The Way Out Is In / Ancient Path for Modern Times: Feeling Safe (Episode #71)

00:00:00

Dear friends, welcome to the second in a series of two bonus episodes of the podcast The Way Out Is In.

00:00:21

The way out is in.

00:00:36

I’m Jo Confino and I’m delighted to be able to introduce this second panel discussion at a recent retreat in Plum Village called Ancient Path for Modern Times. The panel was based around what are known as the 14 mindfulness trainings, which were written by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1966, in Saigon, and were really his vision of a global ethic, a way of living life that brings peace, harmony and joy to our lives. And the 14 mindfulness trainings are actually a modern distillation of the traditional Bodhisattva precepts of Mahayana Buddhism. And to give you an idea of some of the 14, they include openness, non-attachment to views, freedom of thought, compassionate living, taking care of one’s anger, building community, generosity and true love. And the 14 mindfulness trainings are taken by monastics and lay friends who have made a vow in a formal ceremony to receive, study and observe the trainings, and they are known as members of the Order of Interbeing. And they’re actually now more than 2000 lay women and men who are members of the Order of Interbeing. And in this episode we have three people. We have Sister Lang Nghiem, who is one of the senior nuns in Plum Village. We have my good self, so I am then you probably know who I am, so I don’t need to introduce myself. And that’s always a bit weird. But lastly, we have Elli Weisbaum. And she is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and she has, from a very young age, spent time in Plum Village in the children’s program, with the teenagers. And then, now, as a young adult. She has worked internationally facilitating mindfulness workshops and retreats within the sectors of education, health care, and business. And this conversation really focuses around what it is to feel safe in the world, what it is to belong, what it is like to feel at home in the world. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

00:03:01

… Still Water Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet, for part two of our panel sharing dialog around the 14 mindfulness trainings and our applications and practices in our personal, professional, community lives. And, to my right, we have Jo Confino. And next to Jo is Elli. But first, Jo, I’m quite curious, yesterday when we were talking about the title of the retreat, An Ancient Path for Modern Times, you were kind of joking, but it wasn’t really a joke. You’re like, well, I feel it’s more like Modern Times to Ancient Path. And I’m just curious why you said that and, yeah…

00:03:54

I always like to play with words, so we always think in a linear way or tend to think in a linear way. So it’s ancient path to modern times. And I just like to say, well, if I turn that round, is that still relevant? And I think it is because I think, and you teach beautifully about this, about time we think of time is linear. But I think the way we meet these modern times also nourishes the ancient paths. And I think that, in some ways, and we may talk about this more, that the time that we are living and moving into, and the dangers ahead means that actually we will need to rely on the teachings, the Dharma, the 14 mindfulness trainings, and actually find new paths within those. And as we do that, what we will do is we will transmit those back through the generations and renew the ancient paths as well. And I, you know, I’ve always found Thay’s, you know, Thay’s teachings on, and sister’s, to be very, very powerful. And one of the things I’ve learned is that when we transform or heal things in the present moment, we don’t just heal them in the present moment, we heal them in the present moment, and we heal it in the past, and we heal it in the future. And so, so often in our modern system we’re looking ahead, we look at how do we… If we act now, what will it do for the future? And I like to also think by acting now, what do we do for the past? How do we also honor all these people who have come before us, who have walked this path, who have met their challenges? And how do we honor them in the present moment? And by honoring them, we enliven them.

00:06:03

Just to go one level deeper, can you share a little bit what you are, maybe something that’s very alive for you right now in terms of healing the past? Yeah.

00:06:17

Yeah. I feel I’m deep in process at the moment. One of the wonderful monks came to me yesterday and asked me a 2 or 3 very deep questions that sort of set me off. And what I came to realize just in those few moments is that actually, since October the 7th of last year, I’ve actually been in a state of shock and depression and that there are many… And what I’m realizing is that there’s very personal issues that have come up for me, but also it’s touching into, for me, deep collective issues. And the deep collective issues, then reverberating back into my personal understanding and personal way I’m experiencing life at the moment. So, until October the 7th, I was reasonably happy, you know, I felt balanced and reasonably content with life and things felt to be good. And I, on that day, I, it was in the middle of the climate leaders retreat here in Plum Village, and I walked up to my wife, Paz, with a sort of, you know, my tail sort of wagging and sort of, all this sort of enthusiastic way. And she said, you know, there’s a war in Israel. And I remember just feeling this sort of sense of shock. And I want to tread carefully here, because the first thing I want to say is that, and it’s important to say, I mean, I’m completely horrified by what’s happening in Gaza. You know, every day I feel like I’m being stabbed in the heart. And the other day, I felt, you know, what was most painful is, you know, being Jewish, I felt this is being done in my name. I’m feeling this, you know, I’d see, as soon as I heard what was going on on October the 7th, I foresaw, you know, I think many of us did, is not that I’m a psychic, but I foresaw that this would be the result. And it was very much, rereading Thay’s work after 9.11 and his sense of, you know, to help a nation to calm and say, you know, if you act out of revenge, then you will just create a far greater problem. And I just foresaw that, you know, we would probably end up in a mess, but not this level of mess. But just to come to the personal. What it brought up in me is a feeling of not being safe. So just a little bit of context. My mother and father were both refugees. My mother’s family died in the Holocaust, and she was, she got out alone as a young teenager to the UK. And my father’s family were forced to flee Bulgaria before the war. And there was a lot of trauma in my family growing up, which was unrecognized and unspoken. So I think I swallowed the trauma. And so a lot of things for me about what it feels like to be at home, what it feels like to be safe. And I feel what I recognize now is most of my life, I have not felt safe and I have not felt at home. And I can see that through the generations of my ancestry of that the world is not a safe place, and that any moment something can change, and one moment you’re safe, and the next moment you’re in danger. So what’s come up for me is on that day and post that is personally not feeling at home in the world. And that’s created a lot of nervousness in me. I’m feeling sort of nervous, and I’m feeling, yeah, I’m… it’s brought up that level of fear and that is then touched into the collective. What I’ve been experiencing collectively, which is, a couple of years ago, I co facilitated a four day convening in Denmark on collapse, on civilizational collapse, which brought 150 experts from around the world on the collapse. And last night I was with someone who a few of you may have heard of called Jamie Bristow, who set up the Mindfulness Initiative in the UK and has worked deeply in bringing mindfulness into politics and different parts of society. And he’s now sort of looking also at collapse. And that when I what October the 7th brought out for me and post that has brought up for me is sort of a deeper, deeper awareness of what’s going on in the world. You know, that, you know, we’re now walking into what I feel is the sky is the blue sky’s darkening with dark clouds coming in and looking at all the polycrises and the, now, you know, very recently there’s threat of war globally, not just in Gaza and Israel, but in Ukraine and Russia, with China and Taiwan. And just looking out at seeing that actually war and the prospect of war is very much upon us it’s not a theory. And that at any moment there can be a trigger, like in the Second World War, which triggers a huge conflagration of conflict. It’s very, very possible. And then, looking obviously at the climate crisis and then the biodiversity crisis and, just realizing that, that actually we are heading into very dark times. And just deeply feeling that and feeling the deep sadness and seeing that actually there’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of millions of refugees, just like my parents. And millions and millions and even billions of people not feeling safe anymore, not feeling at home, not feeling that they have ground to stand on. And then it comes back to the personal. So experiencing that collective worry about collapse brings back issues of resilience because I’m not feeling very resilient at the moment. And I’m noticing that when I’m out of balance, that I’m being much more self-critical of myself. That when I’m in balance, when I’ve been in balance, that when things go wrong, I can quite easily course correct or take account of or understand and sort of, you know, do the deep looking, listening, course correct, understand what’s going on and move through it. And that as I’m out of balance. So my mind is out of balance and small things that may be going wrong or mistakes I’m making, ballooning out and reaching sort of much larger proportions in my mind. So I’m noticing just that sense of what we are collectively feeling around the world. And lastly, the other things being very much on my mind is sort of watching people like Trump and Netanyahu and these powerful individuals who, through ambition and the wish to protect themselves, are destroying entire ways of seeing. And for their own personal gain of destroying norms. And seeing how many people are prepared to follow those, that collapse of norms. And so it’s just watching both within myself and at a distance what that looks like and the risks of that. And then, from that sort of saying, well, what does create resilience? And the 14 mindfulness trainings a pretty good, you know, manual for that. You know, taking care of our suffering, building community. All these different things are… So when you say about ancient paths to modern times, I think that these trainings, are the raft to grab onto in stormy seas. They are that that we are going to be called onto to really get in touch with our deep humanity and to strip away all this nonsense that we’ve been fed of capitalism, of consumption and individualization and all that we know. And that is just being like a plaster, and it’s just going to be torn off. It’s being torn away from us, and we’re going to have to face that wound because it hasn’t been, hasn’t been healed. And I’m going to have to say what is the healing that we’re going to sort of take? And Jamie Bristow, you know, last time we were talking about, you know, there’s techno optimists on one side who say, don’t worry, it’s all going to be sorted by technology. And the other side, they’re the doomers who say, you know, there’s no hope. And what we’re doing is often getting caught between, you know, just that sort of, not the optimism that Christiana Figueres talks about, but the sort of naive optimism. And then the people saying, well, the nihilists saying, we’re going to collapse, let’s have a good time. And Jamie and I were both talking, because I agree, I have a great sense of agreement within that collapse into renewal, that there is some sort of collapse happening, but the capacity is for a deep renewal and that we have to wake up, you know. Thay’s, this is Thay’s teachings. And he says if we don’t wake up, the civilization will collapse is inevitable. And that the only way we, you know, the only way is if there’s a collective awakening, will we avoid that? And of course, collapse has many layers, levels. But I think it may be that there will be some sort of collapse and that our work, individually and collectively, is to build the resilience and understanding and the sharing and the, you know, how these teachings spread out into the world that help people to, in difficult times, to know how to respond and not to go into despair and not to go into nihilism and not to go into, you know, this deep insecurity that leads to protection and withdrawal, but to say, can that lead to deeper openness, deeper sharing, deeper collaboration, a deeper sense of localism? And the answer is we don’t know yet because it can go either way. And so I think each of us individually can make that start to make that difference and mean to make that difference now. It’s not saying, you know, Thay’s teachings were always you practice in the good times so that when the bad, difficult times come, you’re prepared to do that. You’re prepared to act because you’ve already practiced. And if we wait for a possible collapse before we start practicing, then it’s too late because we go into panic. So I think, you know, everyone who is engaged in Thay’s work, is engaged in the Order of Interbeing, that wants to make a difference, you know, this is the time to do it now, not in five, ten years.

00:18:24

Thank you, Jo. Maybe before we go on, we have one sound of the bell, and we can all breathe together.

00:19:30

From what you just shared, Jo, there’s about ten themes I’d like to draw out on. But I’ll just stick with two for the moment. One is the idea of home. And I think the Plum Village community and being, especially the OI community we’re very much dedicated to building community, building sangha as a place of refuge, as kind of like a spiritual home, for many. And, so I want to explore a little bit about that. And, you know, sometimes it’s not easy feeling at home. First of all, it’s extremely difficult to feel at home in ourselves. Challenge number one, let alone to feel at home in a community and then also to build a community that can be a home for many. So I just want to explore a little bit on that theme and maybe how you’ve been able to do that in your life, personal or professional. And the other theme just I’m just going to say, and, in case I forget, and then you can answer or pick up the thread as you please. The other theme I’m picking up on is, for each of us, I think, of course, it’s very important to have this journey where we can look deeply into the roots of our suffering. And so you’ve been through that journey, and in the 14 mindfulness trainings, there is a training on the awareness of suffering. And it’s an encouragement for us not to run away from our suffering, to look, you know, to have enough courage and, enough stopping, enough time to really look and understand the roots of our suffering. And then there’s another training on, which is almost the opposite, dwelling happily in the present moment. So I’m just curious how you find the balance of those two, you know, the need to really look deeply into our suffering and to identify the roots and to embrace it, to heal and to transform. And then the other training, we are determined to learn the art of mindful living by touching the wondrous, refreshing and healing elements that are inside and around us in all situations. So how do you… How are you practicing as OI members? You know, how are you practicing with this? First of all, I mean, you can pick up any theme, home or this looking deeply into suffering and the balance between that and living happily in the present moment.

00:22:45

Happily, I think they interare, finding a home, embracing my suffering and dwelling happily in the present moment. I was sitting here listening and I could feel my heart going up as Jo was sharing, just, coming back, one of our trainings that I love to look into, I love, again, the scholarship side of Thay in our practice that we have theories and frameworks that we can hold up as mirrors to our lived experience. That’s something we do with the 14. And in this moment, the one coming up for me as I think about how have I been approaching my fear, my anxiety, the unsettled parts of myself that I am also feeling from what is going on, you know, close to me and in the world that we are not separate from that. And I’ve been thinking a lot about, yeah, where are spaces of safety and home? So I want to share where I have been cultivating that and how that shows up in my life, both in what we might call our personal and professional, but we know from Thay, I was with him, I googled, he was like, those are not separate. But I will use them as words because that’s helpful. But the framework that was coming up for me was the four nutriments, if anyone’s familiar with that. In in our 14, we talk about consumption. And so in our practice, I wanted to just bring in this language so that I can talk about how I’m cultivating home and looking into my suffering and happiness right now. So I guess the the Coles Notes, I don’t know if that translates over into your … it’s like this book for getting the cheat sheet, the short review of the four nutriments looking into what we consume beyond edible food. So the first being what we eat, then our sense impressions, what we take in from our eyes, our ears. For myself, and with my sangha and my students, we’re talking a lot about what are we consuming through our technology right now and how are we consuming it and then consuming our volition and then consciousness, which is, I think, so interesting in our practice, where, I mean, all of them are, but that we are invited to really become aware. We’re thinking in the framing of becoming aware of the suffering that may come from my consumption of things beyond edible foods. What is my relationship? Sometimes I like to say like with a bag of potato chips. I like to get very practical. Here’s how I’m doing in my daily life. I really like potato chips, and there’s a healthy way for me to consume them. Maybe I am like, I’m working, I’m going to put this many potato chips into a bowl and I’ll just eat that bowl. And that can be a very happy experience of crunching on potato chips. Or I can like, open the whole bag and be like working on my emails and consuming text on my phone, and I eat the whole bag without realizing it. And then I suffer. I don’t feel so well, and so I like to think about this in relationship to my sense impressions, the conversations I’m having, the media I’m consuming, you know, my thoughtfully putting some boundaries, putting a certain amount that I’m going to consume, or am I just opening my brain and pouring in all that information and maybe having an upset physiological and mental response and going further with my volition. Right? My drive, my motivation to do in the world. And we heard from our first panelists and I know so many of you I’ve spoken to who are here, we have this real volition to do in the world. And then this beautiful question from our teachings, how are we consuming that? Am I consuming my drive to build sangha, to care for our planet, to care for myself in a way that is healthy or in a way that is overwhelming me, perhaps leading to burnout. And then with consciousness to be aware that I consume my own consciousness. So we’ve heard a lot about this from the earlier trainings. Right? Our thoughts, we consume them first. They lead to our actions. So there’s that internal consumption behind a bunch of thoughts about how I was gonna do on this panel today. I was consuming them last night, I was like, is that the food I want to be eating? I changed what I was consuming, I thought about offering to the sangha the things I love about my work, the humans I would be here with. Consuming that felt very different. And then their collective consciousness, and Jo spoke to this already. You know, it’s feeling the pain of the world and knowing that I am consuming that. I’ve also made a choice to be here for these two weeks to consume this consciousness. And that really impacts the landscape of my mind. And so that’s a question I have, as a practitioner, often to look around in my day to day life and ask, holding up the four nutriments, what am I consuming beyond edible foods? And how is this impacting my internal landscape? And Christiana shared very beautifully, then we go where we are the ones that go into those spaces and speak, that systems change may be deeply personal. I think as a researcher, like we’re that consistent factor where we go and so how am I contributing to the landscapes of consciousness around me? And so coming back to this question of not feeling safe, of not maybe feeling at home. And I can see when I don’t have ways of connecting in to community, connecting in and feeling safe within myself, it’s almost impossible to be the human I would like to be in the world. To step into maybe a difficult meeting where I know there’s going to be different viewpoints and to meet those views with love and compassion. I know if I sit down to grade, I teach some undergraduate courses at the university, if I sit down to grade papers and I am not settled in myself, you know, I love to guide, to iterate, to develop students writing, but maybe I will just give my critiques. I will forget to write this sentence is wonderful. What seeds do I water? I have a deep commitment, actually, as a teacher or before I go into meetings with my colleagues to really look at the landscape of my mind, to be committed to bringing myself to each of those interactions in a way that is of love and understanding. And I have seen more challenges in this year, as things have felt so unsettled in the world, as I’ve consumed that consciousness, my husband Rob is here, so if you want to hear from him, how consuming the world can lead me to come home and be unskillful in my speech. What I consume in the day, how hard I push myself that shows up right when I sit down to eat a meal. Because I always like to say our practice is to turn towards suffering and embrace it. And for me, the spaces where I feel safe are ones where that permission is given. And when that permission is given, then we also have the opportunity to touch happiness. The other thing I want to mention about this was, as I shared, I also do research at the hospitals, with physicians, with allied health care professionals. In October, as the wars were starting, on campus, we had daily readings of names of family members, of students who had lost their lives. And that was quite a collective consciousness to all be consuming on campus. And my class was in the afternoon and one of the afternoons, one of these readings was going to happen halfway through the class just outside our window. And so we came in, we’ve been practicing together for about a month. I just asked the students what they needed that day. And we had students in this class, international students. I had students in my class from Israel and Palestine, some of whom had lost family members. And we moved the chairs to the side of the room and we just sat quietly together. And I was asked to lead a compassion practice. And in that space of academia, everyone’s come prepared that day to read peer reviewed journal articles and critique them, and all the students also came prepared to sit together and hold space for tears, to breathe, so we did not run away from the suffering. We really invited it in. We sat together. And held it. And then after we sat, I asked them what they wanted to do. And some of them lit up there, like, am I allowed to be excited about talking about the articles we read this week? And so this just brings me to the happiness part. And our teaching on multiple truths that perhaps we are allowed and to give ourselves permission, and this is something I’m practicing with in really challenging times, our trainings invite us, they encourage us to turn towards and embrace our suffering and dwell happily in the present moment. That’s how we get the energy to hold these spaces, to keep doing the work we want to do. And so in that moment, the first half of class, we were with our suffering, we did not ask it to leave. In fact, I invited, I said, we can bring it with us into the next conversation. And then we had this lively and joyful time debating peer reviewed journal articles and how the measurements of mindfulness were going in the current field. And there was laughter and there was playfulness and there was fun. So for me, that’s a very deep part of this training is, and a growing edge of my practice, how do I give myself permission to really engage with, embrace and turn towards suffering? What are the practices I have? How do I offer that to my communities? And then how does that also allow for us to touch happiness in the present moment? And so multiple truths I can, I’m going to pick on Rob, because he’s here. It is true that I can deeply love Rob and be kind of frustrated with him. Like that’s true. And to hold that on a greater level. Right? But systems are made of individuals. We can perhaps be really overwhelmed by even outraged at actions being taken by our collective human families. And at the same time, just like if Rob doesn’t do the dishes in…, I can still deeply love and care for all of my human family. A practice.

00:34:16

I’d like to add one more element to that home question. Because speaking of home, you know, I’m not sure if everyone would agree, but most would agree that most homes have some kind of dysfunction. And, I want to say this, but, I want you to understand I am very much team PV, and I know many of you in the room are very much team PV, but it doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the dysfunction that is in our home, in our community, in our sangha, etc.. So the other part of the home, building community, building homes is how do you recognize and practice with the dysfunctions that you recognize in the community and maybe in particular, how do you… When we feel misunderstood by our community, first of all, what’s that experience like? And how do we practice with it? Do we… How do we stick with the community even through misunderstanding? Yeah.

00:35:33

That will take us to dinner time, I think. So the first time I deeply understood home was when my wife and I first had tea with Thay, but I just want to go back a bit. When I was a reasonably young man, around 28, I think I was working in New York, and it was clear that I was a bit sort of screwed up, in my own beautiful way. So I went to see a psychoanalyst, I saw a Jungian analyst. And the first question he asked me was probably the most important one, he said, what do you hope to gain from being here? And I realized I hadn’t actually thought of the question and my immediate answer was, I feel I’ve been at war with myself my whole life, and I just want to find some peace. And really helped me to realize that I had been at war with myself all my life. I used to have sort of daydreams, you know, get on a train to go to work and I’d imagine terrorists coming on the train and attacking it. And it was very interesting that yesterday on the meditation walk, we walked down towards the forest and there was one shot of a gun… you could hear gunfire, because obviously here there’s hunting and sometimes you hear gunfire. And I’ve been here for four years, and when I hear that gunfire, no impact on me. It’s just like, oh, they’re shooting, and that’s, you know, sad they’re shooting, but it hasn’t had a personal impact on me. And as soon as I heard the gunfire, I looked for a place to hide. I thought, oh, if they come and come for us, I could grab Paz and there’s a little bush, we can go that way. And it was really like quite a shock to me to think that that is still running in my mind. So when Paz and I first came here, we were married in this hall by Sister Chan Khong, God bless her. And then Thay invited us for tea the next day. And, again, he asked a very simple question saying. He said, how have you enjoyed these last two weeks? And I said, Thay, they’ve been two of the most, two of the happiest weeks of my life. And he said, can you explain more? And I said, it’s the first time I’ve ever felt at home in myself. That it was the first time I’d ever felt that. I had dropped the armor and I dropped the critical voices and the internal warfare and that I was actually present. Fully, fully present. And then he asked Paz, you know, have you enjoyed, you know, the two weeks? And Paz said, and at that time we were staying in Upper Hamlet, here, and there were no other women. So it was like, and it was during a winter retreat, there was about 200 men. And Paz said, it’s the first time that I’ve been among so many men and felt safe. And a few days later, Thay gave his Christmas talk and he referred to that conversation. He said when a woman feels safe, she’s at home. And I think he said, I’m not sure if that’s right, he said in Vietnamese that, you know, your marriage partner is called home. And he said, well, when they say, where’s your wife? You say, my home is at the post office or my home’s gone shopping or my home is doing this. So I really understood deeply what home is. Home is to be at peace, for me, within myself. That I can, that what Thay refers to is that nonstop noise in the mind, a nonstop radio just fell away, and I was just here. And I’m… And that’s very beautiful. And it was a moment and, of course, but it’s a moment I can, I know to be my truth and my place. And so whenever things are difficult, it’s a place I can come back to. And also, you know, Thay had to work hard to find what home was for him. You know, he was exiled for 39 years. He didn’t know, you know, he had no home for a while, no no country home until France accepted him. And so he also had to work out that home is where… Home is where I am, I think. That we have to find a home inside of ourselves, that we can’t find it outside of ourselves. In terms of your second question about suffering and joy, I think because they interare you can’t separate them. So our joy is in our suffering, and our suffering is in our joy. So to try and even separate them out is is itself a mistake. My… The understanding I’ve reached at the moment is… and especially with all the leaders I coach, is that we find our truth in the balance of forces, not… And I often use the metaphor of a children’s seesaw in a playground. And for a seesaw to be fun you have to have someone on each end and someone kicking up and you going down, and then you kicking up, and the other person going down. And I think often my experience with people is they’re sitting at one end of the seesaw. And the other one is empty. And so… And when you’re at one end, on the ground, you’re crouched up, there’s no space in you. You’re just, your whole body is like a fetus position on the ground. And there’s no movement, there’s no flexibility, there’s no joy in it. And what I often do is help people to also sit on the other end. And to say it’s in the interplay of the suffering and the joy that we find meaning. And the meaning we eventually find is the fulcrum of the seesaw, because the seesaw balances on a fulcrum. And the fulcrum is in the center and it is grounded. And so it’s the place in which everything moves. But it’s very hard to find the fulcrum if we haven’t experienced the ups and downs of the seesaw. So I have one short story about joy and suffering. My mother, when she left Germany, she was, I think, 14. She was put on a train and some distant relative… It was after Kristallnacht, so their apartment had just been smashed up by the Nazis. And my grandfather’d been begging for these relatives to take my mother in. And they said no, no. And then after Kristallnacht, they said yes. So she was put on a train and she waved goodbye to her father on the station. And when she was telling me the story, I was imagining this story of immense sadness. She was 14 on a train on her own, leaving her home country, leaving her father, not knowing where her brother was. And so I was expecting her and wanting her to tell a story or only of suffering. And so she told me how difficult it was to leave. And then she said, you know what? I was so excited because I was going on an adventure and I didn’t know what was to come at me, but I was really looking forward to this adventure. I’m so grateful to my mother for telling me that story because, because she was feeling all the suffering and she was feeling excitement and joy. And even in that circumstance, she was able to feel both. And there was something really… I felt it was a great gift in that moment to tell me that. That we so often get caught in this duality that if we’re feeling sad, then we’re not allowed to feel joy because that that diminishes the sadness, it negates the sadness. So you can’t tell a joke at this point, or you can’t enjoy something because you’re supposed to be sad. If someone has died, you only have to feel one thing. And I’m… And that in our joy that it’s not possible to feel sadness in our joy because we should be happy. You know, if you’re happy, you shouldn’t let the sadness come in. And so we built this sort of this binary code within ourselves that it’s either one or the other. And meaning is never found in one or the other, it’s found, you know, in the middle way. And your third question is just about practicing with imperfection, I think. So, often people come to Plum Village, and if they come for a week, they believe they’ve come to heaven on earth. And they have come to heaven on earth. If you live here for four years, you recognize that heaven also has its problems. And what I’ve come to recognize is, you know, in my relationship, particularly with the monks and nuns, that the monks and nuns are people, they’re people, they’re people. Yeah, they really are just people. And I think there’s a great danger in mythologizing the monastics because then we expect things from you rather than share things with you or be shared from you. And I was just in Deer Park Monastery, in California. I’m on the board of the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation and that was the first board retreat there for five years. And one of the lay practitioners who’s on the board was saying, I just want to be breathing the same air as the monastics. I just want to get close enough so I breathe the same air. And I was saying, yeah, okay, whatever. You know? I was about to say, well, that’s carbon dioxide, actually, you know, that’s… But, you know, I know monastics have been here a year, and 20, and 30 years, and we’re all, all of us, not just monastics, we’re all facing into our difficulties. And listening to Sister Chan Duc in her Dharma talk, I thought I’d been practicing very well with anger, you know, and then after…. at lunchtime, I got very angry. You know, when I was young, I did a lot of personal development work with this wish that if I worked hard enough, these problems would go away, because what I wanted was these problems to go away. I didn’t want to ever face them again. I just wanted them out of my life and I wanted to be free of them. And so all my work was to get rid of them. And I now realize I will take them with me to my last breath. And that the best I can do is to understand them, to befriend them, to see the value in them, and to work with them as best I can. And that’s true of the monastics. You know, I see monastics who, issues come up for them, traumas or something, things that they had as children, they face all the same problems. And so, one of the things I feel is most important is to take away the expectation and the need in monastics, because otherwise you can end up getting too close and getting disappointed and thinking, well, you know, these people who come and have this wonderful view of, you know, they don’t really see the truth of it. Whereas in fact, as Elli said, there are many truths. And what I love, the reason I love Plum Village and the monastics is because of the humility, because you share your issues, because you share your sufferings. And I find that the most courageous thing. There are so many spiritual traditions where the teachers are on pedestals and they just tell you, do this, do that, and you’ll get nirvana. And there’s no pedestal in Plum Village. And that this was Thay’s amazing teaching. And there was once where we went on a meditation walk, actually, like Lower Hamlet to those woods where we all sat down by the river. And we’d arrived a bit late, and Thay was sitting on his small, bamboo mat and we were standing a little bit away, and he beckoned Paz and I over. And we were a bit reluctant. He said come over. And then he shared his mat with us. He said, come and sit either side of me. And we sat on his mat. And that is what Plum Village is. You see it all, you see the wounds and so the important thing is not to judge those wounds, but to realize to have compassion for the wounds of the monastics in the same way I have compassion for other people. And when I get frustrated occasionally, the way I’ve understood it is that I’m here for the Dharma, not for the monastics. And so I’m here because these teachings are deep and it’s a deep flowing river that has helped me transform my way of seeing the world and I know is what we need in these modern times. And that I’m not here for the monastics because the monastics are doing that, are here for the teachings too. So where are we all in common? We’re all here because of the Dharma and the Buddha. And that with all the imperfections, imperfections are part of the beauty. And never to mistake that for weakness, but to actually see the immense courage in showing the wounds.

00:51:23

Here’s the thing. You know, when… I’m going to just share a little bit of my reaction. You know, your beautiful sharing. I did have a little bit of a reaction when you said us and the monastics. I really did, because I remember the first great ordination ceremony that I attended in Plum Village. And I witnessed Thay offer the lamp to monastic Dharma teachers and lay Dharma teachers. And also… And so for each lamp he would transmit. I just remember it was so beautiful to me because for every person, monastic or lay, he would recognize a field of action that they kind of shined in or really invested a lot of their life in. And he really watered their seeds in this field of action. And, you know, whether it was a person who is in the teaching profession or in health or in research, and each lamp that he transmitted, he really kind of spoke a little bit about their fields of action and how they can, you know, and just really acknowledging how they’re bringing mindfulness and the practice into the fields that they were in, out in the world. And when I witnessed this, it was such… I just felt that entrusting is so beautiful. And then, in my mind, I had a vision of the Plum Village community as being, okay, well, monastics are here. We do our thing here, but there are thousands and thousands of lay practitioners who are doing their thing out in the world. You know, it may look different from what we’re doing here in Plum Village, but it’s also about bringing the practice of mindfulness into the many different areas. So I always thought the lay, especially the OI community as being, like, extensions of the Plum Village community. And it wasn’t a different body. It wasn’t an us and them. But weirdly enough, the more senior I get in the community, and I’m still very young compared to my… I’ve only been here 20 years. But I find the more senior I get in the community, there is this expectation that we are teachers of the Dharma. And then slowly, slowly, there’s this us and them, which I never felt in my heart in the beginning. And I know Brother Phap Huu and some of us mentioned quite often that, you know what, when we ordained, we never expected to be anybody’s teacher. We just wanted to ordain for the practice. And it’s, yeah… But I understand. It is a kind of responsibility that, you know, to step into, to learn, and etc.. But for me personally, I do want to do it in such a way that I see us as one body, a multifold body, and not an us and them. What am I expecting as a layperson from the monastics? What am I as a monastic expecting from you, as, you know. And even there I feel like I want to, I need to go and wash, rinse my mouth like ten times, just to get that kind of separation away. So… That’s one reaction I was having to your sharing a little bit. So how can we go together as a river? I think that is, that is, where it’s leading me. And, for Elli, I think you’re in terms of speaking of going together as a river, not just monastic and lay, but maybe younger generation, older generation, younger Dharma teachers, older, more senior Dharma teachers. Or, you know, how are you finding, what are some of the challenges that you are facing in terms of community building, with bridging the understanding between the younger generation of practitioners to the more senior seasoned, practitioners? That that’s where my consciousness is taking me in this conversation.