When we come into the present, we begin to feel the life around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding. We must have the courage to face whatever is present—our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes, our love—everything that moves us most deeply. As we stop the war, each of us will find something from which we have been running—our loneliness, our unworthiness, our boredom, our shame, our unfulfilled desires. We must face these parts of our human life and hold them with great compassion.
In this way we stop the war, and we can embrace our personal griefs and sorrows, joys and triumphs with love instead of denial. With the same courage of heart we can open to the people around us, to our family, to our community, to the social problems of the world, to our collective history. We can live in harmony with the truth of life.
This is the purpose of a spiritual practice and of choosing a path with heart—to discover peace and connectedness in ourselves and to stop the war in us and around us.
– Jack Kornfield
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