Ayya Khema Quotes

#1. Half the spiritual life consists of remembering what we are up against and where we are going.

Ayya Khema

#2. It is often thought that the Buddha's doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn't going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away.

Ayya Khema

#3. If we do not try, we will not know.

Ayya Khema

#4. The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart, where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude and contentment

Ayya Khema

#5. From contact comes feeling. From feeling comes reaction. This is what keeps us in the cycle of birth and death. Our reactions to our feelings are our passport to rebirth.

Ayya Khema

#6. Unless we practice
loving feelings toward
everyone we meet, day in,
day out, we're missing out
on the most joyous part of
life. If we can actually open
our hearts, there's no
difficulty in being happy.

Ayya Khema

#7. The more we abandon ill-will and hatred, the easier it will be to meditate.

Ayya Khema

#8. If the whole universe can be found in our own body and mind, this is where we need to make our inquires. We all have the answers within ourselves, we just have not got in touch with them yet. The potential of finding the truth within requires faith in ourselves.

Ayya Khema

#9. "Wholeheartedly" means that we give our time, love, and energy unstintingly.

Ayya Khema

#10. Trying to achieve something in the spiritual world is just as foolish as trying to achieve something in the material world. There's nothing to achieve. There's only letting go. As we let go, more and more, of ego identifications, desires, and support systems, bliss will arise.

Ayya Khema

#11. To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Everybody is unhappy simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn't available.

Ayya Khema

#12. Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.

Ayya Khema

#13. As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.

Ayya Khema

#14. Eventually we will find (mostly in retrospect, of course) that we can be very grateful to those people who have made life most difficult for us.

Ayya Khema

#15. If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are looking for spiritual growth.

Ayya Khema

#16. Whatever we attempt is a reflection of our inner thirst, which we hope to quench in all these external ways. What we are looking for lies within us, and if we gave out time and energy to an interior search, we would come across it much faster, since that is the only place where it is to be found.

Ayya Khema

#17. A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.

Ayya Khema

#18. The Buddha compared anger with picking up hot coals with one's bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry of course.

Ayya Khema