The Way Out Is In / Cultivating Joy and Togetherness in the Midst of Hardship (Episode #95)

00:00:03

Good evening, dear friends. My name is Nho, and I have the joy and the distinct honor of welcoming you here tonight. In Vietnamese, there’s a saying that we’re often taught, which is [Vietnamese] which means ‘when drinking water, remember your source.’ And so we want to just invoke a heart of gratitude for Thay for bringing us together in this moment. Tonight, as we explore conversations about cultivating joy and togetherness, even amidst times of trouble and hardship, let us acknowledge and let us recognize together the first source of joy, which is our togetherness, and let us rejoice in the collective energy of the beloved community. Tonight, our conversation will be shared between Jo Confino, who is a coach and a spiritual mentor. And it’ll be shared also between Brother Phap Huu, who is a Zen Buddhist monk, a longtime attendant of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, and also the abbot of Plum Village. And we have a special guest with Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. So please join me in welcoming Brother Phap Huu, Jo and Ocean to the stage.

00:02:15

Dear friends, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In. I am Jo Confino.

00:02:24

And I am Brother Phap Huu.

00:02:27

And we are sitting together with a thousand people in Euston, Central London. And we’re here to talk about joy and togetherness in the midst of hardship. And who better than our special guest, Ocean Vuong? Ocean, you’re very welcome.

00:02:46

Thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for having me. It’s a deep, deep honor.

00:02:53

And before we get into the talking, we want to get into the presencing. And everyone has arrived here, probably having had busy days and maybe lots on your mind. And what we want to do is to be present for each other and to recognize that actually as we sit here, we are one community. We’re, as Thay would say, one organism, one body. And to help us to get into that place of letting go of the busyness of your day and just being present to this time together, I’m going to invite Phap Huu to bring us together and to bring us into our common center so that we can all be here for each other.

00:03:43

So dear friends, I invite us to find a comfortable position, possibly if our two feet can be firmly on the ground, having three points of contact, our buttocks and our two feet firmly on this earth that is supporting us. In this moment, we can close our eyes or just keep our eyes focused in front of us where we are not looking left and right, up and down. And start to arrive in the feeling of the body. Whatever sensation is there, just acknowledge it. Allowing us to fully bring our mind home to this body. As you breathe in, just recognize this is an inbreath. As you breathe out, know that this is an outbreath. Just recognizing inbreath and outbreath. If the breath is short, just let it be short. If the breath wants to be longer and deeper, allow it to be longer and deeper. As you breathe in, don’t think about the breath. Feel the breath. Following the breath from the beginning to the end. This is inbreath. As you breathe out, you are fully one with outbreath. From the beginning to the end. I fully take refuge in my inbreath. I fully take refuge in my outbreath. As you breathe in, become aware of your whole body sitting here. As you breathe out, with each outbreath, relax more of the tensions that are there, in the body. Just by acknowledging and giving permission to relax. In this moment, you are here for yourself. We don’t have to be presenting ourselves to anyone. Just allowing ourselves to be fully in the body. As you breathe in, aware of the body, as you breathe out, maybe offer a gentle smile. This smile is the smile to life, to this moment, to the stillness that we are experiencing. Aware of body, smiling. As I breathe in, I allow myself to be in this stillness. As I breathe out, peace is in my heart, in my body. In this very moment, how precious. I listen, I listen this wonderful sound of the bell brings me home to the present moment. I listen, I listen this wonderful melody of my breath guides me home to my body. Thank you, dear community, for breathing together and meditating together.

00:09:35

Thank you. Thank you, Brother Phap Huu. The talk is called Joy and Togetherness in the Midst of Hardship. And often we find that joy and togetherness only in the midst of hardship. And each of you coming here this evening will have hardship of one sort or another in your life. And also there’s the collective suffering we’re seeing in the world today with climate change and biodiversity loss and war and famine and inequality, etc. etc. So it’s really, really important that we, rather than getting sort of overwhelmed with grief and fear, is that we come back to our center and find at this moment real community and real joy. And this morning when I woke up, there were two images that came to my mind. One was the satirical film Don’t Look Up, where there’s this meteor coming to Earth and the human folly of not stopping it, and at the last moment the people who are trying to save the world just meet for dinner. And they just have this space together to find this community, this togetherness, this presence over a meal as the Earth ends. And there was another image that came to mind, which is Phap Huu, which is in our new book, Calm in the Storm, which is a poem by W. S. Merwin called Place. And I’ll just read you a line from that. It says, “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree. What for? Not the fruit. I want the tree that stands in the earth for the first time with the sun already going down.” So before we get into the hardship, let’s get into this connection, which many of you will not know between Ocean and Phap Huu. So Ocean and Phap Huu were born in the same small village in Vietnam. They are both second generation immigrants into North America. They are both in their mid to late 30s. And what very few of you may know is that just if one or two conditions had shifted, that Ocean may have ended up as a monk in Plum Village.

00:12:07

It could still happen.

00:12:08

So I checked in, phap Huu says he’s very welcome. So Ocean, tell us a little bit about this journey that almost happened.

00:12:23

Well, yeah, it’s a delightful surprise to realize that we were from the same village and the village is very small, a little shrimping village. Shrimp and rice was the major production, and you know, just a year apart in our.. So we could have, we might have shared the same water, the same air. So karma is a thing, right? And you know, in the West we often say karma is a b…, as a kind of revenge, but it’s important to say karma is action, karma is occurrence, and there’s so many occurrences that led us to share the space and now meet each other. I believe I’ve been meeting you for hundreds of years, perhaps all of us, and it’s good to see you again. I guess, you know, samsara is the condition that we’re all in, the condition of suffering and dukkha. And I I think growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, post-industrial Hartford, Connecticut, it was no longer the Hartford of Mark Twain and Harry Beecher Stowe or even Wallace Stevens. It was the Hartford of the crack epidemic of a blighted community. The Reagan era of trickle-down economics never manifested for us. And then when I was about, you know, 14, 15, the opioid epidemic hit us like this plague. And except it didn’t have a term at that time. Politicians weren’t using it to build a base or to build their brand, it was just wiping, and it was wiping people out who were like lunch ladies, moms. And it was so much shame around those deaths because it was all… It felt like everyone was a junkie who were dying. You know, we didn’t know what it was, and you would see folks get cremated overnight and then vanish. Families would move, and it was at a time before the iPhone, before social media, on the cusp of it, you know. I think the millennial generation is very interesting. The further away from its epicenter of those years is that I think we were the first to live an entirely analog childhood and then experience the iPhone. And I imagine it’s quite similar to the generation that experienced the T Model Ford for the first time. You know, imagine riding a horse, you know, a month prior and then being in a machine. And that’s what it felt like. And so the grief and the sorrow was immense but irretrievable. Like to this day, I… there are people who are gone who I don’t have their photographs. I can’t find them anywhere. And it starts to become this kind of private grief where their faces fade. And being in the midst of that as a 15, 16-year-old, I guess I turned to the Dharma and to Buddhism because I saw it in my living room. But my elders didn’t really engage with the philosophy. They did it more as a cultural act, a kind of ritual. And I said to my mom, why are we putting fruit before the statue until it rots? You know, I mean there’s fruit flies, like what is this? And my mother was like, I don’t know. It’s… I think it’ll help us with our income, you know, like… As a kid, I was like, all right, this… I’m not, it does not triangulate. It’s like the math meme lady, right? I was like, okay. And then I said, okay… And then I just, I was just thrown into so much suffering. And I guess as a child, there’s a kind of naive questioning of like why. And I asked my mother, I said, Mom, can I please go to the temple? And there’s something really interesting with being a Vietnamese person in the diaspora, is that often, for many of us, the temple or the church or what have you is the only place where we hear Vietnamese at the most longest unbroken duration. Whereas this experience would not be an experience for someone native in Vietnam. They would hear it all the time. So the temple was the only place, and so to this day, the Vietnamese language to me elicits this collective desire to heal and understand suffering. And it’s a very specific to the immigrant. It’s what I call a third culture. It’s a third culture. There’s nothing like it in the homeland. There’s nothing like it in the assimilated American ethos. But there’s this kind of a special place, this thing that displacement and violence created. We think of the image of the lotus, this beautiful thing, this beautiful pink flower coming from the mud. And it similarly, my lotus was be able to hear Vietnamese at its most capacious, nuance, rich, and elongated every Sunday at the temple. And that’s when I started to go. And the first book my mother bought for me was a little book of the Dhammapada, the Buddha’s words at Barnes and Noble. And I remember she was so intimidated by the bookstore, its immensity, it’s full of books, this thing that because she was illiterate, she was so sealed away from that she said, ‘Go in and find what you need. Here’s a $10 bill. Go in there and get what you need. But I can’t, I can’t go in with you.’ You know, I didn’t know it then, but I think what she was feeling was a deep sense of shame, you know. But despite that, she knew that this was going to be a future, a kind of access to knowledge. But that was kind of the route, and I really, I went really hard, and one day I asked my guidance counselor. I said, ‘I know you’re supposed to try to get me to go to college, but I want to be a monk. And I’ve already looked it up. There’s a school called University of the West. And it’s a school in California where…’ It was a Buddhist school, similar to a Catholic school, but it was all around a liberal art school, around Buddhist education. And I figured I could go there, get a degree, and then become a monk, start my education. But it wasn’t accredited. So the guidance counselor said, ‘I would love to help you become a monk, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I sent you there. So you’re gonna go to a community college down the street.’ And then from there I got hit with Baldwin, Foucault, and Benjamin, and then I never turned back. Is interesting, it was very interesting because the school was accredited only two months after that conversation. Because I remember asking him, I said, can you look this up? He turns on his Dell, giant computer at the time, he’s like, ‘No, can’t. It’s not a real school.’ You know, but that was just two months later. And so I could, I would have probably made my way following the Vietnamese language to Plum Village. In fact, I’m sure I would because my mother was listening to tapes of Thich Nhat Hanh at the time. And I think she would have been really proud if I chose that. But I asked if Thay Phap Huu can recite a Vietnamese mantra just because of all that, again, the Vietnamese language to me is so close to this aspirational desire towards understanding suffering and collective healing. And again, that’s not something I would say to represent Vietnamese in Vietnam, but something specific to Buddhist Vietnamese in the diaspora.

00:20:48

I think that was an invitation, Phap Huu.

00:20:50

And I will accept it. And just to share before I offer this chant, as Ocean invited me to offer this, I think in English more than I think in Vietnamese. And part of my journey was, in life, was discovering who I am. I grew up in Canada and very much in a white world. And part of my thinking and my thought of success and happiness wasn’t really what my ancestors taught me. And when I came to Plum Village for the first time, I was very moved by the collective kindness that was there. And it felt like home. And I’m staying in a house with a sangha member that’s housing me before this podcast started. And every morning I get to see the son go to school and come back home. And it reminds me of my fear of school. And the only place that I felt safe was actually Plum Village. And karma, like suffering brought us to the Dharma. And in Plum Village, when I first entered, I was 13-years-old, young, and I touched a kind of kindness that I’ve never touched before. And I asked myself, if I could be a kind person, I think I’m good. I think I’m gonna have a career of offering smiles. And because I grew up not surrounded by smiles, it was a lot of hardship, it was a lot of striving. And in Plum Village though, I had to accept the Vietnamese culture, which was very difficult because going to school, you know, my mother would make me a lunchbox, fried rice, but I wanted wonder bread. I wanted to be seen as equal. So Plum Village or Buddhism as Ocean has shared, is, for me, I didn’t know that it was part of my identity until many, many years later. And as a monk, we have to learn to chant. And I first just chanted in English because a part of me was rejecting the Vietnamese side. And only as I continue to accept what this robe means for me, this robe represents freedom. It represents we have a choice to take the steps that we want to make in this life, to have the actions that we choose to enact, to pass down to this present moment community and as well as many generations down the line. And so I’m gonna chant a verse that is very close to my heart. It is a chant that we will recite in our minds before we invite the bell. It’s a prayer. And this was one of our teachers’ favorite chants. So I invite him in my heart, in this moment, as he has helped me rediscover my own soil, my own soil so that I can plant the seeds of my heritage. And I’m very lucky that I have many seeds, not just from Vietnam, but also from Toronto, from France, from the UK, and now internationally with the community that I’ve got to be in touch with. And so, as I chant this, it’s also a prayer to all the suffering that is happening in this very moment that we are not ignoring as a practitioner. We send our prayers to Gaza, to the Congo, to the Sudan, to all the conflicts, to all the genocides, to all the destruction, the starving children and the mothers that have to care for them. So I invite us, as a collective, to invoke this peace that we can bring in our hearts and into the world in this moment. Body, speech, and mind in perfect oneness. I send my heart along with the sound of this bell. May the hearers awaken from forgetfulness and transcend the path of anxiety and sorrow.

00:25:55

[Chant in Vietnamese]

00:26:42

Thank you, brother. I just want to pick up on what you said about kindness. You came because actually you saw the value of kindness. And I know this is central to your writing and the way you see the world. And just today at lunchtime I was in a restaurant with my wife Paz, and the waiter who came to see us, to serve us, I could immediately see that he was a very kind and attentive man. And I just said, which I often do, ‘I just wanted to let you know that I can see your attentiveness and I can see you’re very kind.’ And his face just lit up. And he was so deeply appreciative. And sometimes, you know, Thay said, you know, just a smile can save someone’s life. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about why kindness, why you think kindness is so much at the heart of… in a world where where often now we’re seeing increasing cruelty and where kindness feels that it’s becoming a rarefied rather than something that is expansive.

00:27:56

Well, I think the our world is getting much more disparate. We are becoming further and further apart. Technology was supposed to bring us together. And this was, this is kind of the promise of the Enlightenment that… You know, and it’s interesting that all technological movements or renaissance are controlled by the wealthy and the elites. And so I think what I’m interested in as a writer, as a teacher, is that so much of our world is about material resources and narrative. And this is why I tell my students, I said, you know, they tell you, they shame you for being a poet, for being a writer. Oh, you’re doing this liberal arts, naval-gazing, decadent thing, dreaming. But the politicians and the elites are poets too. You know, the greatest political speech is the anaphora, you know, and Walt Whitman used it as a catalog, but you hear it. We will heal the working class, we will heal the great divide, I will solve, we will heal this country’s heart, we will heal the middle class. And what’s the anaphora is so useful because it doesn’t have to explain itself. It just keeps… It launches again and again. And and you think about, you know, all the the riffs, right? The the greatest moments in political speeches are the pathos. You know, rarely do you hear facts and figures. You don’t have… It’s, you know, the three classical Greek modes of argument: logos, ethos, and pathos. And it’s always pathos. Unfortunately, we are a species that has evolved to hear the cry of our neighbor rather than move for facts and figures, right? And although, you know, we are not unmoved by that, it takes a lot for us to kind of comprehend that. We evolved in these tribal, smaller circles. And so I think narrative is deeply important. But if you look at how history progresses, it’s often kings and queens from the Enlightenment, procuring or being, you know, solicitors of technological advances. And it was promised. The narrative is that it should liberate us, it should promise to free us from our conditions, and of course it did free Europe from an agrarian system, but it only freed mostly white men. Then it exported that to the colonial South for the global South through colonialism. And then, you know, it was… We plundered and destroyed the natural resources. And so all that technology led us where? It led us to mustard gas, trench warfare, the machine gun, gas chambers. It led us to social media which just depletes our dopamine, which is leading to the highest youth suicide rates we’ve ever seen. And so something has gone awry. And I think kindness is difficult now more than ever because I think kindness is something that is deeply dependent on its proximity, our proximity to suffering. We… it’s harder for us to comprehend suffering now. Schadenfreude is in our hands and it’s always easier to see. We’ve normalized suffering so that we’ve been disassociated from it. And I think growing up in these communities in Hartford and working in fast food and working in the farms, you know, I don’t want to romanticize it, but I think I I did notice that kindness and generosity was very, it was very easily mobile, it was easily shared. And I think part of that was because everyone in that community knew that they could be next. You know, there’s a there’s a moment that I think about when I was working in Boston Market. There was one of my co-workers, she was a woman in her 30s, I was just you know, 17, 18. And she got this horrible call that you don’t want to get at work, on a landline, you know, and she said the call was from her aunt saying, your brother is overdosing and he’s in the hospital. And this was before Narcan, and it was really interesting because how it would work is that there was some use of naloxone medicine, but it was not prescribed by the FDA, it wasn’t approved as a nasal spray but it was still there. So some ambulance crews would kind of […] it and put it into an etherizer. And so it’s called off-label use. And so they experimented, but whether you lived or died really was Russian roulette. It depended on which ambulance crew came who knew about this. So and everyone kind of knew, they’re like, oh my gosh, who’s gonna come for my brother? Is it, you know, the EMS that knows this or don’t, right? It was kind of the wild wild west of overdose care. And she… But meanwhile, we’re closing down the store, we’re trying to just kind of push through and wipe down the counters. We close it down, we’re ready to go, and something that I just I think I’ll take to the end of my life, this image. We didn’t say a word to each other. But all of us kind of knew that we weren’t gonna go home. We clocked out, we’re not gonna get paid, and we’re just standing around her in this dark dining room, just the back, fluorescent lights in the kitchen lit. I was a kid, so I just followed my elders, and most of the people were in their 40s and 50s who were working with me. And we just kind of decided that we would hold vigil over. And I just thought, gosh, these people have family, they want to get home, they want to get out of there. Why did every every single… like it was eight of us? Why did we all stay? And I think, I’ve been thinking about that for almost 20 years, and I think it’s because every single one of us knew that on any given day we could be where she is. We could be where her brother is, we could be where her aunt is, that the proximity of our lives to suffering meant that we would be in a position where we also need people to stand next to us. And I think as our world gets more and more diffracted, as we get further and further from kinetic contact, because in that workforce, we had ideological differences. I knew there were people in that room that thought me as a gay person would be burning in hell. And yet, kinetic kinship degraded ideological differences. When you’re working through a shift to collectively move towards a common goal, to survive together, you start to see your coworkers sweat and the locket that she’s wearing that’s slick with sweat after the six hour of a grueling shift is Mother Mary and her grandmother. You know, it’s really hard to hate each other when you have shouldered labor. Which is why in my work I’m always interested in labor. It’s just it’s something that has really moved our world. And it’s, to be in the UK, to be in Britain, you know, the beginning of the industrial revolution, which meant it was also the beginning of the worker strike, right? The workers’ rights started here, and it was a group of people making the very humble terry cloth. It was the first moment where folks, you know, revolted, walked out of factories and called for their rights. And so I think labor is something I’m always thinking about, not just a political thing, but as a narrative force. Like, what does it mean for a group of people to understand each other’s suffering so deeply that they would surrender comfort, surrender the easy thing in order to hold vigil for one another. And I’ve always felt that it’s the proximity, which is why, you know, my latest book is also about addicts. And in the course of that book, I knew that I wanted to write a book wherein the main character never gets better. Because there’s a moral discrepancy in addiction, that we often think as someone gets more and more sick, that they’re somehow a worse person, that they’re morally condemned. Whereas someone with an illness like cancer, right? They’re, if they fight that battle, even if they lose it, it’s a virtuous battle. But for the addict, it’s always maybe they deserved it or they’re rubbish or what have you. But I’ve experienced addicts as they lose sight of their life, actually their understanding of kindness and how important generosity is actually goes up. There’s a kind of extreme difference between those two things. It’s almost an inverse pattern. And so I think it’s hard with ChatGPT and technology, we can go on and on, but I think there’s a lot that is uphill. And again, it’s the narrative. We were sold this promise, and a lot of it is from elites who benefit, technocrats who benefit from us willingly surrender our rights to them in order to give us a utopia, a heaven on earth that never materialized, in fact, a continual hell. And so I think it’s so important to think about narrative. I talk to my students, you’re a poet, you’re a novelist, but you’re under the mantle of wonder, bewilderment, curiosity. You know, all the other, those in power, are also poets. They’re manipulating meaning, but they’re manipulating for votes, for profit, for power, towards fascism. And no wonder it’s designed for you to be ashamed to be an artist. It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that in the art world, we’re often asked to be humble, to be grateful for a seat at the table. Perform humility. And I think humility is good. As a Buddhist, I believe in it, but there is a discrepancy between the artists. We never tell people on Wall Street to be humble. You never hear someone say, you know what, we killed it last quarter. Let’s tone it down. And be grateful that we have a seat at the economic table. You never hear the board of Raytheon say, let’s lower the blast radius of our next drone-striking model. Let’s make sure the automatic rifle sprays just a fewer bullets because the last school shooting was so effective in our weaponry. You never hear humility in the death machine. And yet, so much of the upper middle class art world demands humility of the artist, right? Controlling that kind of ambition so that it’s absolutely minuscule, and yet there’s open reign in linguistic registers, but also profit and death machine. We, in fact, we praise it, right? Anything that grows has this ultimate libidinal power, we innately celebrate in and of itself. And I just, it’s important just to draw attention to that and not see these values, these discrepancies in valuations as a given, but to question why they are and the historical sort of lineages that led to what we’re seeing today.

00:40:03

Thank you, Ocean. And also there’s the proximity of labor, and then there’s the proximity of nature.

00:40:09

Yeah.

00:40:09

Which is also important. And I what… As you were talking it brought to mind, a couple of years ago I co-facilitated a four-day conference on collapse of, civilizational collapse with, you know, 150 of the world’s experts on the polycrisis. And it was very intellectual. And actually I didn’t feel very much, even though we were talking about things that were so serious because it didn’t touch me. And I I got home to France and it was in the middle of a heat wave, and we have a small pond, which I often sit by and look at the frogs and the newts and the dragonflies, and it had dried up because it was so hot. And I felt so much grief that I hadn’t felt when we were talking about the end of civilization.

00:40:57

Right.

00:40:57

And it’s because I was present to what was there, right in front of me, and I felt the absence in a way that I couldn’t do in my mind.

00:41:10

Thay, can I ask you, what was the moment? Was there a moment where you knew that you were going to be a monk? That’s not in the usual wheelhouse for someone raised in the West, you know, fireman, police officer, doctor…

00:41:26

Movie star.

00:41:27

Yeah. Was this plan B when Hollywood wasn’t calling?

00:41:31

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I fell in love. It was as simple as that. I came to many retreats and in the years that I’ve gone to Plum Village, I’ve been hearing Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh give hours of Dharma talks, which most of it I fell asleep in. But it all… It came through somehow. We all, I think most of us growing up, we want to have figures that we look up to. Superheroes, right? I grew up loving […] before Spider-Man and and Batman and so on. And I think when I came to Plum Village, the robes and the bald head, the bald and brown were my superheroes. And everytime I left the retreat I would cry, because I knew I was going back to suffering. And Plum Village was like… it is my home, it is my community. And we’re not perfect, like there’s so much that we’re still figuring out. Like we are made of humans, and one of the shared truth is we all suffer. We all have jealousy, we have hatred, we have discrimination among each other. You know, imagine 50 monks brought up in different cultures, different educations, those who can read, those who can’t read, and we’re learning to be in harmony, and that’s a huge commitment. If we, most of us we live in a room of four monastics and we have a common space. If you leave your chocolate bar there and you come back and it’s gone, you can’t be angry. Because you’re in harmony. But there’s many people that are angry. Which one took my chocolate bar? Hunt down the monk’s residence, look through the trash can. These are all true stories, by the way. I only speak direct experience. And when I came to Plum Village, why I fell in love with it was because I did see suffering. And I got to listen to suffering. And I listened without judgment. They were teaching us to listen and not try to solve it. That was a miracle. Because most of the time when we we are asked to listen, I always have this feeling, okay, I have to try to fix you now. It’s almost like a give and a take. And most of our life, through capitalism, is a give and a take, right? So in Plum Village was the first… Through the practice, it’s not just the village, it’s the practice of every individual learning to be accountable to their truths too, which is suffering. In Buddhism, the first noble truth is suffering. That is something that we all will share. We speak about inclusiveness and equanimity in Buddhism, but we’re not equal. Some of us are born in places where we have more privileges in a particular race, in a particular situation, in a particular year. But what is equal is as a human being, we’re all gonna grow old, we’re all gonna get sick, we’re all gonna have to let go of what we think is permanent. And we’re gonna learn to live deeply in the present moment. So as a young child, the same, in my household, fruits, tea, and incense, right? Every morning, parents would tell us, light an incense before you leave your home. And I didn’t understand the essence, and I thought it was very superstitious. I’m lighting the incense so I get an A plus, and my mom is happy. And as I was getting Ds, it wasn’t working. So I gave up. What you mentioned about, you know, the understanding of suffering and the willingness to be there is interbeing, it’s this essence in Buddhism where we cannot be alone. We have this idea, as individuals, we are gonna be successful by ourselves. Nobody is successful by themselves. And if we’re unlucky, we will go through life, through pain, through suffering, just by ourselves. And that’s where a lot of the deep longing for love is. And in a way, my heart that was looking for love, there was a plug. And that was the monastic community. And I’ve tried to explain it in many ways, but I think the realest answer was I fell in love and I can’t explain it. It’s like when you meet that one person or many people, and you just like, I’m ready to suffer with them. I’m ready to experience life with them. I’m ready to go up and down with them. And I’m ready to be very selfless with them because becoming a monastic, you’re letting go of all the individualistic way of being. I had to unlearn a lot. I had to unlearn so much. And before becoming a monk, they give us a trial period. It’s like internship. Are you sure? And one of the monks, he pulled me aside and he’s like, all right, I think you have a summer fling in this moment with Plum Village, but, you know, you’re a guest right now, and you’re a child, you can wake up whenever you want. But if you want to be a monk, you’re gonna be waking up every morning at five o’clock. You’re gonna go through training, you’re gonna learn to unlearn many things. You know, you’re gonna be away from your family, you’re gonna, you’re gonna get ready to be of service for the world. And I felt that’s my life. And because the practice is to dwell in the present moment, I knew that that was so… it’s a source of energy that I couldn’t ignore. And my intuition was telling me to listen to my heart, and my heart was saying, let go of everything and be here. My mother was a big condition because I was so young, so our parents had to write a letter. My mother had a lot of fear because she knows in the culture the monastic life is not easy. I can smile like this because I’ve done a lot of work. I’ve endured a lot. Endured here as in not the struggle of the life as a monk, but endure here as in the wanting to leave also. There are so many crises that we had to meet as a monastic. We call it the maras, the inner demons that come and you can’t ignore it anymore. And the longing for love is a big one. Intimacy. And I’ve discovered that in the spiritual world, there’s a very deep intimacy that I have for the path, for the aspiration. We speak a lot about aspiration, and the aspiration gives a lot of joy, it bonds us as a togetherness, and we can renew our vows every day. And when I realized that this is what I wanted to do, I think my heart felt so light. My spirit was floating and I knew I’m in the right place. And my mother, after a long conversation, she said, if this makes you happy, mother will support you. And I think for our mothers who were refugees, who give up so much, I think their deepest wish is that we have a place where we can cultivate happiness. I think that is the deepest desire of many mothers. So I think when I was able to articulate that, my mother was ready to let go. And I was very lucky. My parents weren’t very hard because I have a lot of friends who have so much pressure from being second generation. All the sacrifices that our parents made, so they then imprint their wishes and demands on us. But I think my parents, I was more lucky. They’re like, okay, you got space. Do what makes you happy because we didn’t have that choice.

00:51:10

Thank you, Phap Huu. And Ocean, we had a chat brief chat last week. You said, and you mentioned earlier that you started listening to Thay’s talks because your mother was playing them on the cassette. And you said one of the things you recognized was that suffering was a curative rather than to avoid it. And that we know that the whole of modern society is based on distraction and avoidance of our suffering rather than going into it. And I just wonder if you can just talk a little bit about what was your experience then of listening to these tapes that were actually, as Phap Huu was saying, where Thay was saying actually, you know, our freedom is when we go in, the way out is in and through, rather than try and get work around it.

00:52:04

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s, you know, going through is very antithetical to Western ideals, right? I mean, you know, a pharmaceutically induced pleasure as a kind of curing pain is a kind of hallucinatory, right? It’s a hallucinogen. And it’s similar to fast food. In fast food is a kind of sinister beauty because it’s an industrialized promise of absolute replication of fulfillment, and yet it’s a kind of poison as well, right? It… For the first time, it’s kind of like the ultimate democratic ideal, sadly, that we can’t have equality, income equality, or health care, but we can all eat McDonald’s French fry, whether you’re a billionaire or a houseless person, and it will taste the same. Likewise with Coca-Cola, etc. And in a way it’s kind of like the sinister capaciousness of the American dream, which is that you can all feel the same thing while you’re all slowly dying. And I think, you know, what… I started when I was in 2012, my uncle took his own life. He was 28, I was 24. And he was my mother’s little brother. And they were very close, I was very close to him. We were all in the refugee camp together, and I started hearing Thay’s voice, Thich Nhat Hanh’s voice in the kitchen about two weeks after he died. And right away I knew she was looking for medicine, you know, and I stumbled upon a bit when he was talking. He says, Thich Nhat Hanh was saying, I speak to Vietnamese refugees differently than everybody else, because their suffering I know very intimately. And so suffering then becomes method. Sadness becomes not just a feeling, but knowledge. And so to think about sadness as knowledge, as potential, and that anger even has an aftermath, and you realize the aftermath of anger is care. I was so angry when my uncle died. You know, I I was so confused. Why? Why? Why would you do this? Why? And I wanted something… I want to do something. I had that very boyish desire. You know, the big trouble of masculinity is that we are not given the ability or the permission to feel and be vulnerable, but we are encouraged to have absolute agency. You know, it’s very, it’s incredible. It’s a perfect storm of violence. Don’t feel, don’t interrogate, and don’t be vulnerable. But meanwhile, go get them, buddy. Right? And I think, you know, it’s not too hyperbolic to see why so many men lead to domestic violence, deadly domestic violence, lead to shootings, both themselves and others, right? You’re given absolute agency. That’s part of the idea of male privilege you’re given absolute agency and yet denied a major part of your humanity, which is to feel, to be vulnerable, to be allowed to feel sad, to say, I need help, right? When you watch boys, they say incredible things to each other. I need him, I love him. And then somewhere around age nine and ten, it’s slowly or quickly beaten out of them. And so so much of my American youth is to watch and to see my uncle go through this and myself go through this. And in his letter, many of which I’ll keep privately, but there’s one moment I think it’s worth sharing in his note, which he said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve just had enough.’ And we often want big reasons, dramatic reasons to step out of life, or big reasons to redeem life. This is what the movies say, the big epics tell us. Give me a big, big message. But in fact, I think, and especially for so many people who are working poor, it’s really just fatigue. There’s an ambivalence to life. And he was really just saying, I’m tired, I can’t do it anymore. And I think my mother, rather than, you know, opting out of all this turn to the only thing she knew, which was the Sangha. Which was, and again, the Vietnamese language led her there. Cause where else she was so sad and lonely, she went to the temple and in there there’s a little box where they had bootleg Thich Nhat Hanh CDs.