Head & Heart
November 04, 2023

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. Notice where the sensation of breathing is most prominent in your body. It might be in the chest, the abdomen. It could be anywhere at all in the body. Wherever you’re most sensitive to the breath, focus your attention there.

Then ask yourself if it’s comfortable. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t feel good, you can change. Try shorter breathing or in-short, out-long; in-long, out-short. Fast, slow, heavy, light. Deeper, more shallow. Get a sense of what the body needs right now and breathe that way.

If the mind wanders off, you don’t have to follow those thoughts. You can just drop them and come back to the breath. Leave the thoughts unfinished. You’ve got more important work to do here. You’re training the mind.

And you’re training the heart at the same time. In all the different languages of Asia where Buddhism has gone, the words for “heart” and “mind” are either the same word or else they’re interchangeable, because there’s no clear distinction between the two. The things you think about—the things you want—the things you’re sensitive to—are all connected. So when training the mind, we’re also training the heart.

This is why the Buddha, when he started teaching, ordinarily wouldn’t start right with emptiness, or with not-self, or dependent co-arising. He’d start out with generosity, which is a matter of the heart. From there he would teach you about karma, and nhow generosity has meaning because of karma. It’s because we have the freedom to choose our actions that people are worthwhile.

That’s why generosity has meaning—why it is a virtue. If we didn’t have choices in our actions, then giving a gift would be an automatic thing that was determined by somebody else or something else. It wouldn’t have any meaning at all. But it’s because we do have choices in the present moment—and that’s what the main emphasis of karma is, the choices we have, whether they’re skillful or not skillful—it’s because we have those choices that generosity is meaningful.

At the same time, the act of generosity teaches you something about freedom of choice and also your freedom to say no to greed, aversion, delusion in your mind. It’s your first taste of freedom.

Then building on that the Buddha would teach you about virtue and then about meditation—because the qualities of the heart are also involved in gaining insight and gaining concentration. So we’re training not just the mind—not just our concepts and thoughts about things—but we’re also training our desires, our aspirations, our sense of what really is important in life. In particular, we’re learning how we can put an end to the suffering we’re causing.

So when you train the heart and mind together like this, the mind teaches the heart the principles of cause and effect. The heart teaches the mind that what’s really important is the fact that even though we want happiness, the things we do often lead to suffering. We want to know why that is. That’s the big problem to solve.

So as you’re training the mind, and training the heart here with the breath, bring them together. And that way they both grow.