Cultivating the Energy of Mindfulness to Create Healing

Thầy begins with the statement: “The quality of our breath reflects the quality of our body and also the quality of our unconscious.” We must cultivate mindfulness as a source of energy with which we can touch the seeds that lie deep in our store consciousness. The seed of mindfulness is in all of us —and mindfulness itself is made of non-mindfulness elements.

Thầy encourages us not to run away from our garbage—negative energies like anger and hatred. With mindfulness, we can transform our garbage into flowers because the garbage and the flowers inter-are. And since we are already what we want to be, the practice is not to run after something by escaping something else—this is the teaching of aimlessness—aprāṇihita—rooted in nonduality.

Our store consciousness has both an individual and a collective nature. By deeply touching the present, we touch and can transform the past. In the same way, living deeply the present moment, takes care of the future. Our store consciousness—and every seed in it—contains the whole cosmos, as does our body. Our body belongs not only to us; it belongs to our ancestors and to future generations. Interpenetration means that in the one, there is the all. About interbeing, the Buddha said simply: “This is because that is.”

To truly understand something, we must become one with it. Thầy shares the story of a grain of salt that wanted to measure the salinity of the ocean. The sea’s answer: “Jump in. Be one with what you want to understand.” This is how we practice interpenetration—dissolving the separation between subject and object, between observer and observed, so that contemplation of the body happens in the body, and contemplation of feelings happens in the feelings.

Our perceptions are often wrong because they are influenced by the negative seeds in our consciousness. Mental formations—both wholesome and unwholesome—are the manifestations of the seeds in our store consciousness. The seeds of fear powerfully shape our daily behaviour, and we must touch our fear in order to transform it.

When we touch someone with the energy of mindfulness, true healing can happen. There are two kinds of relief available through practice: the relative relief of calming and transforming our suffering, and the deeper relief of touching nirvāṇa — which is not separate from us, from the trees, from the birds, or from any moment of daily life. This deeper relief, Thầy reminds us, is the cream of the Buddha’s teaching.

Thầy closes with instructions for walking meditation — an invitation to stop running and touch the conditions of happiness already present in the here and the now.

This the second talk in a series of five given during the Peace is Every Step retreat in the year 1992. Thầy offered this talk at Haus Tao, Wolfhalden, Switzerland.