Prior to his passing Buddha advised his followers to rely on the four foundations of mindfulness after his passing. This is what is commonly called Satipatthana in the Buddhist world.
The four go like this:
- The body: the more mindful attention you pay to your body, the more you realize that there is nothing in your body that is precious or dirty. There is nothing in your body that makes you an elevated status nor a defiled status. There is nothing in your body that is so precious worth everything else, there is nothing in your body that is so disgusting it must be eliminated.
- The feeling: the more mindful attention you pay to your feeling, the more you realize that the pursuit of happiness is actually the pursuit of suffering. You always get used to happiness and seek to desire more, and when you get it you will get used to it again to pursue it or suffer because you cannot get it. To desire happiness is to desire suffering.
- The heart: the more mindful attention you pay to your heart, the more you realize that none of your emotional experiences are constant. How you feel about something seems like it can last but it is a quality of feelings that they are ephemeral in nature. To rely on emotions as if they are constant is a fool’s errand.
- The dharma: the more mindful attention you pay to the dharma, the more you realize there is nothing to actually call and label as “the dharma”. Everything is contextual and meaning is bound to perspective, there is no one steady all-encompassing truth to be found anywhere.
Buddhism is generally difficult to convey in the English speaking world because much of the concepts in Buddhism do not transfer over that well to the English language. While all the above four are worth deep, deep diving into, the heart is a pretty loaded concept that deserves some more explanation.
The heart is how I translated the term Cittā. It can mean the heart (not the organ), the mind, the unconscious, the feeling, the intuitive, and other similar concepts. It stands in contrast with the rational, cognitive thinking brain (which is also “mind” in English).
Although we have these things called “thoughts” in our heads, if we differentiate between them we can see that some thoughts we can intentionally have, and this is what we do when we’re creative problem solving or engaging in a research we’re interested in.
The other category of thoughts is thoughts that are inspired by feelings underneath. A good way to think of your “heart” (the idea from above) is it having its own identity, it thinks and acts independently of you. So suppose your heart hates you; then you will get thoughts of self-hatred in your brain and you engage in this thought chain.
This type of thoughts lend to spiraling, it keeps on feeding you the next thought to have when your heart feels a certain way. But again, as Buddha noted this isn’t constant. So on one moment you might be feeling pretty great about yourself, then at the flicker of a moment you can feel pretty horrible about yourself.
When the seesawing of this becomes too extreme that’s when we might call it bipolar disorder and try to engage it in a medical way. But in general even without disorders we all suffer at least a little bit because we keep on wanting to rely on our heart. We think because we’re the owners of it we can always count on us having the power to control it.
But we don’t.
Even if you’re the Buddha, you don’t. This is precisely why it is encouraged to understand the NATURE of the heart; it is just not constant. When we don’t understand seasons, we have no idea why it’s hot for a fairly long time then it becomes cold for a fairly long time. When we don’t understand the moon we have no idea why that object in the night sky keeps shifting shape. Not understanding something keeps on making you rely on faulty understandings.
When your heart shifts into something, it will draw its ammunition quickly. It will then immediately start shooting thoughts that reinforce its experience to the head. A good practical exercise to try and differentiate, is this an intentional thought or is this a heart-driven thought? If it’s a heart-driven thought, you just notice it instead of trying to act upon it or 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.