How can mindfulness practice support a more loving world? How can we cultivate resilience and mindful resistance in these times? In this article we share a recent panel discussion – between Brother Phap Huu, Sister True Dedication, Brother Spirit and climate leader Christiana Figueres – and highlight how the practice can support us to engage deeply and take action in the world.
The lessons shared are inspired by the Plum Village online course, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (ZASP) – you can join the next ZASP course cohort starting 1st March, 2026.
The Responsibility to Generate Joy
Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) taught the importance of cultivating joy and peace, especially in challenging times. These practices help us build the capacity to stay present when fear and despair arise in response to suffering in the world. But why is this so vital now, and how is it possible?
Brother Phap Huu: Thay once told us that one of his darkest moments in his activism was when despair became so overwhelming that he wanted to give up; he wanted to drown into the situation. Despair can cripple us and immobilise us in finding a way forward.
This is where mindfulness is needed. When we speak about mindfulness, it is not just the breath – it is to be truly engaged in the present moment. And at the same time when there is suffering, we have the responsibility and the capacity to generate joy, peace and love.
As practitioners, wherever there is hatred, we have to be the warrior of love. That has to be the aspiration. Every morning waking up I have 24 brand new hours; how can I bring love to the forefront in my way of being, looking, seeing and understanding?
Love is a very organic energy – it needs the right nutriments and concentration of energies to develop and to strengthen it. Also, recognizing when our love is weak – when we don’t have the capacity for kindness or the capacity for compassion – we know our limits. We can say, actually today I’m going to give a little bit of space in order to take care of my own heart. If we don’t take the responsibility of checking in about our own level of joy and inner peace, then how can we offer that peace that we are fighting for, that we are cultivating, that we are speaking up for?
This is a very important engagement of the practice: wherever we go – if it is a peace walk, a walk, or a protest – we can do all of these actions and we have to generate the peace that is true to our way of being, in the steps that we take, in our way of showing up – so that peace, love and presence are truly there.
How to Respond to Suffering
The panel discussion explored how we can make a choice to face this moment in a particular way: to not avoid suffering, but to meet it with love. Choosing to cultivate joy, peace and love helps us generate the resources we need to meet and respond to suffering.
Brother Spirit: Mindfulness practice is to become aware of whatever is in the present moment without having an idea of what should or should not be there, but just meeting what is there. Generally speaking there is some level of pain in reality, of suffering, and there is injustice. If it is real, then on the way to peace we have to pass through the door of suffering and grief. For the peace or the joy to be real, it has to include our pain. If you just jump straight to joy without acknowledging and really encountering the pain, it is fake.
We have to have the courage to feel what we’re feeling – the immensity of that. Of course we all need to know what our capacity is. We have to have some moderation and know when to nourish ourselves, but sometimes we have the strength, especially as a community. Maybe all of us right now, do have the capacity to embrace some of the pain and the grief. When we do that authentically, there is a kind of joy. It is the joy of: finally I am not ignoring it anymore. We are able to look at the suffering directly and say, you know what, “I am not going to turn away’’. The feeling of it is metabolising it, and that’s when pain and grief can become good fuel for our insight.
Christiana Figueres: Mindful intentional choice keeps you away from spiritual bypassing or overwhelm, and opens the possibility of choosing how you respond. It is understandable to feel that there are so many challenges in today’s world that we don’t know where to start. Choose where you can make a difference, where you can influence a decision, where you can bring kindness, to yourself and to someone else – who really needs it in that moment? If it is a moment of hate and aggression, ask where can I bring peace and expand love? It is not a question of where the highest level of the system I can affect is, but of where I can actually make a difference in this moment, in the here and now.
If we pause, and breathe into that pause, then there is an internal wisdom that comes forward that speaks to us and tells us: this is where we can make a difference right now.
The Power of Community
The panel discussion also explored the power of making a difference together. Whether we feel overwhelmed or ready to engage, it can help us to come back to our community.
Sister True Dedication: I think we resist injustice as a collective, as a community. We resist injustice with our ethics – the Five Mindfulness Trainings and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings. This is our calling card of what we stand for as a community, and we say these ethics are our teacher guiding us and giving us the moral courage to speak out in very grounded and real moments.
We have so much agency to find our centre and to find our ground in our daily life. That agency means that we can effect change right where we are. The roots of systemic injustice have their basis in practices and ways of being as a society – in our workplaces, in our towns, in our places of learning, in our way of interacting with one another. I feel like the frontier of resisting injustice is maybe much closer to home than we may think.
Our mindfulness practice can give us the strength to trust in our heart that there are ways of living that embody the good, the true, the beautiful, and we can live in alignment with that, and constantly recorrect our alignment. That is something not to give up on. Our society and what we’re seeing on our screens can often be cause to think that we should give up on that. But our ethics say keep reaching for that light, keep finding it in our hearts.
We have deep gratitude for this deep discussion on cultivating resilience and mindful resistance to create a more loving world.
To close the panel we heard about the power of the Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (ZASP) online course to help people build community across the world.
We would love to invite you to join us for the next cohort of ZASP, opening on 1st March. Full details and registration is available via https://plumvillage.org/zasp
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