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Citta and Memory ~ Tanya Wiser

The following talk was given by Tanya Wiser at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on September 23, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Citta and Memory (link)

Introduction

I'm in no rush to talk. It's nice to sit with you all, nice to sit in community. It's a gift. Thank you for being here.

Tonight, I want to give you a bit of an overview of where I'm going to try and take you with me. I'm going to talk about this term citta¹, which is a Pali term that means heart-mind. Not a separation of a heart and a mind, but this one thing together. I'm also going to talk about memory and the way memory impacts citta, and a way to practice with citta in a very simple way that for me has been very, very helpful. And this idea that life is additive and not subtractive. We can't get rid of what's already happened or what's happening, but we can add to life, and we do all the time. What we add to it sticks around and lives inside of us.

I'll make this more clear as we go, but essentially, the way we meet our experience, the way that we show up for our lives and each other, is additive. We're adding something to life. So, do we want to add patience, kindness, caring, or do we want to add conflict, hatred, delusion? Whatever we add, it's not some amorphous thing that's just out there. It actually stays in here. It lives with us. And that's where the memory thing comes in.

First, let's just connect with this idea of citta, heart-mind, not two things but one field, one thing. There's a lot of usefulness, I think, in splitting things up. It helps us dissect; we get to know the parts of something. But when we're dissecting, we're taking things apart that were a whole. With citta, I feel like there's a way of bringing things back into wholeness. The heart and mind are not two separate, distinct things; they're actually in constant relationship with each other, as well as the body. The body is part of all of this.

We could consider it, as Ajahn Sucitto² often talks about it, like the field of our experience. It's something to be sensed or felt into. Our experience can be described as a tone, a quality, a flavor. And Bhikkhu Bodhi³, who's a Pali scholar and translator, says citta is not something we possess but something we participate in. I think we tend to think of hearts and minds as something we possess, but citta is something that's created, and we're participating in that creation. It's a field of experience.

Coming back to this idea of wholeness, another way that we dissect our experience, and are taught to do this in the Theravada⁴ tradition, is we learn how to be mindful of breath, body, emotions, and thinking. We learn how to tune into each of these different experiences as separate. There's a lot to be gained by doing so. But when it comes to thinking and trying to be mindful of thinking, especially in daily life when our mind is pretty busy, is it very easy? I don't find it very easy because the mind gets so full and there's so much going on. It's so easy to just get caught in the thought, the storyline, the perceptions that we're having.

This way of tracking citta is a way of tracking the impact of how I'm thinking and feeling right now. Instead of trying to track every little thought, it's more about the nuance of, "Ah, what's happening here?" And more simply still, "How's the heart quality here? Am I available for this moment in a way that my heart is soft enough to care? To care about what's happening, to respond in a caring, thoughtful way?"

The mind itself and thoughts are more easily experienced if we notice them in this way. We can track and notice our thinking by noticing the impact of our thinking. This is a way to pay attention to body, heart, and mind, and do it in a way that doesn't require all of this detailed tracking in the middle of a busy life. It's more like we can be going along and checking in, "Okay, how am I relating here? How am I doing? Am I open, closed? How's this going?"

When we come to an important moment and we notice that our heart is contracted or we're not sure where our heart is at, we can know it's not the right time to make a decision or say something that might be misconstrued or difficult. It's a very simple guide. In Buddhism, non-harming is like the North Star. I kind of feel like the heart is the magnetic force for that North Star, like the compass. Is the heart online? Is the magnetic field awake? That's what we need awake to help us really track and gauge whether or not we're in a field of non-harming.

We need to be mindful, but we're busy in our lives. For me, this is a nice way to be tracking, "How am I in general?" And to just know it. There's no forcing the heart to care when it's not caring, right? It doesn't work. It's not about forcing. It's about noticing and softening, bringing care to a contracted mind-heart, a citta experience.

Another reason to notice on this level of experience is that it's almost a pre-verbal level, so that we're not caught in the story yet. Once we get involved in the story, we get pretty entangled and identified. A part of ourselves starts to get enmeshed in the story, and then we're in the courtroom battling it out. If we just start in this more subtle realm before we get into this detailed field of courtroom arguments, we can just know how we need to care for ourselves as we proceed.

One of the things that is also so simple about this is that a heart that's contracted, when we're clinging, we're already entangled in something and we may not even know what it is. This is partly because there's so much going on under the conscious level that's shaping us, causing us to lean in one direction or another—our conditioning, our patterns, our habits.

It's good to take our time, to not be in a hurry. Georgia O'Keeffe said something that I think is quite lovely in this regard. She said, "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." I really like that. It really helps put it in context. It does take time to make a friend; we can't rush that. So we want to go in this deeper way, this deeper opening to what's going on inside of ourselves.

Another writer, Leah Purpura, talks about this in another beautiful way. She says to see in a way that's an invitation to see the world whole, by apprehending its details and the dialogue between them. The interrelationship between things. Even within ourselves, if we take our time to feel what's going on, we can start to notice more subtly what is it that's leaning us one way or another. What is it that's pulling on us to respond or to see things or react in another way versus a more free way? This attitude requires giving permission, letting things unfold a bit inside of ourselves without taking action. It takes some restraint and curiosity and some softening around what's going on, not coming in and just making change, but more letting change happen.

Memory

Let's talk a little bit now about the memory part, because this is part of what we're working with. A neuroscientist describes the brain as a prediction organ. That's the job of the brain: to predict. And what does it predict based on? Memory. What it has learned and experienced. But memory itself is actually nothing fixed. It's very adaptive and it changes.

Our impressions of things, our responses to things, are shaped very much by our memory and what we've been told and taught and experienced. Most of which was given to us, and we probably would not take if we had a choice. There's so much with media and all kinds of stuff that just comes into us. We don't really have a choice. We are conditioned beings. We get conditioned by everything that we see, everything we hear, everything we experience.

The good part of it is that if we're awake to what's happening, we can start to shift and change the neurons that fire together. You've heard that saying: neurons that fire together, wire together. So, we can start connecting different things to change what our automatic responses and associations are.

But memory in our minds is not like memory in a computer, where you can pull it up, play with it, change it, decide to save it or not, or go back to old versions. Nope. Our memory is adaptive and designed to update, not preserve. So, when you sit around and you talk to your family members about a trip and a story, and you're all telling different things, your memory has just been changed. When you revisit a memory and you have a new insight and you think, "Oh my gosh," your memory has changed. And if you're bringing up a traumatic memory and you go back into the trauma over and over again, guess what? You're restoring and reinforcing that, too.

Every time we reflect on the past, we are delicately, or maybe not so delicately, transforming its cellular representation in the brain. That's by Jonah Lehrer, a scientist. And then Henri Bergson wrote, "The brain's function is to choose from the past, to diminish it, to simplify it, but not to preserve it." The brain's function is to choose from the past. Your brain is going in, choosing from the past, diminishing it, simplifying it, but not preserving it.

There was an article just this week in Tricycle magazine from a Thai Forest teacher, Ajahn Punnavaddho, and the title of the article was "The Delusion of Memory." Perfect. Out of necessity, the way that the brain organizes things, we create categories, symbols, forms, organizational structures. "Tree" becomes all trees. This person becomes all of this, and it somehow gets synthesized, simplified, diminished into this one thing. We have a name for everything, and then there's so much stuff that has gone into what that name represents, but it's getting changed and distorted and simplified all the time.

So, we always have this opportunity to try and wake up to what this tree is, what Susan is today, who we are, what's happening today, free from the constraints of our memory. If we can open up and notice the citta, the quality of our relationship to what's going on, it gives us a clue. How many of you have certain people that when you hear their name, you're like, "Oh." Right? And that lives in us. All of that lives in us.

As Ajahn Punnavaddho puts it, "The moment you start disliking someone, an imprint is created in your mind. The imprint then causes you to see that person in a fixed way and prevents you from seeing how he or she really is. This is delusion at work."

In the Dharma, this is where we talk about conditioning and consciousness. In the Majjhima Nikaya 18, the Honeyball discourse, it goes: dependent on the eye and form, eye consciousness arises. With contact, one feels, and then one perceives. As you perceive, one thinks. And as you think, you start to proliferate. And then what you proliferate becomes the source of our perceptions. We start to create and recreate and project so much onto what's happening that probably doesn't have much to do with what's really happening.

So, simple. Come back to simple. For me, citta. What is the energy field? What is happening in the heart field? For me, it's so helpful just to track, "Ah, is my heart open? Is it contracted? Is it numb? Is it offline?" Where is my heart? Where am I in relationship? How open am I to what's happening? That simple reflection tells me so much. I don't have to know all the details about why, what happened when I was two, or what this person said or did. I don't have to get caught in all of that. I might want to, maybe, but more importantly, I might just want to smooth out, soften around what I'm noticing and stay in the moment, stay here, and bring caring attention to what's going on for me. And if my heart's hurt and shut, just letting it be hurt and shut and caring about that, at least. Then I know how I'm inclined to perceive and proceed and move. And then I can choose more wisely about how I go forward and what I add.

This brings us to this idea that life is additive, not subtractive. Remember, memory keeps changing. So as I notice the heart is contracted, I'm bringing a caring attention to it. All of a sudden, I'm adding more attentive and caring, hopefully discerning, attention to some field that I may not even have any idea of all that's going on. I'm bringing a whole new level of consciousness to that, that is starting to get connected to this whole set of stuff that I don't know. And so what happens? Memory gets stored, so that maybe next time that comes up with the memory, it makes it easier and easier to grow more mindfulness, more awareness, more caring when I find myself in a space that might be hard for me to inhabit in a way I want to inhabit it. Does that make sense?

However we meet things, we're adding. And adding might be simply complete allowing. We're just being a witness. We're just seeing clearly. Adding might mean that we bring, for me, I've intentionally practiced metta⁵ for myself or my mind stream when things were difficult. It's like just flowing metta into this stream of stuff so that metta starts to soften and be around all that's there. And then I'm adding that, and when it comes back up again, it maybe is a little bit softer. Or I could add anger that I'm having a bad feeling. And guess what? That's what I'm adding. And so guess what's going to come up with it next time?

This is so important for us to think about. It's compassion for our future selves and everybody around us. I want to be kind to my future self and all my future loved ones. It matters what we add. It really matters, and it lives inside of us. It's this storehouse, and it's right there under the surface, and it is felt when it gets touched into. So what do we want to be feeling? What soup do we want to be living in?

Resisting is persisting. When we resist what's coming up, things persist. It doesn't help them move through or digest or resolve. So if we feel resistance, we can notice the resistance and bring care to the resistance. That's what we can add right there. Don't try and get rid of the resistance, but don't resist either. We've got to include everything. If something's born, it's here. It's already here. Let's not add greed, hatred, or delusion to it. There's plenty of that to go around.

There might be this feeling of contradictions, that it doesn't make sense. But Ajahn Sucitto says it this way: "We're fragile and we're resilient. We are separated and we're connected. In the language of the heart, these are not contradictions." So we might feel joy and we might feel hatred at the same time. We might feel connected and we might feel disconnected at the same time. Both are true. We don't have to choose one over the other. It's all in how we hold them.

Just take a minute maybe and notice your chest area in your body. Bringing your awareness here. Come in quietly, gently. And then just left of center, just attuning to the quality in this area of the body. Notice what you're aware of. Just maybe drop in this question right now, and any answer is a good answer: Is the heart soft enough to care right now? And whatever the answer is, bringing care to that answer. Just knowing actually begins the process of getting us more free.

There's this miracle thing that is true for me, which is no matter what is happening, whether my heart can care or not in a moment, or if love is available or not, there is always something to love. No matter what is going on, there's always something to love. "Oh, the part of me that can't open. Oh, sweetheart." There's always something that can be loved, that can be cared for. It might take a while to find it, but it's there.

I'm going to read a poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer. It's called "Love Like Water."

We could say the pain was a block so great it could not be moved. We could say love did not try to move it. Love simply surrounded the mass and dissolved it the way water meets a block of salt, breaking apart each ionic bond until every atom of sodium and chloride is surrounded by molecules of water. And in this way, and sooner than you’d think, the pain was rearranged into minuscule bits. And there was no part of the pain that was not touched by love. The pain was no less, it’s true, but mixed with love, dispersed, the pain became something new, something vital that encouraged a different kind of life, a substance that supported buoyancy, an essential medium to carry me.

I'm going to end there and just see if anyone has any comments or questions.

Q&A

Susan: I'm a little puzzled about the last line of Rosemary Trommer's poem.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah, "an essential medium to carry me." I think part of the poem got cut off when I first read it. Let me find the full version. [pauses] Okay, so here is the full poem:

We could say the pain was a block so great it could not be moved. We could say love did not try to move it. Love simply surrounded the mass and dissolved it the way water meets a block of salt, breaking apart each ionic bond until every atom of sodium and chloride is surrounded by molecules of water. And in this way, and sooner than you’d think, the pain was rearranged into minuscule bits. And there was no part of the pain that was not touched by love. The pain was no less, it’s true, but mixed with love, dispersed, the pain became something new, something vital that encouraged a different kind of life, a substance that supported buoyancy, an essential medium to carry me.

So now if you bring the salt in, it makes sense, right?

Susan: Yeah. And you know, I don't want to get mixed up with religious alchemy, but it feels like... I never could figure out transubstantiation, but it has a tinge of that. As if it never disappears, but it becomes something new that carries us instead of torturing, eroding, haunting.

Tanya Wiser: Yeah. Well, I've used the word composting too. And then there's this saying, "no mud, no lotus." This is the nature of life. By turning towards suffering with consciousness, with mindfulness, with a heart that's open and willing to meet it with wisdom, it transmutes, it changes.

Audience Member: Thanks for the talk. There's a lot to work with with citta. I'm finding personally what's coming up is when I think of the blockers or prisons that we put up, words themselves or language seems to be one of them. When we're making memories, at least for me, it's usually in words mostly. So what's going to be hard to work with is thinking of how do I know I'm on the right track with this type of practice? And the tendency seems to be like, well, when I'm putting less words to things, there's like an aversion to wanting to use words. You mentioned pre-verbal.

Tanya Wiser: No, we need words. We don't abandon words. We need them. But this is why I say tracking the energy, the tone, the quality, the impact of the words we're using and the way we're seeing gives us feedback in a way that we're going to miss if we just stay in the words. Does that make sense? Don't get tangled up. Soften around it. Relax, soften, breathe.

Reflections

I'll just read you my questions for you to think about, if you choose to engage in this kind of practice.

When you bring your attention to the tone of your heart-mind, citta, what do you notice? What do you start to be aware of?

And then notice what happens. How does it change when you simply receive it instead of trying to change it? Come to it like a naturalist, somebody who's coming into the world of nature to study and observe, not to change things but to learn, to be open.

On memory: some of us use words, some of us use imagery. We think differently. How do you think? Just be curious about your own mind and how it organizes things. How do you find things?

And then on inclusion and this idea of allowing, and that life is additive, not subtractive. What does that mean for you? How do you make sense of that? How do you start to track that in a way that maybe inspires you? Maybe you start to see, "Oh, it matters. It actually really matters." All these little side comments I'm making inside my little head, those matter. So start paying attention to them.

And include all the parts of you, even the parts that are hard to love. There's no part of you that should be left out or shamed. All parts of ourselves, every feeling, we just need to know how to meet it, be with it. We're humans. We're messy. But the more we're kind to ourselves, the more we'll be kind to each other and our messiness.

Dedication of Merit

May we all bring more love to our messiness. And may that love go from messiness to messiness and fill all the space around all the messiness. And may the messiness get smaller and smaller, filled around more and more with love, everywhere, for all beings without exception.

Thank you for your attention.