Thầy teaches that sitting is not hard labor aimed at enlightenment, healing, or transformation, but a pleasure in itself. When body, breath, and mind come together, we are truly there, and the simple awareness that we are alive, with all the wonders of life around us, is already enlightenment. Mindfulness and concentration arise together, for what we are mindful of, we are also concentrated on.

The practice is to live each moment of daily life deeply: brushing our teeth, boiling water for tea, spending time with our child before she goes to school. Thầy shares, “Every moment of your daily life should be the most important moment of your life.” Yet most of us have the habit of running into the future, using the present moment only as a means to build something later. Thầy imagines a candidate for the White House, a business person following the stock market, and a student studying only for the future, and points out that learning and understanding can be a great joy in themselves.

Living deeply, we begin to see that things are interconnected: our joy is the joy of our ancestors, our peace the peace of our children. Drawing on the Avataṃsaka Sūtra’s teaching that the one contains the all, Thầy shows how the insight of interbeing frees us from three linked complexes—inferiority, superiority, and equality. He invites us to imagine being the first lotus flower of summer in Plum Village, proud of her beauty, until she listens to the whole pond and knows she is not a separate self. Thầy names both low and high self-esteem as sickness, since both show we are still caught in the notion of self, and freedom from that notion is the foundation of true happiness.

Thầy closes by encouraging us to let sitting, walking, and breathing become an end in themselves: walking to the meditation hall, we have already arrived in the here and the now. Supported by the Sangha, we can embrace our sorrow, fear, and pain, which are like the mud a lotus needs. Without the mud, there are no beautiful lotus flowers.

This talk is from a series given during the Ninety-Day Rains Retreat in the year 2007/2008. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.