Dear Thay, Dear Sangha,

On Monday, after our sitting and walking meditation, we will listen to part of a Dharma talk by Thay, entitled “Calling your cows by their true names.”

While the whole of the Dharma talk is wonderful - from the Pebble Meditation to the eight practices to care for our suffering - we will listen to the last part. This is where Thay teaches about another way to generate joy and happiness: the practice of letting go.

Somehow, despite all these years of practice and my intellectual understanding of impermanence and interbeing, I still find myself holding on. Sometimes, clenching, without even knowing that I’m doing it. Holding on to how I have taken care of my aging mother, contrasting that with how she is currently being cared for, and suffering. Holding on to how I would like to physically be with and comfort a dear friend who just lost her daughter, relative to being so far away, and suffering... Holding on to how much work I could and should get done in a day or week, when I wasn’t grieving…

On Monday evening we will offer a ceremony of prayer and healing energy to our community and beyond. Within our sangha and worldwide, many are suffering. In the Plum Village tradition, we offer this ceremony to acknowledge the suffering of all beings and offer peace, compassion, understanding, and love for ourselves and for those who suffer. The essence of the ceremony is to transform suffering into compassion, peace and joy.

We welcome two guests, Dharma teachers, Valerie Brown from ARISE Sangha, and Mitchell Ratner from Still Water Mindfulness Practice Community to facilitate this ceremony. We aspire to bring love, compassion, and kindness to those who are suffering and to release their suffering toward great love…

Dear Thay, dear friends,

On Monday, we’ll explore the Fifth Mindfulness Training, Nourishment and Healing as it relates to difficult moments and comfort eating.

One of the many things I love about the Five Mindfulness Trainings is that they’re aspirational. When I read them, I feel the love, encouragement and non judgement with which they were written. There’s also an element of strength, or perhaps belief, inviting us to step into the practice in ways that will support us and the larger world.

All of this is true, AND, when times get really tough, I often want to soothe myself by eating something comforting, mindlessly - ideally with my attention focused elsewhere. Something in me judges me for being unmindful, contributing to suffering. Am I?

There is a lot in the news about climate change, the mountains of plastic in the oceans, an accelerated extinction of many species, and how much the planet Earth is suffering. If I look at the Earth as something separate from me, I could feel separate from her suffering. When I look more deeply, I see Mother Earth as the great mother to all that is animate as well as inanimate. I then feel connected to all ---not only other humans, but also all the animals, birds, insects, mountains, trees, flowers, rivers, streams, etc.

Thay has taught deep ecology for decades. He continues to inspire us, with the assistance of monastics, in his recent book, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet:

“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth….We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this situation. And now we need to look deeply to find a way out, not only as individuals but as a collective, a species.”

Life in Washington DC is one where you are often surrounded by experts (either self-proclaimed or actual). It's a city which weights credentials and expertise very highly. It's not that unusual in this respect as many societies have increasingly equated human value with formal, credentialized knowledge. I am sure that even amongst the members of our own sangha, knowledge and expertise are highly valued and seen as an integral part of how we perceive our own worth.

One of the things I have never forgotten when I first moved to this area was how in almost every new professional meeting (and many social gatherings) people would within a few minutes include their educational resume even though many of these individuals would likely have graduated 20+ years ago. This would often be followed by “what do you do?” In response I would usually dig into my archive of British humour and crack some joke to which I would get a slightly quizzical look. These days I usually respond with “breathe”.

I recently had our solar panels serviced, and Marquis, the man who serviced them, told me to check my house for "energy vampires."

I didn't know exactly what an energy vampire was, so he explained that an energy vampire is a piece of equipment that is secretly draining power, even when it's turned off.

This reminded me of a line in the Fourteen Mindfulness trainings (the 14th) that says, "we are determined to ... learn ways to preserve and channel our vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of our bodhisattva ideal.

Thich Nhat Hanh expands upon this in a commentary on the 14th training:

In the religious and medical traditions of Asia, the human person was said to have three sources of energy: sexual, breath, and spirit. Sexual energy is what you spend during sexual intercourse. Breath energy is the kind of energy you spend when you talk too much and breathe too little. Spirit energy is energy that you spend when you worry too much and do not sleep well…

This week Camille will facilitate and we will continue to explore the practice of Engaged Mindfulness.

Last week we were introduced to Samanthabhadra, the Bodhisattva of Great Action, as a resource or reminder to "act wisely" and with understanding. And as Annie suggested last week in her write up, in the practice of engaged mindfulness we wish to learn

to practice "skillfully" to understand the suffering of another before we can act and try to help. Her sharing of Thay's mantra that "our happiness depends on the happiness of all other beings" - is what really resonates with me and sometimes eludes me.

I am often one to rush out to a cause, join a protest or march, feed a sick friend, and fill my day with acts to help others and then realize I have not really taken care of my own suffering and need to slow down. Over the last year I have suffered from a good deal of pain and discomfort in my gut and joint issues. And at the same time I have felt a lot of despair of the suffering in the world in terms of oppression, violence, and destruction of our ancestral lands. So much of my practice is trying to remember this mantra to not only skillfully understand the suffering of others but to remember mine as well and that I am not separate from others. Only then can I act with true compassion and understanding and find happiness.

As a child I learned to jump into action whenever needed, and I sometimes still act before thinking deeply. As a student of Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), I learned that how I act is as important as the action itself.

The Bodhisattva of Great Action, Samathabhadra, has offered us a guide for what it means to act wisely. One of the things I learn from Samanthabhadra is that to act skillfully, we must first understand the situation.

In a Q&A session with Thay many years ago, I asked how I could help someone in my life who I felt was behaving in a harmful way. Thay's answer was to go back to my own practice, to become fresher, to stop thinking that I was the healthy one and that he was the unhealthy one, understand the roots of my loved ones suffering, and then I would know what to do. Focusing on my own practice and developing a deeper understanding of the situation was needed before any truly skillful action could be taken…

One of my favorite sentences in our sangha’s new Engaged Mindfulness Vision Statement is “Mindfulness is the awareness and transformation of not only our own suffering, but of the suffering around us.” This summarizes what engaged mindfulness means to me as well as the efforts of our Engaged Mindfulness Working Group to expand the mindfulness possibilities of our sangha. In the month of October, which our sangha is dedicating to engaged mindfulness, I am grateful that I feel ready to reach out and share the peace that I derive from my mindfulness practice.

In a month that is also dedicated to National Domestic Violence Awareness, I have decided to support Community Family Life Services (CFLS). CFLS assists formerly incarcerated women and their families, many of whom have suffered different forms of abuse. I would like to explain why I have chosen to support this organization by describing the connection I perceive between engaged mindfulness and the interbeing among all living creatures. I will focus in particular on the lessons I have learned from elephants.

On Monday night we will explore our attitudes, experiences and feelings around generosity as a lead-in to our month-long theme for October: Engaged Mindfulness. October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the USA. Over the last few months, our engaged mindfulness working group has been learning about and working with an organization that supports incarcerated women, many of whom have been victims of different forms of domestic violence. In October we’ll have the opportunity to look deeply at our practice of engaged mindfulness as individuals, as a community and at the work of CFLS through multiple Dharma doors.

For now, we’ll take a BIG step back and invite you to reflect on your experiences with generosity - from childhood through the present day - and whether/how these have changed as you practiced mindfulness.

When I (Marie) explored these, I realized that the experiences of my childhood and young/middle aged adulthood left a seemingly indelible imprint: caring for others was generous and good whereas caring for myself was selfish and bad. So simple!

Monday night we have the gift and opportunity to recite the Five Mindfulness Trainings together. We will explore more deeply the 4th training on Loving Speech & Compassionate Listening. Of the five trainings, this one gives me the most challenges, day after day, year after year. The current times are as deeply divided and as toxic as any we have witnessed. After last year, I didn’t think it could get worse. I was encouraged after listening to Thich Nhat Hanh/Thay’s short teaching on Loving Speech & Compassion. He shares a three day practice challenge aimed to expand our capacity to begin the healing process through deep listening.

I find I try to shield myself from taking in too much news, too often, as it seems to reinforce all the great divides and suffering in the world. And it spills over into all aspects of my life. I lack the patience to listen deeply to others, even those who are closest to me. I have to stop and remind myself that deep listening requires me to first be ‘mindful of compassion’. I am listening to try to help, to try to relieve the suffering of the person who stands in front of me or who may be on the phone. I have to push aside my other agendas and projects and focus on how I can help…

Being in the present moment for me is to be in touch with everything around me. Whether being in touch with my body, my breath, the earth and all living beings, or even the "mud" as our teacher Thay would say - it is recognizing reality in the present moment. For me this is one of the true teachings of this practice of mindfulness and what I work towards in my personal practice, and can often be very difficult for me.

My understanding of reality lately is focused too much on worrying about the future and not enough being in the present moment. I have often lost touch with my body in the present moment in my busyness of thinking about the future. My worry becomes my suffering and I am caught in that suffering and I am not helping myself and I am not available to others. My partner, who had a bad accident at the beginning of this year, together with a failing business, is lately often caught in the past with regret and anger, and has a hard time enjoying the present.

Increasing polarization over the last couple decades has made it harder for us to find common ground with others because we believe we are right and others are wrong. We get into the habit of passing harsh judgment on anyone who doesn’t think like us, whether Republicans, Democrats, pro- or anti-Trump, Liberals, Conservatives, Anti-vaxxers, Vaccine-hesitant people, Vaccine-pushers, etc.

What would happen if we choose to find common ground instead?

Water, mainly natural bodies of water, are anxiety producing for me. When I was little, I got a stomach ache, and resisted every time I had to prepare for my swim lesson.

Eventually I became a confident swimmer. And as a teenager, I would stay in the ocean for hours when I visited my grandmother.

On our camping trip last weekend, we went canoeing in a creek with "No Swimming" postings. Our 85 pound muscular and determined dog was in the canoe, and I was holding him while my husband and son rowed. I could feel my dog’s anxiety, heart racing, panting, shifting his weight. As we rebalanced against his shifts, I knew I was anxious too. Maybe if I was less anxious, he would feel calmer. I did some mindful breathing, and soon we headed back for shore.

What’s the worst that could happen?

The dog jumps in the creek. We swim him to shore as there would be no way of getting him back in the boat. Actually, there are many more dire scenarios including capsizing, injury, concussion, drowning, death.

The news shows us the cruelty, injustice, terror close by and in the distance. We have more anxiety and stress because we know how badly things can go. How much can we control by worrying? What can we do with our feelings of anxiety and stress? Being mindful about what I have the power to affect versus accepting what I can’t change is helping me find a balance. I know if I take a breath and sort through my thoughts, I can make a conscious choice of how to handle my anxiety…

Dear Thay, Dear friends,

We will start the evening with a guided meditation to settle our bodies and prepare for reading the Five Mindfulness Trainings.

After our recitation, we will focus our attention on the Third Mindfulness Training: “True Love” (in the traditional version) and “Cherishment as True Love” (in the ARISE version). Below, you will find both Trainings.

As I write these words, I’m sitting on my brother’s porch in Wilmington, North Carolina - a place I have visited for twenty years but only recently learned of its’ coup d’etat, wherein white supremacists overthrew a US government.

Sometimes I wonder if I am addicted to my comfort. I know I generally have plenty of comfort in my life - compared to many others on this planet and even compared to my younger self. I see myself using my comfort to sidestep dukkha (discomfort or dissatisfaction) because it seems like I'll be happier if I keep myself comfortable. But that's not exactly what the practice teaches us.

The first teaching that the Buddha gave after his enlightenment, the first of the Four Noble Truths, says that dukkha is simply part of life. Stuff happens that we don't like, even when our lives appear to be relatively comfortable from the outside.

How do we handle those moments of challenge? Are we able to stay present for them or do we distract ourselves with our comforts. And, does it even matter?

Building on last week’s theme of Right/Wise Effort on the Buddha’s Eight-fold path, I invite you to explore more deeply what you are doing to enjoy your time here on the planet. I ask myself if the activities I engage in and the effort I give them are aiding or hindering me. Am I gaining greater awareness to reach a longer term objective: to transform my mind, my heart and my life/situation? As the current pandemic tosses and turns us and our world, I feel the calling to reflect on the way forward. Sometimes it feels so overwhelming. Yet when I’m able to come back to the present moment, it’s much easier to let the sounds of the birds, the morning light, and the blue sky help me to anchor my day. And then I can move forward, one day at a time.

One of the central tenets of Buddhism is known as The Noble Eight Fold Path.

1. Right View

2. Right Resolve

3. Right Speech

4. RIght Action

5. Right Livelihood

6. Right Effort

7. Right Mindfulness

8. Right Concentration

For this week's dharma sharing I thought I would focus on the sixth of the eight -- Right Effort. Endeavoring to give rise to skillful thoughts, words, and deeds and renouncing unskillful ones. Right effort can be viewed as something akin to the sweet spot between gritted teeth determination and relaxation that veers into daydreaming.

Right effort involves working towards healthy states of mind and body mind as well as learning to have the grace to accept and submit to what cannot be changed. In other words learning to let go of what is unhealthy or unhelpful.

Since I'm on vacation this week, I thought we might consider the benefits of being lazy. This is a photo of Lake Michigan where we have are being very lazy.

In my household growing up, being lazy was an insult. If we kids were ever caught playing or reading when there was work to be done, we were called a ""lazy bum" and immediately put to work.

On my first retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, I learned about the "lazy day". During each week of each retreat I've ever been on, there has been one day set aside as a lazy day. On lazy days we don't have a schedule and we do whatever brings us joy. It sounds good, but it can be challenging for me!

I often feel some tension in my body when I'm not doing something or attending to something. In addition to Fear of Missing out (FOMO) I think I also have Fear of Not Doing Something (FONDS). So being on vacation is good practice for me.

For me, FONDS is driven by the misperception that I am separate from others and that if I don't hurry up and do something, things will fall apart…