Photo by Henrik Hjortshøj 

With the holidays all but upon us and the end of the year / decade approaching this Monday we plan on having a seasonal sangha gathering where we get to enjoy a little more time than usual enjoying each other’s company. Rather than the usual two ‘sits’ and a walking meditation we will ‘sit’ just once and then spend time sharing food and dharma. With many folks headed out of town, and others having guests visiting we expect this to be a nice small group evening. 

In terms of a dharma sharing I thought it might be fun to ponder on a favorite story shared by Thay:

One day the Buddha was sitting with his monks in the woods. They had just finished their mindful lunch and were about to start a question and answer session. A peasant passed by and asked the Buddha, “Dear monk, have you seen my cows passing by here?”

The Buddha said, “What cows?”

Dear Friends,

With so much conversation around racial and social justice, how do we work with these issues through the lens of the mindfulness and Buddhist practice, and specifically through the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh?

Within the larger Thich Nhat Hanh community, a few years ago, a small group of practitioners came together to create the international ARISE sangha. ARISE - Awakening through Race, Intersectionality, and Social Equity - is made of practitioners and monastics who came together to heal the wounds of racial injustice and social inequity, beginning with looking deeply within ourselves and using the energy of compassion, understanding, and love in action. Part of their mission is to guide those of us in the larger community in how to do this work as well.

Following on Marie’s beautiful thread from last week, I would like to share my personal practice of sitting — a practice that helps me to “build a home inside yourself to love and heal yourself”. During dharma sharing I will invite you to reflect and share your own experiences. Why do you sit? 

I sit because it makes me happier. I sit alone to enjoy the calm. I sit with others to enjoy the peace and rest of connecting with others in silence without needing to engage in conversation. 

I also sit to create new neural pathways, new more skillful ways to act and react to old stimuli in order to decrease the suffering I cause to myself and others. Modern neuroscience has helped elucidate the brain’s process to do this challenging work. Consistent repetition of new learned behaviors appears to be key. Thich Nhat Hahn (Thay/teacher in Vietnamese) teaches the time-honored way to do this using a metaphor of ‘watering seeds’ in our store consciousness/subconscious. By watering the positive seeds within ourselves and others, these seeds or tendencies will grow and thrive. By refraining to water the less helpful seeds in ourselves and others, they will wither from lack of nourishment and fall away. 

Last Monday, Camille helped us to explore the 2nd Mindfulness Training: True Happiness. Several people shared their challenges, and their practice with this part of the training: “…the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from my own happiness and suffering…”

From a theoretical perspective, we know that we “inter-are”with those who are suffering, and we have a clear sense of the implications. Yet from a practical perspective, this can be difficult to do, especially (for me), with those I love the most who have been suffering for a long time.

On Monday night after our sitting and walking meditation (we will not do the 2nd sitting meditation), we will read the Five Mindfulness Trainings together,  and after the reading we will explore the Second Mindfulness Training, True Happiness.

Last Monday night at sangha Mick talked about "the art of stopping" and coming back to our breath and taking care of ourselves during challenges, and the week before Annie talked about cultivating "compassion, freshness, and understanding", all of which are mindfulness practices that give us the opportunity to be more present and move closer to joy and happiness.  True happiness is not possible without these qualities.

You may have noticed a shift in your mood and your everyday rhythm as the days get shorter and the air gets cooler. Although winter is a time of moving inwards, over the next 6 weeks especially our energy can be pulled outward by the holidays and all that they entail.

This outward movement can be in addition to our usual states of activity. 

Thich Nhat Hanh talks about meditation and mindfulness practice as “the art of stopping.”

“We have to learn the art of stopping - stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace. We turn on the TV and then we turn it off. We pick up a book and then we put it down. How can we stop this state of agitation? How can we stop our fear, despair, anger, and craving? We can stop by practicing mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful smiling, and deep looking in order to understand. When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy.”

This week, we will contemplate together the following words which were part of an answer Thich Nhat Hanh gave at a Q&A session in the UK in 2010:

So our practice should transform us more, should bring more compassion and freshness into our person.

Then when we don’t suffer anymore, we can with our compassion, with our freshness, with our understanding, help the other person come out of that situation.

So I would suggest that we stop thinking that we have done our part, only he has not done his part. We can very well improve our quality of practice.

And we should believe that when we have become true compassion, true freshness, true understanding, things will change. Because every one of us needs these three elements.

I feel very grateful for all the practices that Thay, our venerable teacher, offers to help us transform our suffering and live a happier life. One of these practices is the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which are guidelines that help us look deeply into our daily life. The question one might ask could then be: “How do we look deeply?” 

Every morning we have 24 brand new hours to live. What a precious gift!” Thich Nhat Hanh

When my heart is heavy, my mind is cluttered, or I’m feeling too reactive, I find it helpful to step back and embrace a moment of gratitude.  Without fail, this brief practice results in feelings of more spaciousness, lightness and clarity.  Something inside me shifts.  So, in preparing for this Monday’s sangha, I wanted to share, for the second time, a reflection on gratitude from Brother Phap Hai (Dharma Ocean), a senior monastic Dharma teacher at Deer Park Monastery and board member of the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation.  Although written on Thanksgiving Day 2016, it is relevant to all of our days!

Photo credit: Bella Appel

Dear Friends,

This evening we will enjoy the Five Earth Touchings together (see full text below).  The Earth Touchings are a Buddhist meditation practice where we bow down and surrender to the Earth. Also called the Five Prostrates, we join the mind and body to help us "return to the Earth and to our roots, and to recognize that we are not alone but connected to a whole stream of spiritual and blood ancestors.  We touch the Earth to let go of the idea that we are separate and to remind us that we are the Earth and part of life.  When we touch the Earth, we breathe in all the strength and stability of the Earth, and breathe out our suffering – our feelings of anger, hatred, fear, inadequacy and grief.  This is a wonderful practice." (From Plum Village web site).

I am someone who loves summer. I even love DC summers. Bring on the sun, bring on the heat. As summer closes, the days shorten and nights get longer. I have always felt my mood shift and it’s been hard to get excited about pumpkins, ghouls, tinsel or cozy sweaters - albeit fall bike rides do help.

My summers are usually accompanied by travel and one of our family jokes is that almost wherever I end up I usually say “I could stay here for a year.” What I mean by this is that I do not want summer to end and I want to hold onto the moment that I am in and to stop time. As I think about this, it is a very common thought pattern for me when either I have found some happy place or am doing some activity or task and I am really in my element. This grasping and wanting to cling onto such moments has been a constant companion.

This Monday night, Alison will facilitate. She shares:

When I first learned of the most recent double mass shooting in America and the death of innocent children, women and men, my initial response seemed to be one of emotional detachment – just another news story to acknowledge and move on.  That’s what it felt like but it wasn’t.  When I really allowed myself to be “present” with the stories, I knew that my original reaction was merely an attempt not to acknowledge a whole wealth of emotions – fear, pain, sadness, anger, frustration, rage, anxiety – none of which I wanted to feel.