What Is the Heart?
The heart, as I talk about it, is a Buddhist concept that is easier to understand for some cultures than others. In English it can be understood as a mixture of three ideas: the physical organ of the heart, your feelings and emotions, and the unconscious.
| Language | Word | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Korean | 마음 (maeum) | The most natural translation; includes feeling, mind, and intention |
| Japanese / Chinese | こころ / 心 (kokoro / xīn) | Heart-mind; the character 心 literally depicts the organ |
| Pali / Sanskrit | Cittā / Chitta | The mind-heart in Buddhist psychology; one of the four foundations of mindfulness |
| English | — | No single equivalent; closest: "the unconscious" + "the intuitive center" |
The heart is a critical concept because while we have rational abilities as human beings, most of our decisions are made from the heart. And perhaps more importantly, our happiness is experienced and felt by the heart — not by the brain.
The Head vs. The Heart
Although we have these things called "thoughts" in our heads, if we look closely we can see that some thoughts we intentionally generate — when we're problem-solving, researching, or creating. But there's another category: thoughts that are inspired by feelings underneath. These are heart-driven thoughts.
Your heart has its own identity. It thinks and acts independently of you. When your heart feels a certain way, it rapidly fires emotionally charged thoughts up to the brain. If your heart hates you, you'll get thoughts of self-hatred and engage in that chain. If your heart feels invincible, you can face defeat and not care.
| The Head (Brain) | The Heart (마음) | |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Rational, cognitive, intentional | Unconscious, intuitive, independent |
| Thoughts | Many thoughts at once; you choose them | One primary sentiment; it chooses you |
| Memory | Requires conscious effort to memorize | Automatically stores every emotional experience |
| Capacity | Limited working memory | Infinite — never runs out of space |
| When hit | You can argue back; recovers quickly | Much more painful; changes how you see everything |
| Sharing | Easy — we share thoughts all the time | Deeply difficult — requires vulnerability |
At a given moment, you may be having lots of thoughts, but your heart — it feels one primary sentiment. Suppose something terrible happened to my family. My dogs joyfully barking at me to feed them will land in a completely different way. Suppose I got promoted. My dogs can bite me and I can still have a wonderful time. What gets to determine my experience in life is largely what my heart is feeling at the moment.
— Billy, "To Be Or Not To Be"The Heart as a Repository
With our brain we need to spend conscious time and effort memorizing things. You probably don't recall everything you learned at school. But you probably remember with great detail how you felt at school.
The neat thing about this repository: you don't have to spend time consciously trying to commit emotional memories into your heart. It's automatic. The not so neat part: all the emotional experiences you've had about certain things are retained and carry over to future instances.
This is the insidious nature of karma — always working latently without us knowing. We become state machines. When we enter a state that we believe warrants anger, we replay a sound bite we learned. We're not even actually angry. We just believe that this situation calls for the angry reaction we've learned to replay. The whole programming is so deeply rooted in the unconscious that we never stop to think about it.
Suppose a car honks at every 4:30AM in my neighborhood. Every 4:30AM I'm going to enter the anger state. But what if the driver drops off $5k every day after the honk? I'm going to look forward to 4:30AM every day. We get into emotions because we believe situations warrant anger. We believe we're angry. But we're not — we're just replaying patterns we've learned.
— Billy, "But How, Billy?"The Heart's Impermanence
Here is where Buddha's insight becomes practical. The heart has a nature, and that nature is impermanence. How you feel about something seems like it can last forever, but it is a quality of feelings that they are ephemeral. To rely on emotions as if they are constant is a fool's errand.
On one moment you might feel great about yourself; at the flicker of a moment you can feel horrible. When the heart shifts, it draws its ammunition quickly — it immediately starts shooting thoughts to the head that reinforce its current experience. This is what spiraling is. But because nothing is permanent, even the spiral passes.
Understanding this doesn't mean becoming numb. It means recognizing: is this an intentional thought, or is this a heart-driven thought? If it's heart-driven, you notice it instead of acting on it or trying to suppress it.
You don't need your heart's agreement with you in order to do something. I can do things I hate doing. Sometimes the heart does make things easy for me, but I don't rely on feeling like that in the next 10 minutes. It's like the wind or the weather — sometimes it's this way, and other times it's not.
— Billy, "Quick Draw of Emotions"Heart Alignment
Feelings dictate the general direction of where our life goes. This means we are headed wherever the heart wants to go.
Suppose in our head we want to rest because we had a long day, and inside our heart we really like resting. No problem — you'll rest easily. But suppose in our head we want to rest, and in our heart we judge ourselves for resting. Now it will be very difficult to truly relax.
When your heart is worried, there is no amount of action you can do to soothe it. Your heart wants to worry — it can always come up with the next reason regardless of how bulletproof you've made your life. And this is different from coping, because when you're coping your heart doesn't feel content but your head goes into a deep argument with your heart about how you should feel content. This inconsistency between head and heart is a major source of suffering.
As much as possible, we want to understand our heart so that we can align with it. And from here we make a conscious choice:
- 1. Do we want to respect our heart's wishes?
- 2. Do we want to learn how to work against our heart without suffering?
- 3. Do we want to change our heart?
There is no correct answer here. Every choice just comes with a different set of consequences.
The Infinite Capacity
A garage fits two cars tightly. A shed fits some tools. A bookshelf fits some books. Every physical container has a limit. But the heart?
Think of the biggest elephant you've ever seen. And the Burj Khalifa. And the biggest whale you can imagine. Your entire solar system. As you think of these things, do they take physical space in your mind? Can you run out of room?
Now consider something more abstract: the feelings you have for your mom over the years. The feelings about your body. About pets who passed away. About your favorite video game. About getting older. About your insecurities. About everything — where does it all go?
When you say you've "run out of patience," have you actually run out? When you say you "can't take it anymore" — can't you? The heart is the grand container of all inner experiences, and it possesses an infinite capacity. It can hold every feeling, every memory, every experience you will ever encounter. It never truly runs out of space.
Opening the Heart
Because the heart is so powerful, we often build thick walls around it. We share our thoughts freely — whatever we're thinking, we just talk about it. But when it comes to sharing how we are feeling, we're deeply resistant because taking a hit on the heart is much more painful than taking a hit on the thoughts.
This is why heart sharing — taking turns speaking exclusively from your feelings, without any interruption or feedback from others — is such a transformative practice. You don't analyze. You don't give advice. You just acknowledge that this is what someone is going through. And when it's your turn, you share what is in your heart.
The more you do this, the more at ease you feel. Eventually you reach a point where you can start opening your heart to the world.
In front of my sangha, I have no need to present myself in a good way.
— Song lyric from Dharma School, as recounted in "Graduating from Dharma School"