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There Is No Way to Peace - Peace Is the Way
This title has been reviewed for accuracy.
Mindful Breathing: The Path to Overcoming Fear
Thầy organizes this talk around eight exercises for mindful breathing. He picks up where he left off in the previous Dharma talk with the third exercise: “Breathing in, I am aware of my whole body.” He advises us to “stop the thinking” and instead breathe into our body. Exercises 1.-4. focus on breathing, releasing tension in the body, and calming the body. Thầy teaches us to support this practice with cultivating the essential, underlaying “three energies” of mindfulness, concentration, and insight, which he elucidates as the essence of “holiness.”
Thầy’s overarching teaching in this talk might be described as the power and beauty of our practice that resides in its simplicity. Mindfulness in everyday actions—walking, preparing food, eating, drinking tea, washing, etc.—lead us to recognize that gratitude, joy, happiness, and freedom can be daily practices in themselves. This, the teaching of exercises 5. and 6., is the “art of living.”
Mindful breathing exercises 7.-8. pivot toward how we can heal and transform our suffering, in particular the pain of fear. The first step is to be “aware of pain,” and the second is “embracing your pain with tenderness, not trying to suppress or to cover up your pain.” The latter chapters of the talk offer methods for turning toward our fear and taking care of it. One is to strive to understand the true nature of our fear using a calm, insightful approach. Another is to enlist insight to show us where our fear may be based upon “wrong perceptions.” Another is to draw upon the insights of no self and interbeing to reveal that self, death, and fear only exist in relation to non-self, non-death, and non-fear elements. Finally, Thầy uses the example of the fear of failure to show how living in accordance with Right Action obviates that fear because when the means are compassionate and non-discriminating then the end can only be successful: “every moment of your life is a success already.”
Thầy closes the talk with a story of a peace walk in New York City, the purpose of which is to illustrate that we must internalize the practice of peace in order to generate real peace in the world: the means must be the end. The story exemplifies Thầy’s point throughout that “if you want true success, you have to make every moment a success”; “if the present is a success, then the future must be a success.” Be present in your body in the here and the now, and “there is no longer fear.”
This the fifth talk in a series of sixteen given during the Summer Opening in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.