Thầy speaks about three kinds of powers that can help us transform suffering and bring about joy, freedom, and happiness, unlike the power that comes with money or politics: the power to cut off and let go, the power to understand, and the power to love. Like light, air, and water, he says, the three powers inter-are, and a practitioner of mindfulness can cultivate them every day.

The talk begins with the sunshine in the garden. Light is an object of meditation for both yogis and scientists, and the sun we see is the sun of eight minutes ago. Without light there would be no vegetation, no air to breathe, no food or water: “You cannot be; you can only inter-be.” Thầy shows how the yogi and the scientist meet in the nature of no birth and no death, and why we can see ourselves as children of Mother Earth and Father Sun. On the day the Buddha’s birth is celebrated, he speaks of a buddha as a flower made of non-buddha elements, grown, like the lotus, from the mud of generations of human suffering.

To show the courage it takes to let go, including letting go of our own idea of happiness, Thầy describes someone held in a noisy city by many pretexts until a close friend helps them out into the countryside. He looks at our comforts, at the arguments we make so that we don’t have to change, and at our habit of reacting.

Do we understand ourselves, or are we waiting for someone else to understand us? Thầy speaks of seeing the suffering in the person who has made us suffer, and retells the Buddha’s teaching of a handful of salt in a bowl of water and in a river. He describes going home, with mindful breathing and walking, to listen to the suffering inside, and the meditation on non-craving, with the image of a fish that does not see the hook inside the bait. He also speaks to parents and teachers about young people who have not been taught that love and sexual desire are two different things.

Thầy closes with the willingness to offer and to include, even those who are difficult to love, and with the nourishment of a Sangha sitting and breathing together.

This talk is from a series given during the Spring Retreat in the year 2014. Thầy offered this talk at the New Hamlet, Plum Village, France.