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Welcome to the Jack Cornfield Heart Wisdom Hour. We are delighted to share with you Jack's innate common sense wisdom and his clear open heart.

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It's a lot that it might be good to do something very simple and basic tonight to kind of ground some of all the other things that are coming and going through Monday night class, back to basics.

When one comes to meditate or comes to enter a spiritual life, what's asked in a certain way quite simply is a spirit of sensitivity, that the quality of mindfulness or awareness that we train in meditation

is really one of listening, paying attention with the heart.

Poem from Mary Oliver. Some questions you might ask. Is the soul solid like iron or is it tender and breakable like the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?

Who has it and who doesn't? I keep looking around me. The face of the mousse is as sad as the face of Jesus.

And the swan opens her white wing slowly. And in the fall the black bear carries leaves into the darkness to sleep.

One question leads to another. The soul does it have a shape like an iceberg, like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung like the snake and the scallop? Why should I have it and not the ant eater who loves her children?

Why should I have it and not the camel? Come to think of it. What about the maple trees? What about the blue iris? What about all the little stones sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses and lemons with their shining leaves? What about grass?

So there comes a kind of sensitivity or listening to some mystery that we are born into.

And in that way spiritual practice is not about a whole set of beliefs. But what we can know hearing the cry of the raven or the crow.

Sitting with ourselves in meditation. There's a story I've told on and off over the years. Some of you may have heard. Some of you have come regularly may have heard a number of these stories tonight.

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