Meditation for Thursday 18th September 2025
Meditation author and teacher, Jack Kornfield writes about the importance of stillness in our lives.
“When you walk into a shaded grove of giant redwoods or into a great cathedral, a sacred stillness descends. As spaciousness opens within you, you can experience a profound silence in your very being. You may feel nervous at first, and at the same time, you’ve longed for this. This is the vast silence that surrounds life. Trust it and rest in the silence.”
When meditating we welcome and embrace silence; we open our hearts and become fully alive. We rest in the silence, not in sleep but in the active state of concentration.
“Vastness is the nature of consciousness. If you gaze at it directly, you’ll discover that the mind is transparent, spacious, that it has no boundaries, that your heart is as wide as the world. As you open to this vastness, you can allow the waves of life to arise and pass. In silence, you’ll see the mystery giving birth to life, to thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions.”
When meditating we are encouraged to banish all thinking and to concentrate on our breath, a mantra, a mandala, or some other point of concentration. And yet it is more nuanced, more subtle than this.
“This silence is not withdrawal, indifference, or punishment.
It is not the absence of thoughts.
It is spacious and refreshing, a tender stillness from which we can learn, listen, and look deeply.”
Meditation
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Ref: Jack Kornfield, “No Time Like the Present” Pub: Rider, London 2017.
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