Thầy reflects on the greeting “How do you do?” and finds in it a deeper question: how are we doing with the five elements that make up a person—body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness? To practice, he teaches, is to bring peace and joy to these five elements, and to learn how to handle suffering when it comes up.

The talk centers on one mental formation: restlessness, the absence of peace. Thầy encourages parents and teachers: if we know how to handle restlessness in ourselves, we can help our children and students to do the same.

Beginning with the body, Thầy offers the first four exercises of the Sutra on Mindful Breathing, starting with the third and fourth. Becoming aware of the body brings about a family reunion between body and mind, and releasing its tension is an act of compassion. He describes how practitioners in Plum Village go home to their body each time they hear the bell, and then turns to the first two exercises: one in-breath alone can set us free from the past, the future, and our worries, and following the breath all the way through stops the radio of nonstop thinking. As Thầy puts it, “I think too much, therefore I am not there to live my life.”

Lying down, we can scan the body with the ray of mindfulness, smiling to each part and staying longer where there is pain. Thầy suggests leading Total Relaxation for our family or our students, and recalls the Buddha’s image of a farmer recognizing the seeds poured from a bag.

The second half turns to walking meditation as a training to stop running—a habit, perhaps inherited from our parents, that comes from believing happiness is only possible in the future. Thầy tells of a university rector who at first could not slow down, and of a Parisian journalist whose mind, after fifteen minutes, agreed to join her feet. He invites us to practice slow walking, not taking another step until we have arrived one hundred percent, and explores what it means to say, “I am solid, I am free.”

The talk closes with walking meditation on the Great Wall of China and a song together. Thầy concludes that if we can end the restlessness in our body, we can do the same with our feelings and emotions—the subject of his next talk.

This talk was given during the Spring Retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this retreat at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.