June 24, 2026

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

Kornfield wrote this in the early 1990s, drawing on decades of Buddhist training in Southeast Asia and years of clinical work as a therapist in the United States. He was watching Western students arrive at meditation practice carrying enormous psychological wounds that traditional Asian teachers had not prepared him to address. The image of the garden was his way of saying that wisdom is not passive — it requires you to look at what you are actually cultivating, thought by thought, day by day. That kind of honest inventory is exactly what discernment asks of us.