Thầy invites us to go home to the little boy or little girl in us—still alive, often deeply wounded, and calling for our attention. As four- or five-year-olds, we may not have understood why our parents fought, but, as Thầy says, “Maybe we did not understand, but we felt. We felt everything.”

Thầy describes a child with nowhere to take refuge: no garden or neighbor’s house to run to, only a small apartment and a locked restroom door. Even as adults, with a house, a family, and a job, we may not feel at ease, because the child inside continues to suffer and no one is taking care of him or her.

Thầy offers a practice of recognizing and embracing the child with mindfulness and compassion: breathing, smiling, and speaking to the little one directly. He names what happens if we don’t practice—we do the same thing to our own children—and suggests inviting the child to join us through the day, watering the vegetable garden, listening to music, driving, or cooking dinner together.

Thầy shares a morning in the hermitage when he told his father, “Papa, we have succeeded,” and explores how our father and mother, as five-year-old children, have been transmitted to us, so that in healing ourselves we can liberate them too. He suggests taking a photo of a parent at five from the family album into our meditation, and points to understanding as the source of compassion, which can let anger toward a parent give way.

The talk closes with Thầy’s poem “Looking for Each Other,” read in Vietnamese and then chanted by the monastic Sangha.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Fall Retreat in the year 2004. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.