Thầy teaches that taking care of ourselves begins with going home to our own suffering rather than running away from it. With the energy of mindfulness, we can embrace that suffering tenderly, like a mother embracing her baby, and come to see that it carries the suffering of our parents and ancestors. “When you have understood your own suffering, you begin to accept yourself, and you love yourself.”

Thầy explains that bhāvanā, the word for practice, means to cultivate: our mind is the land, and the seeds of understanding, compassion, and joy are already in us. He shows how making breakfast, opening the water faucet, or walking from the parking lot to the office can become moments of joy and healing, and how happiness becomes a habit, supported by the collective energy of a Sangha, like a drop of water carried by the whole river.

Every one of us needs a spiritual practice, Thầy says, because in daily life we meet difficulties and strong emotions. He traces a path: going back to ourselves first, then to our partner and family, then building a local Sangha—perhaps of physicians, psychotherapists, or schoolteachers—and from that base, bringing the practice into the workplace.

Much of the talk turns to schoolteachers. Thầy describes a teacher who, having understood her own suffering, steps into her class with the eyes of compassion, and he suggests sessions of compassionate listening in which students and teachers hear each other’s stories. He offers a meditation on seeing ourselves, and then our father and mother, as wounded five-year-old children, and tells the story of a mathematics teacher in Toronto whose class was transformed after he practiced in Plum Village.

Thầy closes with four practices that can be brought into the family, the classroom, and the workplace without believing in any religion: releasing the tension in the body, recognizing and embracing painful feelings, generating a feeling of joy, and listening with compassion and using loving speech to restore communication. He calls this applied ethics.

This talk was given during the Autumn Retreat in the year 2012. Thầy offered this talk at the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, France.