Thầy asks whether we can communicate with ourselves. We have cell phones, email, and Skype, yet communication has become difficult, because behind all these instruments is the mind. Many of us are angry with ourselves or don’t know what is going on inside, and in that situation it is hard to communicate with anyone else. Thầy, who doesn’t have a telephone, shows how the basic practices of Plum Village help us reopen that communication.

Breathing in mindfully brings the mind back to the body—a happy reunion of body and mind—and for the few seconds of an in-breath, we are free of regret about the past and fear about the future. Questioning Descartes, Thầy teaches the practice of non-thinking: when he drinks his tea, he just drinks his tea, and there is real communication between him and the tea. He suggests programming a bell of mindfulness on the computer, as the monastics in Plum Village do, and eating each morsel as a gift of Father Sun and Mother Earth.

Thầy then speaks of two miracles of mindfulness. The first is that it connects us with the many conditions of happiness already available—a happiness that money cannot buy, whatever the society of consumption believes. The second is that it lets us recognize and take care of the suffering we usually try to cover up by consuming: a book, the telephone, the car, the internet. Like a mother taking her crying child in her hands, mindfulness embraces the pain tenderly. Thầy calls it the guardian angel within: “You cannot buy your angel. You have to help him or her to manifest from within.” When we live together as a community, this energy becomes collective.

Thầy closes by returning to communication. When we understand our own suffering and know how to care for it, we can understand the other person too, listen with compassion, speak gently, and restore communication. The practice, he says, is to go back and communicate well with ourselves first.

This talk was given during the Spring Retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this retreat at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.