In this article, we hear from one of our newest Dharma teachers, Meena Srinivasan, whose journey of practice has led her to move into the lay community of Deer Park Monastery, helping to found the Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing
This is our second offering in our monthly series in which we feature an OI member, as we lead up to our June Retreat, celebrating 60 years of the Order of Interbeing.
This post features an excerpt taken from Meena’s article originally published in the Mindfulness Bell.
Moving to Simplicity Hamlet
The air in Simplicity Hamlet feels softer, as if carrying a quiet blessing. From our back windows I see the foothills cradling Deer Park Monastery, afternoon light shimmering all around. Solidity Hamlet is home to the brothers, Clarity Hamlet to the sisters, and now our family has arrived in Simplicity Hamlet, a lay community forming in the monastery’s embrace under the gentle, steady leadership of Thầy Pháp Dung and Thầy Pháp Lưu.
We haven’t come here to run from anything; we’ve come to move closer to what matters most. This moment—boxes still unopened, my seven-year-old son’s soccer ball skimming across the dirt backyard (soil I already imagine becoming a meditation garden beside a little play field for children), the kitchen filling with birdsong—feels like a threshold. A space between the life we’ve known and the one we’re co-creating: a village where children, parents, and monastics live in rhythm with the land, nourished by practice, presence, and belonging.
As the mother of a young boy, Kailash, I feel the rare gift of raising him in a place where compassionate, mindful masculinity is alive in daily life. In a world that often asks boys to harden, he’s surrounded by monks who embody another way, strength grounded in gentleness, leadership rooted in listening, and care held with equanimity. The men of Deer Park model a solidity that has nothing to do with domination, and everything to do with presence, playfulness, and joy.
As a tenderness researcher, I see how culture trains boys to armor up. Here, we’re writing a different story: tenderness as the truest strength, compassion as real courage. I return often to an insight attributed to Ilya Prigogine: When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos can shift the whole to a higher order. Deer Park, with monastics and lay friends tending gardens and hearts with equal care, is such an island. In this field, our family is learning that gentleness and strength belong together, seeds that can travel outward into a culture longing for balance.
An Intuitive Move
This threshold didn’t appear overnight. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, my husband, Chihiro, and I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego with our two-year-old, not for a job, but because of a quiet, insistent intuition. It felt like stepping into the dark with trust as our lamp. Senior Dharma teachers Peggy Ward and her husband Larry, now a beloved ancestor, were in San Diego then; their presence helped us say yes.
We didn’t fully know why we were being guided south, only that the felt sense was unmistakable. Looking back, it’s clear the universe had plans wiser than our own. That intuitive move became part of a karmic unfolding: we would become the first family to live in Simplicity Hamlet, and our son will be among the first students at the Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing. It is a story of taking refuge in the mahasangha and discovering that when we step toward community, community steps toward us.
Not a School with a Mission, but a Mission with a School
Our move is intertwined with the birth of the Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing, a K–8 learning village opening in August 2026, just across from Happy Farm at the entrance to Deer Park Monastery, nestled in Escondido’s “Great Hidden Mountain.” The seed was planted decades ago and germinated anew as Thầy Pháp Dung and Thầy Pháp Lưu invited a small circle of educators to radically imagine a school not as a program, but as a living expression of mindful education and interbeing.
This school isn’t separate from Deer Park; it is the monastery’s heart shaped for children
Learning moves with the land and seasons, in relationship with monastics who anchor our Plum Village practice, within a community that cultivates wisdom and compassion as living relationships with people, place, and all beings. Its touchstone is The Five Mindfulness Trainings, a shared ethical root orienting us toward reverence for life, true happiness, loving speech and deep listening, mindful consumption, and collective flourishing.
For me, the school feels like the flowering of a path that began twenty-one years ago in Oakland, when I first touched the Plum Village tradition as a young teacher attending an educators’ sangha led by Dharma teacher Lyn Fine.
The Lamp before the Move: a Community Light
Just months before our move to Deer Park, I returned to Plum Village. Sixteen years earlier I had come as a young educator, learning to bridge inner life and outer work. This time I returned older, tenderized by life—a mother, a wife, a daughter caring for aging parents, and a leader in heavy times.
I was invited to receive the Lamp Transmission, a sacred ceremony honoring commitment to mindfulness, service, and transformation. During the ceremony I received a transmission gatha, and one line in particular, a nod to Gandhi’s teachings, pierced straight through: “Your everyday life becomes your message.” As I received the Lamp Transmission, a radiant beam of light poured through the stained glass Buddha above Thầy Pháp Dung and me, and the small oil lamp I received burned for over thirty hours before quietly dimming. A teaching: tend, release, begin again.
Afterward I wept surrenderful tears of gratitude as I prostrated before Thầy’s picture. I’ve never really made big decisions; they’ve made me. India called me at twenty-six. Now, at forty-five, Deer Park is calling with the same clarity. There is no deliberation, only surrender.
Enough, Together
Sixteen years ago, on my first visit to Plum Village, I bought the only piece of Thầy’s calligraphy I have: Samtusta, You have enough. My friend, psychologist Daniel Cordaro, calls contentment “the knowledge of enough,” and Lynne Twist speaks of sufficiency as releasing the drive for more of what we don’t need so our energy can serve life. This move, this school, and this community are not about chasing happiness; they’re about listening to what is quietly, clearly true, becoming a small island of coherence together, a sangha for children and adults in a burning world.
I see it already. When I watch Kailash play ping-pong with the monks and basketball with lay friends, I see a boy learning to listen to the land, to people, to himself. I think of monastics whose footsteps serve as mindfulness bells. I think of lay friends choosing this with us, imperfect and practicing, all wanting something deeper than what we left behind.
Community isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the willingness to be present through the small rubs and big storms, to stay, repair, and recommit. TEL taught me that leaders need communities of practice to sustain courage. Deer Park is teaching me that families do, too. The school reminds me that the seeds of community live in all of us, waiting to be nurtured. And the Lamp keeps whispering that a life’s message is written in ordinary hours: the point isn’t to shine endlessly, but to tend the flame, noticing when it flares too hot or dims too low, asking for help, and sheltering it so it can keep giving light. In the end, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
We invite you to read Meena Srinivasan’s full article here: Not a Choice, A Current: a Homecoming to Deer Park.
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