you mean, afraid to suffer?” And he said, “There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering that you run away from, which follows you everywhere, and the suffering that you are willing to turn and face and thereby find the liberation that the Buddha taught for us all.” That was his opening sentence.

What made you stick around?

Well, he said it with great humor. He wasn’t heavy-handed. He would direct people into difficulties without subtly increasing their unworthiness or their self-hatred. He knew how to mentor people-he would look at students and say, “I know you can do this.” He would see what Thomas Merton called “their secret beauty,” their Buddha-nature, and foster that, which is what a great teacher can do.

Why did you leave your life as a forest monastic?

After my first five years in Asia — I was still quite young — I realized that I didn’t want to spend my life as a celibate monk. Marriage, relationships, and living in the world were still important to me, and so I told my teacher that I wanted to return. I felt like I had learned enough of the practices of mindfulness and compassion and now I wanted to see if I could really live them in ordinary life and not in the protected circumstances of the monastery. I didn’t feel that I wanted to live as an expatriate in Asia for the rest of my life. I was drawn back to my own culture.

And when you got here?

The fantastic detachment and great bliss and joy and peace that I had known for some years crumbled. I discovered to my horror that a lot of the neurotic patterns of my life were waiting back here, like old comfortable clothes-fighting with my girlfriend, worrying about money. So I really had to ask myself, “OK, now, how do you actually live this practice, how do you integrate it?” That became the compelling question. And what I found is that I had done a bit of a spiritual end run or spiritual bypass around a number of very painful areas of my life. All this unfinished business returned. I had spent eight or ten years in dharma study and practice beginning in college-working primarily with my mind, through concentration and great ardor, but now there arose all this emotional work. I had to really learn how to bring the principles of mindfulness and compassion into the pain and neurosis in my life. And to transform them in some way. I did that in meditation, through a great deal of emphasis on lovingkindness and compassion. I also did it in psychotherapy, especially body- and breath-oriented forms of psychotherapy. And I did it through gradually learning how to be more conscious in close relationships, which was a big practice, and not one that was focused on much in the monasteries.

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