The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are.
Interpretation
Acceptance of emotions and thoughts without judgment leads to inner peace.
This quote by Ajahn Chah emphasizes the importance of accepting our feelings and thoughts as they are, without labeling them as good or bad. It conveys a profound sense of peace that comes from allowing ourselves to experience emotions fully, while recognizing that they are just aspects of our human experience, not definitive truths about our identity.
In practice
In a meditation workshop, to encourage participants to accept their thoughts.
Once you understand non-self, then the burden of life is gone. You'll be at peace with the world. When we see beyond self, we no longer cling to happiness and we can truly be happy. Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are - no holding on, no attachment, free.
When sitting in meditation, say, "That's not my business!" with every thought that comes by.
If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.
To observe and watch one's own mind is something really interesting. The untrained mind will run and follow its old habit patterns. Because it has not been trained and taught, it will get lost in all kinds of stories and issues. Therefore we have to train our mind. The meditation practice in Buddhism is all about training one's own mind.
Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
Whatever skills I have acquired, whatever gifts I have been given, I place them at Your service.
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing.
He felt his heart pounding fiercely in his chest. How strange that in his dread of death, it pumped all the harder, valiantly keeping him alive. But it would have to stop, and soon. Its beats were numbered. How many would there be time for, as he rose and walked through the castle for the last time, out into the grounds and into the forest?
I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.