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Touching Our Joy - Caring for Our Pain - Cultivating Happiness
This title has been reviewed for accuracy.
April 6, 2012. 115-minute dharma talk given at The University of Nottingham by Thich Nhat Hanh. The sangha is on the UK and Ireland Tour and this is the first dharma talk for the Cultivating Happiness Family Retreat. The recording begins with a couple of practice songs before Thay enters the meditation hall followed by 10-minutes of chanting. At 18-minutes into the recording, Thay gives a talk for the children present at the retreat. Cultivating happiness. We begin with a story of a teacher who implements coming back to oneself in the classroom by breathing and resting together. The practice helped the students and teacher in the classroom. The teacher used a bell in a classroom, so Thay teaches us about inviting the bell and how to be a bell master. At 56-minutes into the recording, we begin the primary talk. The focus of our talk is on mindful breathing. This has to do with our suffering and our happiness. Exercise #5, from the Sutra on Full Awareness of Breathing, is cultivating joy, followed by #6 on cultivating happiness and #7 is to recognize a painful feeling and #8 is calming the painful feeling.
“When you breathe out, there is another line for you to read silently: I send my heart along with the sound of this bell. This is not a simple sound, there is my love in it. I send my heart along with the sound of this bell. And then you breathe in again. May all of you who listen to me awaken from your forgetfulness. People in the world, they live in forgetfulness. They breathe and yet they don’t know that they are breathing. They walk, but they walk like a sleepwalker, they don’t know that they are walking. They don’t enjoy every step they make. They eat, but they are lost in their thinking. So that is called forgetfulness. Forgetfulness, it means your mind is not there. It’s the opposite of mindfulness. Mindfulness means that you are - your mind is there, always with you. While you breathe, while you walk, while you eat, while you sweep the floor, your mind is always in your body, you are mindful of everything. Mindfulness is what we practise here, and the opposite of mindfulness is forgetfulness.”
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