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Be Alive in the Garden of Humanity
In this talk, Thay invites us to imagine that we are in a garden. Every flower in the garden is a human being. Each one of us is indeed a flower in the garden of humanity. Thay then guides us in the meditation of being a flower, and a mountain: fresh and solid.
This meditation can help us ground ourselves, and see that we can indeed embody the qualities of freshness and solidity. In order to do that, we can practice mindful breathing during all our daily activities, such as walking. Thay introduces as to a way to synchronize our breath with our steps, thus allowing us to unite body and mind, and then he explains the first seven of the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing as proposed by the Buddha in the Sutra on Mindfulness of Breathing. A key teaching Thay offers is on letting go, and in order to explain that, Thay explores a story that happened during the time of the Buddha, during which a farmer asked the Buddha if he had seen his cows.
We have already many conditions to be happy, right here, and right now, and we just need to see them in order to be happy. Happiness does not lie somewhere in the future, it can be accessed in this very moment. If we have a healthy liver, or a healthy heart, we can already be happy by being mindful of that. We have fresh air to breathe, and food to eat: indeed there are already many conditions for happiness, if we look.
Thay offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.
Part of the following collection
The Fifth and Sixth Exercise of Mindful Breathing: Generating Joy and Happiness