The Way Out Is In / Being with Busyness Q&A, Part Two (Episode #78)

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Dear friends, welcome back to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In.

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I’m Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems evolution.

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And I’m Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk, student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village tradition.

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And today, dear listeners, dear friends, this is the second part of our two part episodes on being with busyness. And we are creating these two podcasts to mark the publication of our first book which is called Being with Busyness – Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout.

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The way out is in.

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Hello, dear friends, I am Jo Confino.

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And I’m Brother Phap Huu.

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And brother, we are doing the second of two episodes to mark the launch of our book. And we thought the most relevant thing to do was to ask listeners for questions, so we posted a story on Instagram and we got about a hundred and forty questions. And so we started recording last time but there were so many that we decided to have a second episode. So this is it. How has the book been received from your perspective? Because it’s been out now a couple of weeks. How’s it going?

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I think it’s going well. Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I think the topic is very relevant for so many people and one of the greatest feedback was is like having two companions in a book that they can carry around with them. And reading it, some chapters, some friends would read it again and again because it becomes relevant to that particular moment in that day, so I think that was our intention. Right? Was just to offer light to this big theme that we all go through which is busyness, burnout, stress, and everything in between it.

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So what are the practices? Because one of the things about this podcast is we always want to make it relevant for people in their everyday lives, it’s something that they can listen to. And if they choose to, if they find something useful that they could go away and practice that straightaway, or experiment with building that into the life. So I’ll just ask a couple of questions. So maybe I’ll read out a couple. I used to be able to practice mindfulness a lot but ever since becoming a mum three years ago I have been feeling overwhelmed and have been burning out very quickly. I also work full time. I think just that, looking after your three year old and I also work full time, and you just see how much work and how much commitment there is there. How can I get myself back into my mindfulness practice? So in other words, when I have so little time and I feel my mindfulness practice is being squeezed out, what can I do? And here’s another one. My question would be for some practical tips on how to stay grounded and mindful amidst the busyness? I emphasize practical tips because it’s all very well to be calm and zen when you’re meditating or have the time and space to breathe, but what about when you’re at work, on a deadline, and three people need something from you right now? The same could apply to a busy home life with small kids screaming, everybody needing something from you at the same time. How to remember to take that breath and calm yourself in these moments before reaching the point of burnout? And then we had a number of questions sort of related to individual sectors, that I think we’ll wrap in but to give an example, someone said, working in healthcare, especially in a hospital, it can be so busy and fast-paced. What are the ways I can practice mindfulness whilst doing multiple things at once? PS: the podcast brings me so much peace and calm at times when I need it most. Thank you. So I think what people are asking for, in part, brother, is… often we separate our practice from our life, so for example, we say, how do I find time to sit in meditation? How do I find time to walk when I’m so busy? And my own experience of the practice, the practice is most useful actually also when I’m in the busyness and say how do I remember… as this question is, how do I remember to practice when I feel so much in my mind already? How do I open space?

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Very good question. And I feel that a lot of the questions, some of them, the folks already have a meditation practice and here I just want to address that there is a dualistic view that meditation is outside of daily life and I know it’s not our intent, but the mind works it in that way. Right? So first I want to address the question towards about being a mother, because we have so many children come through the retreat and I get to be with a lot of parents and get to hear their journey, so these questions have also come up towards myself and to the community. I think the first thing that I can share is to expand our understanding of mindfulness and meditation because these practices are to give us more inner quality of being present and being alive and being in peace with, and here we just have to shift it to every time we are with our child that is a very deep meditation practice like. When we’re changing the diaper, when the child is screaming and shouting and needs our attention, let that be a mindfulness call of showing up for the child. Let that be an immediate awareness that my presence is my practice of meditation, so it is not on a cushion, it is not in a room that is quiet, that there’s an incense, a candle, but the breathing is still present. The actions that we make are still present. So how can now these actions, even in the rush, in the quickness of movement that we have to do, it is still a deep practice. It is still a very mindful practice. As an attendant of Thay, I had some very extreme moments, especially after his stroke. When, yeah, we don’t have time to sit and to enjoy a sound of the bell. We’re in the hospital for almost a year. We were living, some weeks, in the ICU, where life and death was happening. All the chaos was around us. And I, the island within that we speak of in Buddhism, the Buddha explains to us that each and every one of us has an island within us that we have to tend to and take care of. And that island is our way of being, our calm that we can bring to the chaos. And it doesn’t mean that around is calm but we are still calm inside. Even if there is just a slice of calmness that still adds another quality to the midst of everything that is happening surrounding us. And it’s continuing to develop that strength of that island that allows us to not lose ourself and to be carried away. So the art of a meditator in the busyness is not being dispersed and being carried away. And when we are being dispersed and carried away we have the ability to come back to that island of practice. And this is an ongoing practice that we can all develop. We develop it when we’re at peace, when we have calm, when there is stillness. And then we also remind ourselves ah, there is so much energy that is the opposite of calm, and I’m gonna be calm in the craziness that is happening. And it’s not for us, it is not zen when you then expect everyone to be calm then you can be zen. It’s actually the total opposite. You cannot expect the world to change to accommodate our needs. It is us that we have to find our… our strength of the meditator in these critical moments. And it’s to show that you can be a stable and mindful person in that chaos. I have run in the monastery in our craziest retreats where I’m pacing very quickly, but I’m not losing myself because I know I can’t be slow in this moment. Like, you know, when you were cooking for 250 people, you can’t breathe in, chop one carrot, breathe out, chop another slice. It’s just like, bro, chop, you know. It’s like… So this idea of also meditation is only created for the whole peace and calm environment, that’s very idealistic. And yes, we can have these moments, we need to develop these moments to bathe ourselves in and creating that faith that we do have the capacity to be calm and peaceful. But within the action it is seeing that when you’re washing your plate, that is a moment you’re just washing your plate, you’re not thinking about the next project, that is mindfulness. And our teacher has written a whole manual and it’s called The Miracle of Mindfulness. And a fun note is that this book our teacher wrote was when he was exiled from Vietnam, he was in the West and he still had a whole community back in Vietnam, his social workers, and he didn’t want them to lose their spiritual dimension and their practice because they will be overwhelmed and they will burn out. So he wrote this as a manual so that they can maintain and see that in the day-to-day life there is still mindfulness practice hidden in every action. Very recently I had a very difficult conversation with a gentleman that we had to ask to leave Plum Village. And at first I brought my calm, I brought my gentleness, and there was a moment I realized he’s bending my gentleness and he is manipulating my kindness, and I had to change my attitude, and I had to change my way of speaking. And if you walk past, it doesn’t look like I’m a kind monk, but in that moment kindness is being abused, and is being used back as as a weapon against me. And therefore, in that moment, the right action is I need to match his energy, but in my heart I didn’t… I can really honestly say this, I did not hate him, but I’m just seeing that he is not understanding what needs to happen in this moment for his own well-being and for the well-being of the community. And so our understanding of peace and compassion, we have to see it in many lights. And there are moments when we can, it can appear like we’re very maybe mean even, but that strictness and those choices of words… I literally said you have to leave or I will call the police. And yeah, this is not something I ever want to say on a daily basis, but there are moments that we have to also be a more stricter and maybe harder kind of person. Right?

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Which is actually kindness.

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Which is kindness, exactly. And I just wanted to just like share that the way of mindfulness in the daily life is totally possible, and sometimes we just have to untangle a little bit of the idea that we have of a practitioner. Another story I have is with Thay. Right? Like everywhere we go, Thay really does apply walking meditation, but he’s not so dogmatic that he’s gonna walk like super slow to create crazy traffic jam in the airport.

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As I now ought to cross the road.

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Yes, but Thay will still walk at a much slower pace because he knows that we don’t need to be that fast. But it’s very ironic because, it’s not ironic, but it is that the view is very ironic because you see two kind of streams of life happening. And two is possible, and we both get to the same destination. But what kind of energy are you bringing? And there was one time when our flight, the whole gate was shifted, changed to another gate, and the announcement was made like please, all passenger, please make your way there. And I know they were speaking to our delegation because it was like 30 something of us at the airport, wherever Thay went on tour, he would take the community with him and for a lot of his retreats were within the hundreds. He would bring his whole community, and because Thay didn’t want to be seen as just one superstar or just one zen master, because for him the whole spiritual path is all about community. And I just remember that moment Thay turned to us and he said, run! And we all just sprinted across the airport. It must have been such a scene. Like this was way before like the smartphones that we have and with cameras, because I would have filmed that, because that was quite a spectacular moment in the airport of like monks and nuns just sprinting across the airport. So it’s also like we have to be in tune to the moment of what actions we need to apply to? If it’s quick, if it’s slow, if it’s gentle, if it’s strong, but our mindfulness is what we’re cultivating in our mind at that moment. And then on a practical, on a very practical… practice, everything that we speak about in Zen, sitting on a cushion, now transfer that to sitting on your office chair. Like see yourself when you are so sucked out of the present moment, by the screen, take a pause, a pause for three minutes, five minutes, if it’s possible.

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Or even three breaths.

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Or even three breaths. They’re all there. There are nuggets of practices that you have the permission and you have to have the will to apply it to. Right? And Thay always says, we all have to walk, choose a distance where you’re going, and have the ability to just step back it mentally and now put into action walking meditation. And slowly you will develop it so that it becomes just a natural way of your walking. So right now walking meditation is still like a practice as an object to train and to achieve, but when I was with Thay, his walking was just mindfulness. There’s no, I need to practice. His being was just mindfulness. When I’m sitting with him there’s never a feeling of like I need to now breathe and be mindful, it’s just this is mindfulness.

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And brother, it’s really interesting this, what you talk about this separation in our minds between work and home, because that’s been there for so long, that I can be a certain way at home, but when I walk out the door I leave my moral ethical calm self and I go to work. And what you’re so beautifully speaking about is we actually also do that with our practice. Our practice is at home, but our practice is in the work. It is in life. And there’s always something we can do. And you talked about walking, there was one person who was here on a climate leaders retreat and everyone made a commitment at the end, and this person made a commitment to, I think it was twice a week, walk in freedom from their kitchen to their home office which was about 30 steps. And I think I mentioned this in the book because on one level that looks, you know, rather pathetic that twice a week I’m going to walk 30 steps in freedom from my kitchen to my home office. But what you’re talking about is if that person does that because it’s within their capacity right now, that’s what they can do, if they really do that, then that will lead probably for them to do that three times a week or four times a week. And there’s in my training to be a coach, I always remember that the trainer told this amazing story which has always been very powerful for me that he said, how does a super tanker change its direction because the super tank is so strong that a single rudder, as a single unit, can’t do that. And he said, well what happens is the rudder is broken up into sections, so the first small section I think is called the tips, tip sail, or something, I can’t remember the exact word. But if you change the small segment of a rudder, then the water flow will slowly start to change the second segment, and then that will change the third segment and then the fourth one, and then eventually that huge ship will turn. But if you try and change it all at once with one rudder, the pressure is so strong it’s impossible to do that. So I think that sense that actually the smallest action may not look very meaningful, but if the small action has an intention behind it, then that small action can lead to the next action and the next action.

00:21:10

Yeah.

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And just one other thing, brother, one of the things I hear you talking about I think is about not being a victim and knowing when it’s possible to speak out. And I’ve seen this a lot in work where there’s almost a culture, a conspiracy of silence that everyone just becomes a victim of the circumstance and no one says anything about it, everyone feels they have to fit in. And I feel this consistently, people feel they, for good reason, want to fit into their community. But sometimes one person who breaks the silence in not an angry way but a creative way, can start to change a conversation at work, or you can find a friend at work who… and together you can maybe voice something. Because until something is voiced, people assume that is how it is. But it’s a bit like the emperor with no clothes who was parading through the streets and everyone’s saying oh my god, your clothes are so fine that we can’t even see it. And the little child who points out, you’re naked. And sometimes we need, not need, but sometimes we have the capacity and the courage to voice something from a place of mindfulness that wakes up everyone around you.

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So brother, perfection in mindfulness. So…

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What does that even mean?

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I think it’s called enlightenment or something. So this is a really good one because often people are trying to be perfect and part of the burnout and overwhelm is from trying to be perfect. And then we bring that into our practice so people look for a practice that is going to save them from overwhelming burnout but actually the mindset they bring to that actually can sometimes lead to further burnout. So let me… here’s the question: How do you work with a tendency to replace obsessing about perfectionism at work with obsessing about a new substitute perfection standard to chase now, revolving around being mindful enough not to chase the perfectionism of work? Then big emoji of a smile. I tend to laugh gently at myself and say hello again when I notice it. But I want to go deeper. And there’s something, brother, about allowing ourselves to be where we are. So Pema Chodron, the Tibetan nun has a book saying Start Where You Are. And just to start this off, brother, just to tell a little short story which is actually one of the younger monastics, who now has disrobed, actually a year or two ago, he came, ran to my house for tea because we live a short walk away from Plum Village monastery. And we were standing at the top of our garden with a beautiful view and we have a sort of a table there where we eat in the summer. And I said to him, okay, stand where you currently are. And he stood. And I said, now place your right foot to where you’re trying to be. And he took a big step with his right foot to the right. And so he was very unbalanced. And I literally just gently tapped him, I might have mentioned the story in a previous episode, but it doesn’t matter, repetition sometimes is helpful. And I gently pushed him and he fell over. And what that was such a strong expression of was that he was trying to be the perfect monk, he was trying to do it all perfectly, but actually in his mind he was actually not a perfect monk, he was deep in his suffering. But that distance was very unstabilizing, destabilizing. And actually I said, the perfect place to be is where you are. As soon as you’re trying to be perfect at something then you are actually you’re creating more suffering. So… But coming back to this question, brother, how can we avoid using the practice… as a tool for our suffering?

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I’m trying to remember my youth. When I just started in the meditation practice, and especially when I was a novice, a newly ordained monk, because at the beginning our teacher and the community tells us that right now your bodhicitta, meaning like your energy of practice, your mind of awakening, your mind of love, is really strong, so you want to ride that wave and you really want to invest your energy and your youth in the practice. And I took that as like as a challenge and I took that as like every day I need to increase my mindfulness. And, you know, I would always start with like a very strong intention, I wake up, 24 brand new hours. Then I make a cup of tea, it’s gonna be mindful. Then I put on my shoes, then I open a door. So I broke down everything, right. Because… That particular mindset was that is perfection, that is a perfect way of being in mindfulness. And of course by action number five Im totally lost. I’m like, what’s for breakfast today, y’all?

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And I’m really hungry.

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And I’m really hungry. It’s like, oh my god, I drank too much coffee, now I can’t sit still, right. And of course I’m failing every day. I’m failing, I’m not perfect every day. And… what I was lucky with was instead of being angry I just kept laughing at myself for how ironic it is to enter into a culture of being kind to oneself, and here we’re just putting more expectation for ourself, which is not really kind because at the beginning it looks like it is coming from a good intention of bodhichitta, like what our teacher has instructed us. But he never said be perfect. He never said that if you’re not perfect you’re not a good student, he just said ride the wave of your aspiration right now, of your intentions. Right? So this experience that I had with my own practice, number one, there’s no perfection. The Buddha was not perfect even. The Buddha was an enlightened being, he had deep understanding, he saw ways out of suffering, and that gave him such freedom because then he wasn’t entangled by the mind and the craving and the suffering, but he knows how to be and transform suffering. But in his community, how many of his students left him and never succeeded as monastics? Is that a failure or is that success? Or is that just a way of life of no birth no death coming and going? And there is always going to be new beings and then beings that die also. So our particular way of looking at meditation, I okay, I kind of blame imagery a little bit because every retreat… I mean we do it too in advertisement like, you know, there’s a monk sitting on a beautiful hill looking at the mountain and then all these apps are like presenting, you know, be calm, meditation… But the reality is you don’t only sit when it’s pleasant. I have had so many meditations when I want to leave the cushion. And it’s excruciating. My mind is in 20 000 directions. My breath is heavy, is deep, but it is exactly because it is unpleasant I need to sit. And I don’t consider that a failed sitting. I don’t consider that a failed sitting. When I really wanted to leave the monastic life, I made a vow that for six months I’m gonna come back to foundational practice. And the first two months it was excruciating, my mind just said get the hell out of here. Leave Plum Village, what are you doing? You don’t want to be here. But I was so determined, I’m like, I can’t let my emotions take over right now. And no matter how unpleasant it was, I was still so committed to sitting. And it was thanks to that, now I have the ability to sit through almost anything. And I can sit through excruciating meetings sometimes that we have. I can sit through unpleasant emotional storms that I have. So what may seem like something so unpleasant and can be considered failure, because we didn’t leave the hall feeling at peace. We didn’t feel happy leaving the hall but is it exactly that one plus one equals happiness all the time. Maybe one plus one equals being in suffering, being with busyness, being and embracing our overwhelm, and just sitting with our overwhelm, not even having a solution for it. And sometimes it is the unknown, the unknowing, because we think that meditation also is then to give answer to everything. And we have to grieve sometimes that sometimes there are questions we don’t have an answer to, but it doesn’t stop us from the practice, it doesn’t stop us from continuing to cultivate this Dharma. Dharma is a living organism, is a living tradition, it is a living insight. The Buddha, I love the way that Thay has said about the three jewels, the Buddha is a living Buddha. The Dharma is a living Dharma. The sangha is a living sangha. And that means the practice has to be living, it has to be also beyond the cushion. And it’s great that we can have a cushion to sit on. And we bow to that cushion every time because it is a support for us, but then that support can may not always be with us, but that support can then be transformed into other ways of being. And my commitment to the Dharma is to be that meditation, like lifeline wherever I go to I can always tap into it. And evidently I saw Thay do that, even after the stroke, even after he couldn’t do walking meditation anymore that didn’t stop him from cultivating his well-being and his present and his compassion. And even though he was suffering, he was still able to be a happy person by accepting his state of being in that present moment. So this idea of perfection will literally lead to suffering because once your condition changes you will feel that now you’re not perfect anymore and that only leads to suffering. So I can dare say that to have the idea that there is a perfection to mindfulness is a wrong view because that doesn’t embrace the insight of non-duality that suffering and happiness they lean on each other. So the imperfection and the perfection they have to play its part in life, in meditation, in love, in joy, in community. And it doesn’t say that I don’t know how to enjoy when we have perfected an art in the community. Like there are moments like we just did a monastic retreat two months ago and it was like a perfect retreat. Everyone left feeling inspired, feeling joy, feeling that we had time to be with each other. And we can enjoy those moments. But then to be attached to that moment, that’s where it’s wrong.

00:34:52

Brother, I just want to thank you for that answer because there’s so much in that. It’s almost like imperfection is perfection. And it reminds me of a couple of things. When I was at The Guardian, I was involved in international development and I used to give talks on the fact that all these charities in order to raise money to help alleviate poverty or social injustice were always showing, in all their brochures and all their talks and all their imagery, were showing people as victims because the only way they thought they could raise money was to show that people were needing victims and therefore actually they needed to show people as victims in order to raise the money to help them. But what that did is it created a culture of superiority that if you’re in a developed so-called western country that by noted donating money to people you would help their lives, but it created this fundamental sense of inequality, that my money will help them. Whereas often actually the giving of the money was to avoid the feeling of the suffering, it’s just that I’ll give money to push the idea away. And what you said was so important about the way that the capitalist system has in some ways co-opted meditation and mindfulnes. And as you say, all the images are of perfection. And so what you’re creating is practitioners as victims if they don’t attain that, because you’re, in a sense, buying meditation, buying mindfulness, because it becomes a commodity, and then if it’s not delivered, then actually you feel that you failed, or you feel the practice has failed you. And I think, brother, that that has, in a sense, crept into Plum Village a bit.

00:36:52

Yes.

00:36:52

I know one of the sisters said to me a while ago that that sometimes there… she’s noticed this sort of, it’s not a trend as such, it’s not fundamental, but this expansion of people who come to Plum Village as a commodity, that Plum Village is there to make them better. And that if they’re not better in a week that they feel Plum Village has failed them or the practices aren’t good enough, and they’ll go off and find something else. Is anything you just want to, I mean you spoke about it very beautifully, but is there anything else to be spoken about the way we’re seeing mindfulness and the practice?

00:37:30

Yeah.

00:37:31

And expecting something from it.

00:37:33

Yeah. I think like things are so beautifully curated now, especially with things online and things, I mean like we’re also a part of that, right? We wanted this podcast to be perfect. And, you know, all the equipment, all the sound engineering, all of the music that Brother Spirit wrote for it. Our producers like they are so good at it, that even in our way of being we create such high expectation for everything. And maybe in a way it’s good to then come to moments where you meet things that are unexpectedly not meeting our needs. And that is good because that reminds us that ah, there are so many things that we still need to grow and develop.

00:38:33

And reminds us there are needs.

00:38:35

Exactly.

00:38:37

… someone else’s needs to take care of.

00:38:40

Right. And I think we also like part of, you know, part of technology’s growth, I mean part of people’s experience and so on, Plum Village has changed a lot in the last 43 years. It used to be a farmland. Like I came here there was no path, like mud was everywhere. And I loved it. It was totally cool and normal, you know. And now especially with like public regulation, things are becoming much more demanding. And so our human mind also gets attached to all these demands, right. And so I think one thing I just want to say that helps to give us freedom and way of being is to always be open to every experience that we are engaging into. When I go on retreats, like there’s so much you can prepare. And that’s it. After that you just gotta experience it, you have to be ready. We don’t know who we’re meeting, we don’t know who will be in our audience. And we can’t just stick to what we’ve prepared and not be open enough to change and adapt and move, so that the present moment is a real moment, it’s not something that we’ve created from the past. And I think as we, in this capitalistic world, like are so fixated on things being created in a particular way, and we become attached to that, and attached to the experience of meditation even. The good and the bad, and so on, and so on. And that’s why we always say you gotta come and experience it for yourself. Whatever you’re hearing is still just my experience and your experience and our notions, but the reality is we just have to apply everything. And that’s why I love, like even the Buddha, he said, don’t believe me, you have to practice. You have to be the experimenter, you have to experience it, you have to put it into practice.

00:41:18

So let’s get to our next question. So this one, brother, is something that comes up regularly for people which is that people aren’t just feeling burnt out in their own life or overwhelmed in their own life experience, but actually when they’re looking out in the world and seeing what’s going on and all the sort of polycrisis we’re facing of climate and biodiversity loss and social injustice and war and disinformation, etc. That they’re feeling overwhelmed and burning out just from either feeling all that or from actually trying to make a difference and finding that it’s like trying to swim against a tsunami. So there are a few questions around this, so I’m going to just read three actually which give us a sense of what people are feeling and then we can answer. So the first one is from someone saying: I’m 74 years old and throughout my life I’ve been always able to pull myself out of depression. Faith and hope continue to fuel my passion for life. Now I wake up with dread. I do manage to work through it but it’s become a morning ritual to overcome it. I feel I’m burnt out from years of being a spiritual warrior. So that’s on the sort of global scale. And then there are two people who wrote in after the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and I think it’s very helpful also to pick one particular example of where people are feeling burnt out as well to show that actually these are not conceptual issues, these are facing people right now. So here’s the first one. I’ve been working with locals affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. I’ve been very intentional in trying to be present and available in my interaction with the victims, but I find that I get overwhelmed by the amount of pain and sadness that I see. How can I be of service to others while still caring for myself? And the second one: we are walking into our third week after the Helene storm went by Asheville, my town in North Carolina, USA. Three weeks without water electricity and many without their home business or family members. I see beauty in the many trucks with license plates from all over the country. I see beauty in the water I can carry, or in the new view I have from the trees that no longer stand. But day after day pain seems to be just there, like a shark under the surface, ready to strike. So brother, how can we respond in a way that creates calm and balance when all around us we see either destruction or fear that actually destruction is on its way?

00:44:09

I think I want to start with we have to be able to honor the grief that comes with the loss of trees, of homes, of livelihoods. And part of the practice of meditation is becoming aware of these feelings and emotions that arise. And spirituality is not here to… take a pill and then it becomes better. It’s actually, it allows us to ground ourselves to be in touch with impermanence, this is the nature of impermanence. And having the ability to stay within the feelings of grief and pain honoring it as well as this is where it becomes a little bit more difficult which is the responsibility of each individual within the suffering still having the wisdom, the insight, that but I am alive, and that today I have 24 hours ahead of me. How can I cultivate these 24 hours? It may not be with the blue sky and the birds and the flowers, but it is ah, how how can I support all of the victims of the hurricane, of my own family, of my own loved ones, of my community? So it is like directing our source of energy even if it is pain and grief we can still direct it to building love, hope, communities. And I think this is a teaching coming from the times of Plum Village’s original sangha, which were all these youth activists who were going from village to village with our teacher and other social workers in helping rebuild villages that were destroyed and bombed.

00:46:16

And this is in Vietnam.

00:46:17

This is in Vietnam. And a part of it already is the aspect of community life is like seeing pain and suffering and collaborating together. And in the work of collaboration, it is like the practice of letting go of self also, because you’re of service now. And realistically, when we’re in service, it looks like we’re just giving out energy, but there’s also energy coming back into us. And it’s important to also be proud and be happy with our capacity of offering, like our willingness to give our generosity even if it’s very simple, it is just an act of, you know, going to give out batteries, or give out medication… vitamins. In Vietnam, present time, our monastic communities over there when the storm happened in the north of Vietnam, we prepared many care packages and monks and nuns would go on boats joining the villagers to bring to the villages that were destroyed. And also witnessing death, witnessing also lost of ancestral trees, you know. I think one of the pain, the collective pain that was shared among the north was all of these huge trees that have been there for hundreds of years, considered like our ancestors, are all gone now because of the huge storm. And we have to also be able to honor that, and I saw collectively, as a community, you know, people crying of the loss of of nature here. And so there is an element where it can also become a ceremony where we can honor the lost also. So when we’re grieving one of the practices in Buddhism is to have channels where… how to put our grief, our hopelessness, our pain, and we do them in ceremonies. And it is a physical act where we would unite our body, speech, and mind, we would sit upright, we would collect ourselves through mindful breathing, we would set an intention while we are bringing ourselves to this moment. And then for us, Buddhists, we would do, we would light an incense, we call it an instance offering. And for us when we light the incense, it represents fragrance, and our teacher would explain it like it represents the fragrance of mindfulness, concentration and insight, these are the three trainings that every practitioner has to develop. Mindfulness is awareness, awareness of what is happening in the very here and now. And then to develop one-pointedness, a direction of where we are focusing our energy. And then having the insight, from this insight, and it can be as a prayer. We pray. Or it is a prayer in action, we go into action. So there’s many ways that we can use our voices, our actions to help bring our energy to the suffering. So when we talk about burnout there also needs to be a ritual there. It’s like we have to be able to hold ourselves responsible in recognizing and accepting that we’re in burnout, and one thing to do is, it’s hard, especially when you’re in burnout, because I think each and every one of us have been in it, but because I’ve heard this insight and it really helped me during that time which was and burnout is also impermanent. You cannot think that it’s gonna be there forever because everything is of the nature of impermanence. So our state of mind, and our state of energy, whether it’s mentally or physically, can change. And that is the beauty of impermanence. It’s that if we recognize and we see and then we have actions towards it, it’s not just ideas now, ideas are not enough. We have to put into action another way in order to help us transform our burnout, our loss of energy, or even loss of hope. So here we have to go back to fundamentals. It sounds crazy, but it’s exactly, you have to go back to basics, you have to come back and remind yourself that you have the ability to take care of yourself. You have the ability to bring some element of relief in the sense of joy and stillness and care, and self-care for yourself. And particularly in those moments, that’s the hardest thing to do because we can become very critical to our own self and we become critical to the world, we become critical to the suffering that is present. And yes, there is suffering, yes there are pain and injustice, but how can we, sometimes just take a step back to look at it all and see how are we taking care of ourselves in the midst of this. Or we also may become the anger, the violence, the depression of this also. And this is where Buddhism, it’s very difficult, because it becomes a mirror for you. We have a sutra called measuring and reflecting. Is like we have to ask ourselves, am I becoming the anger that I have transformed, that I have been working to transform? Am I burning out from the deepest work that I’ve loved? And on another practical space, we have this friend who comes every year to Plum Village and he always volunteers in one of our retreats. And every winter he goes to Myanmar and he does three months of social work. He just brings food to where there is… because there’s a civil war going on right there, oh yeah, there’s a civil war going on right now. And he would just deliver food. That’s it. And one year he got so burned out from, you know, witnessing so much pain and suffering, and also seeing that his work is not really relieving so much. So he came back to Plum Village the next day, the next year, and he met Sister Chan Khong who is in our community like a bodhisattva, like she helped our teacher start the school for youth and social service. And he shared with Sister Chan Khong what he’s been doing and how he feels he becomes powerless. And she said, there’s one advice I’m going to give you and you have to commit to it, and that is once a week you have to give yourself one lazy day. You have to have the courage to not be put into action on that day, and you have to give yourself that day to recover, to take care of yourself, in a way to be a little bit selfish, meaning just to care for yourself, to breathe, to eat, to drink, to sleep. And when she shared this you know that this is her own journey of helping and of being an activist. And sometimes we feel like there’s not enough time, but if we… that is also a mentality, we don’t have enough time, of our society that we have created, and we have imposed on each and every one of us that it becomes such suffocating energy. So when our friend shared this in our recent retreat this year, we had a workshop on loving action, and he really shared like this became his safety vitamin once a week, to take one lazy day, and the six other days fully committed, and that one day to remind yourself of also you also need to be loved and cared, and you offer that to yourself. And I, when I hear the question about compassionate fatigue it is very real, it’s very true. And here we have to see what are the elements that we are lacking in our daily life that can help balance ourselves? You know, the Buddha has taught of the middle way, we cannot be too extreme, like always on gear five, because we will lose energy, we will not have any more capacity, because we’re limited. So we have to know when to stop, when to ask for help, as well as when our mind of love… In Buddhism, it’s a very particular energy, we call it the bodhichitta, when our mind of love is lacking nutriments and we have to be very honest. And for those of us who’ve given their whole life to these kind of work, sometimes it may feel like an insult when we hear that… and we dare to even say like my mind of love is not there anymore. And I think that was one of my hardest moment when I was meeting my own crisis was I was realizing that my capacity was so limited. I thought I was the vast ocean, but I’m a creek now. It’s definitely drying up. And realizing like I can’t love anymore. And that becomes a very scary place because it feels like we’re changing, it feels like we’re becoming a different person. And here we have to learn to close our senses and come back home. Thay has this story when he was at a hermitage writing a book and one day he went to the hills for a walk and he left all the windows open, the doors open. And when he came back everything was a mess in the hut because the storm has come through and the wind has blown everything apart. And Thay said, in that moment, what he had to do was close all the windows and doors and take care of the inner home. And he said sometimes we have to do that, when our inside is all disturbed and all not aligned anymore, we have to close all our windows. Whether it is our contacts, or our actions, our listening, even our giving of love. Here’s when your generosity is not there anymore, you don’t have any more to give, you have to rebuild. So the Buddha also teaches us we have to learn to take care of the island within us. So we have to know how to understand our capacity. This is very difficult. Thay said, when he was in his later years of teaching, he said the hardest thing he had to say was no to requests. But at that time he said, because I understand that I’m becoming older, I am more limited in my energy and I still want to focus on my brown family, my monastic students, because I don’t know how much time I have left. So you have to start to intentionally select very skillfully where you’re going to give your energy. And what we think what we were doing in the past and we can’t do any more it’s a loss, but actually it’s a new era that we’re in. And before we go into the next question, I’ll never forget this, there was a monk who asked our teacher in a Q and A, Thay, when do us, monastics, we get to retire? Thay said never. Thay said, as a monastic, we’re like fine wine, the older we stay the more nutritious and the more flavor and the more essence we have to give. So the more that you’re a monastic you have more to give. There’s no such thing as retirement.