Thầy offers the pebble meditation to the children present. Thầy then explains that all of us have seeds of happiness and suffering, and that we have the power to manifest both paradise and hell in our life. Sometimes the seeds of fear, stress, and despair are watered within us, and we suffer. This however doesn’t mean that we don’t have seeds of peace, understanding, and joy.

Everyone can become a boat that can carry the pain and suffering, floating happily on the river of life. In order to do that, we need a Sangha that can help water the positive, healthy, seeds within us and that can help us understand and heal the pain we carry within. There are refreshing and healing elements available right now, in the present moment, and we only need to identify and recognise them in order to transform our pain, and open up to the wonders of life.

Walking mindfully, eating mindfully, and sitting mindfully in our daily life, we can begin the process of healing and transformation. The energy of mindfulness has the capacity to heal and transform our anger, our fear, our despair. To do that, we need a Sangha that supports our practice, otherwise we could become like the tiger that leaves the mountains—it will be easily caught and killed. If we leave the Sangha, after a while we will abandon our practice.

Thầy concludes his talk by mentioning that the energy of mindfulness is the energy that can embrace all our mental formations of fear, of despair, of depression, of anger. All mental formations are sensitive to mindfulness, and that is why we have to generate that energy in order to embrace and transform our mental formations. At the end of this talk, one of the brothers offers the ten mindful movements to all participants.

This is the second talk in a series of five given during the Pain, Love and Happiness retreat, in the year 1997. Thay offered this talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the United States.