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Summer Retreat
When we begin our spiritual life, we are like a child just born: we must relearn how to walk, sit, eat, look and even wash dishes. A Sangha is our spiritual family—elder brothers and sisters to guide us, younger siblings to support—and we learn to bring that family back into daily life by identifying elements of our home and town as our practice partners. The telephone becomes the bell for telephone meditation, the kettle the instrument for joyful tea or coffee, and every act—from brushing our teeth to taking a shower or using the toilet—is transformed into meditation through mindful breathing and awareness of our body as taught in the “Contemplation of the Body in the Body” sutra.
Proposals for home practice:
– Daily walking (even five minutes) as prayer on Earth
– A breathing room (meditation room) respected by all family members
– Three deep breaths before entering the home to restore our best selves
– Mindful driving with shared breathing or songs
– Telephone meditation whenever the phone rings
– Total relaxation (five–fifteen minutes, ideally guided by Sister Chân Không’s cassette)
– Mindful eating (silent first minutes, three breaths or hand-holding)
To resolve conflict, practice these mantras:
Speaker to beloved:
- I suffer. I want you to know it.
- I am trying my best.
- Please help.
Response from beloved:
- I know that you suffer.
- I am doing my best also.
- You have my support.
For deeper release, write for yourself:
– “I am angry at you. I want to punish you so that I will suffer less.”
– “But if you die, I will spend the rest of my life weeping.”
Or recall the poem on impermanence: looking three hundred years from now, where will you—and I—be?
A new handbook, The Mindfulness Practice Center Guidebook, offers step-by-step guidance to establish non-sectarian practice centers. There are already ten in North America (including two in Vermont, one at the University of Vermont, and one in Washington, D.C.), and the goal is to have one hundred by 2000. To bring the Dharma home to Vietnam, four requests are made:
- Permission to publish ten books (including two chanting volumes and one for novices)
- Authorization for ten Vietnamese monks to train in Plum Village
- Approval for ten Plum Village monastics to visit the root temple in Vietnam
- A two-month public teaching and retreat delegation from Plum Village