Thầy teaches that mindfulness is always mindfulness of something—of breathing, of walking, of drinking our tea—and that with just three seconds of mindful breathing, we bring our mind home to our body and make ourselves available to life. The Kingdom of God, the Pure Land of the Buddha, is only available in the here and the now.

Inviting us to look at a flower, Thầy asks whether we have the time to get in touch with it, caught as we are in regret about the past and worry about the future. He shares André Gide’s words that God is available twenty-four hours a day, and the Gospel story of a farmer who found a treasure in a piece of land and released everything else. Each of us is a cell in the Sangha body, and walking, sitting, and breathing together, we generate the collective energy of mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

Thầy offers the practice “I have arrived. I am home.” for walking, and points out that this is not a declaration but a realization. If we suffer while we breathe or walk, that is not correct practice; every step and every breath can be a joy. When the Sangha is a true Sangha, the living Dharma is there, and so is the living Buddha.

Thầy then invites two Dharma teachers, Sister Tùng Nghiêm (Sister Pine) and Brother Pháp Dung (Brother Inclusiveness), to offer some recommendations for enjoying the retreat. Sister Tùng Nghiêm shares that the most important thing is to enjoy, and speaks about Noble Silence, eating in silence, waiting in the food line, and working meditation as chances to come back to our body and our breathing. Brother Pháp Dung remembers his first retreat and discovering salad without the dressing, and invites us to enjoy ourselves without the dressing and the labels we put on ourselves. He explains cultivation as being like a farmer who makes the earth rich, and shares that in this tradition the practice and the nonpractice are woven together, so it’s hard to tell where meditation begins. He closes by encouraging not a hard effort but a gentleness, a compassion to ourselves.

This is the first talk in a series of three given during the Cultivating the Mind of Love retreat in the year 2011. Thầy offered this talk at Magnolia Grove Monastery in Batesville, Mississippi, USA.