Thầy begins by describing the practice of Applied Buddhism, which is based on knowing how to handle our breath, body, and mind. When we watch someone walking mindfully, it reminds us to be mindful, and in this way, we bring peace and joy to the world. When we sit, we can practice with the Buddha, with our parents, and bring the Buddhadharma to our ancestors. With the mind of nondiscrimination, we can touch and even change the past and the future.

Thầy then teaches us how to harmonize our body, breath, and mind — bringing the three scattered elements of ourselves home together, the way a cook harmonizes the ingredients of a soup. We’re not to fight or force our breath into being deeper or calmer; we simply allow it to be as it is, and the energy of mindfulness naturally brings improvement.

If we feel fear, anger, restlessness, or any of the fifty-one mental formations, we don’t fight it or suppress it. We simply embrace it with mindfulness, and it transforms.

There are sixteen breathing exercises that help us handle our breath, our body, our feelings. Each of us is an artist, and as such, we can work with and change our mental formations using mindfulness. Thầy speaks movingly about how many young people, not knowing how to handle a strong emotion, are driven to suicide, and offers concrete guidance for parents and teachers on how to help children practice belly breathing before a crisis arrives, so they have a refuge to turn to. We can transform strong, painful emotions, especially with the support of our Sangha. We take refuge in the Sangha to assist us in being mindful so we’re able to do this. By learning how to take care of our mind, we become able to handle our mental formations. Joy and compassion are also mental formations, and we strive to cultivate these by selectively watering them in ourselves and others, even signing a “happiness treaty” with a loved one to make this practice a shared commitment.

When we free ourselves of our discriminating mind, we see that everything is part of everything else. There’s no separation. Thầy unpacks this through the three parts of consciousness—the perceiver, the perceived, and the ground from which both arise — showing how subject and object, like the two sides of a sheet of paper, cannot be pulled apart. The Buddha is made of non-Buddha elements. There is no self and other; all things inter-are.

This is the fourth talk in a series of thirteen given during The Science of the Buddha, twenty-one-day retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.