The Way Out Is In / Guest Episode: Buddhist Practices for Busyness, Overwhelm & Burnout

00:00:00

Hello, friends. Thank you so much for tuning in to The Way Out Is In. I’m Clay, co-producer of this podcast. Today on the show, we have a special treat. But before I get to that, I wanted to mention that just a few weeks ago, Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino released a new book titled Calm in the Storm, Zen Ways to Cultivate Stability in an Anxious World. I have my copy right here. See if you can hear it. Just like this podcast, this book was made with you in mind. And if you love listening to this podcast you will love reading this book. You can find it wherever you get your books. Again, the title is Calm in the Storm, Zen Ways to Cultivate Stability in an Anxious World. Go check it out. Recently, Brother Phap Huu was a guest on the 10% Happier podcast with Dan Harris. It’s a podcast that has a trusted reputation for searching for practical pathways to peace through conversations that touch on where modern science and ancient wisdom meet. So today, we’re excited to be sharing this most recent conversation from 10% happier between Dan and Phap Huu. This is Phap Huu’s second time on the show and, in fact, several other Plum Village monastics have been invited on. Sister Dang Nghiem, Sister True Dedication, Brother Phap Dung and Brother Phap Luu. So if you’re looking for something more to listen to, there’s plenty waiting. Please check the show notes for links to those. We put them down there for you. From all of us here, at the podcast, we want to thank Dan and the team at 10% Happier for making this episode available for us to share with our community. And to our listeners, the guys will be back with another episode soon, so look forward to that. But in the meantime, thanks for joining us. Here’s Dan. Enjoy the show.

00:02:12

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I’m Dan Harris.

00:02:27

Hey gang, today I’m talking to a Zen monk who burned out. And this monk is gonna lift the curtain on some of the Buddhist remedies that he personally used to recover from his overwhelm and overwork and chronic busyness, strategies that you can use too. This is crucial stuff in a culture that pressures us to constantly do more, get more and be more. Let me address the elephant in the room first here. You might be wondering right from the jump, how the hell can a Zen monk burn out? Aren’t they just sitting around and meditating all day? As I’ve learned in my many years hosting the show, there are many flavors of Buddhist monks. Some of them do sit around and meditate all day, but many others actually do quite a bit of work, including the guy you’re gonna hear from today, who’s done, of course, a non-trivial amount of meditation, but also helps to run a bustling monastery. My guest is Brother Phap Huu, who’s really an incredible person. He began training at the age of 13 with the legendary Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was an author, activist and founder of the Plum Village tradition. Today, Brother Phap Huu is the abbot of Plum Village’s Upper Hamlet and the co-host of the Plum Village podcast, which is called The Way Out Is In. He also recently co-authored a book called Being with Busyness, Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout. This is Brother Phap Huu’s second appearance on the show. And in this conversation, we talk about why humans today are busier and more overwhelmed than ever, why monastics are not immune to burnout, how busyness is thrust upon us by the world, but it’s also the result of us running from the shit we don’t wanna face, practical tools for addressing busyness and burnout, why doing nothing is an art, the role of perspective and how contemplating your own death can be a huge source of perspective, the practice of total relaxation, that’s his phrase and he’ll describe it, how to have healthy boundaries without armoring up, how to say no without pissing people off or at least not pissing them off too much, how to protect yourself in toxic environments and much more. Just to say before we dive in, this episode comes with a custom guided meditation designed to help you find some rest in this chaotic world. Said meditation is available only to subscribers over on danharris.com. As you may know, we’ve got this new thing where every month we’re hiring a meditation teacher to design bespoke meditations to go with every episode and this month that teacher is Dawn Mauricio so head on over to danharris.com to claim your meditations. We’ll get started with Brother Phap Huu right after this.

00:05:06

Brother Phap Huu, welcome back to the show.

00:05:08

Thank you Dan, thank you for the invitation.

00:05:10

It’s a pleasure, congratulations on your new book. Picking up on the themes of that new book, let me just ask you this question, do you think we are busier and more burned out now than we’ve ever been?

00:05:23

Absolutely, I think our cultural change in society has shown that stress is much higher as well as our inability to relax as well as to be present. And when we can’t be present, it means that our mind and our attention is leaning mostly towards the future or towards the past. So we are definitely in a society of running right now. And with all the technologies increase it hasn’t shown us that we can connect deeper, it’s actually allowed us to do more. And the cultural tendency in our society has been to get more, to do more, to receive more. And last year, in our summer retreat, one of the most challenging moments was actually I had an audience of just teenagers, 60 teenagers in a room and I was asked to address them and talk to them. My first question to them is how many of you feel like you’re not enough? And everybody raised their hand. And then the second was like, how many of you feel like you are being pushed to do something that you’re not even sure about doing? And 80% of them raised their hands. And I said, how many of you would like to feel more at peace with just yourself in this very present moment? I would say 90% raised their their hands, and so just speaking to the young people, I feel that they are very honest and there’s no filter. So that was a good check in for me with their pulse. Like what is the present moment for them? So I do see this and I see it in myself also as a monk.

00:06:59

You see it in your… I thought being a monk was it to be immune from the pressures to be more, get more, do more, et cetera.

00:07:08

Yeah, that is definitely a view towards it, but everything that happens in the world seeps into the monastery also. We also have emails, even social media, and the technology of the times have also, it has a particular energy that draws us to be very productive. So even the concept of being successful as a meditator is also very present now. So people come on retreat for a week and sometimes I feel like they expect themselves to be enlightened, right? And I’m like, come on, like you are 50 years old and you have 50 years of habit. One week won’t be able to allow you to become a fully enlightened person. And it’s the same for myself, just recognizing these qualities of wanting to be perfect, wanting to successful that has also seeped in. So there is this tendency to achieve. And I have recognized that as a practitioner, in meditation, it’s not to run away from busyness, it’s not to cut off from the busyness, and it’s not even to be afraid of the burnout, but it’s how to be with the burnout, how to with the busyness. And that is very alive, very real for me. And if anything, the practice and the training that I have been able to cultivate has allowed me to transform it into a more nonviolent way and I kinder way to oneself.

00:08:40

We’re gonna go deeply into what you just discussed, how to handle busyness in a meditative way, to transform it, but before we get to the medicine, let’s just stay with the illness for a second. Your teacher, the late Thich Nhat Hanh, great Zen master, author, founder of the Plum Village tradition in which you are a monk, has a great quote that you include in your new book. And I’m gonna read it to you. It uses a term that I’ll need you to explain, the premature hero or the false hero. So I’ll let you explain that in the back end, but just to give people a heads up that there’s a term they may not be familiar with. Here’s the quote. To cope with fears and insecurities, the premature hero has to stay busy all the time. The destructive capacity of nonstop busyness rivals nuclear weapons and is as addictive as opium. It empties the life of the spirit. False heroes find it easier to make war than deal with the emptiness in their souls. Please unpack that for us.

00:09:41

The metaphor and the image that our teacher give is of a hero. And I think in all of us, there are moments that we probably have the aspiration to become someone that people can rely on, like a hero to offer service, offer a presence. When we’re still young and naive, our tendency is to just go outwards and not having the ability to really develop the inner hero, the inner warrior. So in our tradition, our teacher speaks of three qualities that we can recognize in us. One is a meditator. A meditator is not something or someone who has to fully invest himself in spirituality or even believe or belong to a religion, but the meditator is someone who has the ability to recognize that they have suffering and they wanna take care of it and they want to cultivate inner peace in order to offer peace. And then the second characteristic is the artist. We all have an artist inside of us that wants to share life in a miraculous way, to see the wonders of life, to transform our suffering, our grief into music, poetry. Even breathing is an art, right? Everything is an art. And then there is the warrior side in us when we see injustice, we see something that is wrong, there is a side in us that we want to care and tend to, and we want be able to help. That is the quality of love that is deep in each and every one of us. So the hero has to have the ability to not only cultivate the strength and the action, but has to cultivate a deeper inner mind of love and sacredness. When we see that our presence itself is sacred and we can offer that sacredness just in presence, that is how we can show up for all of our action. And our teacher also always says that we are sources of energy and our action depends on our energy. And if our foundation is the energy of love and understanding, then that becomes a source of fuel for the actions that we can offer to the world, offer to our loved ones, offer to ourselves.

00:12:08

So I think what Thich Nhat Hanh, your teacher, was saying is that if we want to be actual heroes and we want cultivate these three qualities of mind, a pitfall would be to get addicted to and obsessed with and consumed by busyness.

00:12:28

Yes. And I think it’s also the hero, when the hero is not mindful, it will be pulled away by the powers of fame, of recognition, the pleasures of the world. To be seen, it’s like opium, is addicting, is to be embraced in this quality that I am worthy. And the truest hero doesn’t need others to see that they are worthy, but they have the insight that I am enough in this moment, that everything that I can offer to the world is in my capacity, in the very here and now. And we don’t become trapped in this idea of professionalism, right? And the present moment is enough because the present moments creates the future. And if we are always chasing for a future, which I have had this very naive idea, it’s like I can only be happy when I’ve transformed all of my suffering. There’s this line that the Buddha always teaches us and we recite it and the Buddha will say, one of the art of the way of Buddhism is to learn to dwell happily in the present moment. And I was caught in the word happiness because I felt that, oh, if I can be happy and enjoy the present movement, that means I can’t suffer. And I was, yeah, a victim to that view. And then later as I continue to practice and see myself more clearly and understand that phrase is actually it’s in the present moment, even with suffering, even with the destruction, even with chaos of the world and present moment. There is a lot of suffering right here, right now, but it is still our responsibility to be able to see the beauty in life, to see the joy and to cultivate happiness, the little things that can spark our creativity, our foundation of love, and we are not limited by suffering. We are potentials of so many offerings that we can give to ourself and give to the world. So the present moment is so important to always come back to for us to reflect. It’s like, am I being a victim even to the action of being a hero? Like being seen, being loved. I’ve touched that even in my community, even in Plum Village. Sometimes I have this idea, it’s like, oh man, like the community needs me. If I can’t be like this, if I can be strong, then who will be strong for the community? And I become more and more fake in a way. So I’ve learned to become more vulnerable. So the hero has to learn to be vulnerable also and ask for help.

00:15:15

One of the most provocative aspects of that quote that I read is that our busyness, which we may feel is thrust upon us by the world, and to a certain extent it is, but our busyness may also be the result of us running from the shit we don’t wanna face.

00:15:34

100%. When shit hits the fan, nobody wants to accept it. Like what I said at the beginning, I feel like there’s a tendency to run away, to go towards an idea, an ideal of even peace. But when we see that the busyness itself is a way to escape, it’s a way to runaway from, then we’re going to burn out, we’re going lose our joy of service. And about two years ago, I did meet burnout and I was actually gonna ask for a sabbatical in 2025. And the community actually gave me a sabbatical. But through 2024, as I was preparing to leave for a year sabbatical by asking for help and by recognizing that I have allowed myself to be so busy because it was a way to escape the present moment and to feel enough I was losing the joy of service. I was losing the joy of even offering the podcast that I was a part of, the Way Out Is In. I was losing the joy of showing up for my loved ones, offering a retreat for the hundreds and thousands of people that come with the greatest intention. And I recognized that, oh my goodness, I am pushing myself away from the joy of service because I can’t embrace myself in this moment.

00:17:01

I’ve talked about this on the show before, so I apologize to anybody who finds this repetitive, but it may be new to many of the listeners and also even if you’ve heard it before, it’s actually the type of thing that bears repeating. There was a study, a great research project done, I can’t remember when or by who, but it was at a seminary. So future ministers, a Christian seminary, and they gather a group of these seminarians in a room and they give them a lecture on the Good Samaritan, the dude in the Bible who stops and helps somebody by the side of the road. And then as the seminarians leave one by one, the researchers have a confederate, somebody who’s part of the research team, in the hallway, having fallen and hurt themselves. And the seminarians, who were told they had an appointment on the other side of campus, almost entirely avoided helping the hurt person. Even though they’d just been given a lecture on the Good Samaritan. And so when you are busy, when you’re rushing, a state in which I find myself all too frequently, your capacity to help out, to be empathetic, to be compassionate, it doesn’t have to be somebody who’s hurt, it can be just a colleague who maybe needs 15 seconds of more attention or a project you’re working on that could benefit from a second revision or whatever it is. You lose something really important in the busyness.

00:18:33

Yeah, absolutely. You can’t recognize what is in front of you. You can’t recognize the wonders that are there. And it’s an art, like the practice of coming back to the present moment and just to see the little acts of kindness that we can do is such a gift. And when we’re too busy, we let go of this moment, or this moment passed by with us even acknowledging it. Even if our truest aspiration is to be of service too. Just think about your loved ones, your family. Like how many times do we take it for granted to say hello and ask, how are you? How’s your heart? Can you tell me today something that you’re holding in your heart so that I can just know and be a support? And sometimes I think we always have this feeling, I do, I have this feeling, especially as a monk, it’s like I should have answers for people. So if I ask people and they want answers, I don’t have them. And then I feel inferior. So I’ve learned that actually showing up in today’s time is more the capacity to just be there and to listen without judgment. I wanna hear you. I don’t want to hear my mind finding a solution for you. And most of us, we do that. The moment we are in conversation, we hear somebody’s suffering or we hear somebody’s even joy and happiness, and then your mind is, okay, I have to also show up and say, I’ve done something well today. Or if you suffer, I also have to show off my suffering so that we can connect, right? So it’s a very interesting way that our culture has shifted us in relationship and connection.

00:20:10

That’s been a real late life learning for me of when somebody in particular, like my wife or my child is, I’m gonna use the word complaining, but I don’t mean that in the pejorative, like describing an issue in their lives to me. Historically, I would go into, let me solve it. But actually that’s not really what people want, at least not at first. They wanna be told, oh, that sucks. Like your stress is, I can validate it for you. I see it. I mean, what’s the terminology that some people use? An empathetic witness. I think a lot about something that Brené Brown, the great writer and researcher once said right here on the show that when her kids come to her with a problem, she’ll often say, I can’t solve it, but I can sit in the dark with you. And I think that’s a really wise rendering of the right posture.

00:21:00

Coming up, Brother Phap Huu talks about some practical tools for addressing busyness and burnout. We’ll talk about why doing nothing is in his view an art. And we’ll talk about the value of remembering your own mortality as a way to get some perspective.

00:21:20

Okay, so we’re talking about busyness and burnout. You tried to bring us in a constructive direction earlier in terms of like, what do we do about it? And I stopped you and made you marinate in the problem with me for a little bit, but let’s go in a more constructive direction now. What do you recommend on a very practical level we can do with busyness in burnout?

00:21:43

On a very practical level, I would say we have to have the ability to cultivate ourselves to even recognize and acknowledge and accept that we are a very busy person and we are stressed. Like is there tension in our body? Is our tiredness like really, really not allowing us to be present, right? So acceptance of busyness is first of all, an act of kindness to oneself. We’re like acknowledging that. And then the other aspect is to see from everything that we’re doing, like what are the things that is bringing us joy and not bringing us join, so like to identify it. That’s the second noble truth that we speak about in Buddhism, it’s like, what is the source of our busyness? The source of stress, our burnout? And to see and go, a-ha, that is where it’s coming from. This is the root of it. And that already is action. That is already very healing in itself, just recognizing and embracing it. And then on a very practical level, especially if we’re living in busy cities and we’re all around concrete or walls and windows, it’s very fundamental, but if you can allow yourself to just go for a walk in nature, like just to allow the trees, allow the sounds of the birds, allow the whole cosmos to just hold you, just embrace you, we would speak in this kind of language. It’s like learn to take refuge in nature in this moment, not taking refuge in more of our stress, our over worrying, our own judgment to oneself. So that’s something very practical that I still do today. Like just yesterday, very busy meeting day and after feeling quite overwhelmed, acknowledging it, embracing it. And, of course, we have different options, right? We can go on Netflix. We can even put on a good podcast, even maybe the 10% Happier podcast. But is it a way to run away and to consume rather than acknowledge and accept? And then practically, we have to be more alive in this moment. And what I mean by that is to surrender to the healing energies that are present there. And sometimes it’s also just hitting up a good friend, a good companion, to share a moment of drinking tea or drinking coffee, to be in touch with the qualities of life that is there, right? Because our mind, we’re so good of doing, doing, doing because the doing, we think we’re pushing ourselves away from the stress, but it is just accumulation of more and more tension in us. So that is very practical and that is something that we train in. And there’s another art, and this is gonna be maybe even more challenging. If you give it a chance, if you allow yourself to rest, we do total relaxation, right? We can listen to an audio to allow us to really surrender to the ground, like just to lay down and to connect to our breathing, allowing our whole body to just be present, not tensing up our fist, our hands, our shoulders. It’s like instead of an X-ray, but it’s a mindful-ray that we’re being aware of where the tensions are in our body. And if we look at our ancestors, right? Our animal ancestors, when the animals are wounded, they know how to stop and rest. They’re not going to hunt more, they’re not gonna look for a mate. They have the art of accepting the present moment, and they have the art of resting. And we are too good at bypassing that, we have built a quality in our society to keep doing, and we have lost the art of resting, because our mind is like, if I’m laying there and resting, I am wasting time, right? This concept of time is money, time is to do. And that’s why in Zen, Zen masters have said, don’t just do something, sit there, right? It’s the opposite of what we hear in the world. Don’t just sit there, do something. And here, the Zen master is teaching us, don’t just do something, learn to sit there, because it’s an art to sit still, it’s in art to do nothing, it’s an art to rest. So very concretely developing that quality of rest. And try to bring it into your daily life, like little moments of resting. And there was this friend who is a producer, he’s actually staying in the monastery for six months, because he’s burned out from producing, and when he was in touch with our practice he would listen to the audio of total relaxation, or even guided meditation. And the only time that he can really practice it, was when he would sit in a toilet, when nobody would interfere, nobody would intercept him and ask him questions. And he said, I know it sounds funny, it sounds crazy, but that was my moment of resting, and of my own spiritual practice. So even a toilet booth can be very holy.

00:26:59

I want to see if I can restate that to you very, very simply, and then also drill down even further on some of it. So I’m hearing three steps there. The first step is pretty clear, although I’ll restate it. The second two steps I think could use a little bit more unpacking. Again, the question was, what do you do about this busyness and burnout? And at least if I understood you correctly, I heard a kind of three step recipe. First, accept it, like acknowledge this is the deal. In AA, they say the first step is admitting it. And I think that’s true in many aspects of life. Second step, which I think we should spend a lot more time on is you made a passing reference now several times to embracing it and transforming it. So I want to hear much more about that. And then the third step is like, give yourself permission to rest. So that could include a walk in nature. It could include sitting with a friend. It could conclude a type of meditation that you’re referring to as total relaxation, which I also want to hear more about. So am I restating your recipe correctly?

00:28:00

Yes, you are.

00:28:03

All right, so let’s start on step number two. When you say embracing burnout, I think that’s deeply counterintuitive to most of us who don’t want to embrace anything unpleasant.

00:28:15

Absolutely. So you have an option. It’s either to not accept it, and that means to not except yourself, not accepting your state of being in this very moment. And I’ve learned as an art of love, I think in our society, we think of love is to buy something, to give something very generous. But if we turn inwards, like, can we be generous to ourselves? And being generous to ourselves for me has been learning to accept myself in every state, in every moment. And I think very concretely, I can speak about myself, like when I touched burnout, I couldn’t accept it because I thought I was failing as a meditator, as a leader, as an elder brother. I’ve been practicing for 16 years, and why am I in a burnout situation now? For sure, for the first year and a half of that burnout, I was just not accepting it. I kept pushing myself. I kept doing, doing, and doing. And then I started to hate everything. I was so toxic. My relationship became so toxic, not the outer relationship, but my relationship to eating breakfast, to seeing my friends, to offering a retreat, to being a teacher, to even being a monk. I didn’t want people to see me as who I am because I wasn’t accepting myself. There was this moment when we were having a celebration. It’s called the […]. It’s the Lunar New Year in Asia. And in our tradition, it’s the only time the monks, we would open our residence and we will allow everyone to come in, to share tea in our private space. So it’s very cozy, it’s very intimate in this way. And it’s the only we open our monastic quarter to the nuns’ community, and they are our spiritual sisters, so we get to be hosts. I just had this moment where I was feeling like I don’t belong here. I don’t belong here because everyone is so happy, but I’m feeling so miserable. And that was a moment when I was like, okay, we all are sharing the same present moment, but it’s very clear that I am miserable right now. And I can’t fake it anymore. I can’t just keep putting up a smile. I can’t just telling people I’m fine. And it was that moment when I just saw myself so broken spiritually, as well as like in this community, that the power was being vulnerable into saying, I need help. I reached out to some of my siblings. I was like, can you share a cup of tea with me? And they’re like, we’ve been waiting for this invitation because we see you’re miserable, but we didn’t want to also push your boundaries. That practice of acceptance was very powerful for me because it allowed myself to have a pathway to healing because I wasn’t ignoring it anymore. I wasn’t bypassing it anymore, and I wasn’t faking it till I make it anymore. And I think all of us, we were very trained to not accept our weaknesses, to not see our tiredness or even our grief or our sadness or even our despair. Sometimes we don’t allow that to be even present, but as a human being, we know that that’s all part of being a human. That’s the whole package when we’re a human, we have to suffer, we have to experience loss. We have experience failure. We have the experience impermanence. We have experienced getting tired, but at the same time, we also have the potential to also learn to adapt, to be flexible, to love, to be stronger in these moments. Stronger here is first of all, just accepting it. And that tenderness is a strength in its own way. So for me, when I say learning to embrace our burnout, it’s starting to have the lens of a meditator, which is simply to stop running, to embrace it and to look deeply at it. Sometimes I see myself as like when I am in busyness and even burnout, it’s like I’m in a fog, a deep fog, and I’m trying to look for the light. But if I just allow myself to be still and to let the fog just settle and the light will slowly come through instead of me just keep even creating more fog as I’m moving to look for a solution. So it’s the second noble truth that we’re talking about, the second step is like to embrace it in order to see it clearly. And that for me is when we’re able to do that, that’s also a transmission we give to our children, our companions, because if I can accept my sadness, my burnout, and when I see somebody else burnout, I can see that they are not perfect because I’m not perfect. And there’s an acceptance that is present there too. The more we’re to accept ourself, it gives us the art to accept others also. That’s what I’ve learned and that’s what have discovered.

00:33:40

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. In my own experience, the cooler you are with yourself or actually maybe even the warmer you are with yourself, it inexorably transfers to how you treat other people. And conversely, if you’re kicking your own ass all the time, you tend to be quite unpleasant externally. Not all of us, but for me, for sure. But let me just get really technical with you. When you say embracing burnout, from a meditation mindfulness, very practical standpoint, like how do we do this?

00:34:14

I would have to say we do have to start from the fundamentals, meaning we have to be able to establish the first wing of meditation. So when we speak of meditation, there’s two wings, like wing of a bird to meditation. And the first wing is learning to stop. And stopping here is not just physically, but it is to come back to the present moment. And in our tradition, we train in the art of mindful breathing. The breathing becomes an anchor for our mind to have a place for refuge. It’s not to empty the mind, but it is to invite the mind to focus on, not on the thinking, the stress, but to be concentrated on the breathing. And so this art of stopping is establishing what we call the power of presence, meaning we know how to show up. We know that I have a body, I have feelings, I have emotions. So the first practices that we train in meditation is acknowledging the body that we have, learning to relax the body. So in meetings, right, like if we don’t have this skillset, when there are things we listen to, we hear, we don’t accept, our whole body tenses up. And to apply this into daily life, I do this all the time. Even in meetings, I can practice stopping my reactions, acknowledging, oh, I’m having a lot of tension, I’m having a particular reaction come up, it’s in my body, so can I be present for that body? And to just come back to my breathing, listen to what is being shared. So we have to learn to have this power of presence. So really, burnout may allow us to have a reckoning, it’s like, oh, there is a training that I can develop to care for my burnout, embracing. So we have to establish first the art of acknowledging, the art of being aware that we have a body, we have tension, we have feelings. So that is the first wing. And then the second wing of meditation is when there is calmness, there is stillness, we have the capacity to look deeper at a subject, such as my thoughts, why am I having all of these negative thoughts? Ah, it’s because of these particular conversations that I had. And then seeing clearly, it gives you some insight. Okay, that is of the past, in this present moment, do I have new views? Are there things that I can learn from that conversation? Or do I keep dwelling on that bitterness that I’m holding? So these are things that we have to develop in our practice of a meditator. And when we have this presence, this ability to be aware, then when burnout shows up for itself, instead of pushing it away, you can say, aha, I know you, you are burnout. You can call it by its name, right? Our teacher has this poem called, Please Call Me By My True Name. And I still think that it is such a beautiful poem that is almost like a sutra that I wanna recite every day because there are so many things that show up in our present moment, but are we acknowledging it? Are we calling it by it’s name? And calling it by its name is, in a way, accepting it, acknowledging it, embracing it. So burnout, when it shows up, instead of being afraid of it, we can learn from it, right? When I was embracing my burnout, I had a deep discovery. I was doing research on my own patterns, my own habits, my own views that I was building up, cultivating, my own tendency to be toxic in these areas. And then the tendency to be over-idealistic in these areas. And so like it just allows you to see yourself more clearly. And then I think for myself, what was clear when I recognized all this, I became more free. And one of my wonderful colleagues, last year, in the spring, he looked at me and we were having a conversation. He said, Phap Huu, you look so much more free, and I said, ah, thank you for acknowledging that. And he said, what did you do? And I literally said, I have accepted that I was in a state of burnout. And he’s like, huh, maybe that is why you have been feeling so stuck because you were neglecting it. You were pushing it away, but the moment you were able to see it, and even to be with it, to be with burnout, feeling that exhaustion. And that exhaustion is, in our language, it’s like a bell of mindfulness. It’s a moment to wake up. It’s the moment to take care of yourself. How are you sleeping? Are you drinking enough water? Very fundamental things, right? Are you eating fruit? Are you walking in nature? You love exercising, Phap Huu, go back to that. Sweat once a day. You love writing sweet messages to your loved ones, right? I became a monk since I’m 13, Dan, so my time with my family is very distant. And in the early days, like I remember, once a week I would call my mother. And the more you grow up, the more responsibilities we all have. We forget of these very practical relationships to tend to, to cultivate to. So I started to just sending my mom a text or a photo, calling my sister, calling my father, just the very fundamental things. And it sounds funny as I’m speaking, and I’m acknowledging this, it’s like, when in chaos, come back to the fundamentals of the things that gave you so much joy and that gave your life.

00:40:07

Yeah, I appreciate you talking about this. I think a lot of people will be, find it remarkable that a monk, a Buddhist monk no less can get burned out. And it’s so useful that you’re talking about it and also talking about ways that you fixed it in ways that we all can. Very practically, when I hear you talk about recognizing and then embracing the burnout, just from a, you know, if you’re sitting in meditation, for me, it’s like interest, interest in how is this showing up in my body? You know, what kind of thoughts am I having? You can make the burnout, the object of your meditation. And in that way, you’re transforming it from a vexation to like a vehicle for learning.

00:40:48

Absolutely. And by transforming my burnout, our burnout, we don’t transmit these tendencies, these habits to our loved ones. Because I know that if I don’t take care of this, somebody will have to take care of it for me.

00:41:02

So in the book, you’ve got these little chapters where you talk about something very practical we can do vis-a-vis burnout and busyness. One of the chapters is on the Five Remembrances, which I’ll have you remind us of what they are. It has to do with death, which, you know, again, I’m gonna use this word counterintuitive, contemplating death doesn’t seem like the move that most of us would make in the face of busyness and burnout. And yet, and yet. So please say more.

00:41:33

You are so right. Death is not something that we even want to contemplate. And we get scared of it. And when we talk about the Five Remembrances, which I will share with all of us now. The first remembrance is that we are all of the nature to grow old. None of us can escape growing old. The second remembrance is we are all of nature to get ill. None of can escape that. And the third remembrance is all of us have to die. None of us can escape death. The fourth remembrance is everything that we cherish today, they’re of the nature of impermanence. We will have to learn to let go. And the fifth remembrance is the way forward, it gives us an insight of continuation. And that is our truest belonging, our legacies, our three karmas, which are action. Karma means action. And that is the thoughts that we produce every day. It is the words that we speak every day, and it is the action that we enact in our way of being. The way we show up, the way we open a door, the way tend to someone, the we care for our loved ones, the environment. They are all our truest belongings that will be transmitted and will, in a way, be passed down from generation to generation. So these are the Five Remembrances. When you reflect on them, it’s teaching you about the art of impermanence. And that is a fact. We are all, everything that exists in this moment are of the nature of impermenence. Nothing can stay the same. And yes, that sounds very scary. It can even be crippling, especially if you have a loved one. Right? You don’t want that person to be gone. You don’t want to have to say goodbye. But this remembrance can also give you the wisdom and give you to power to not take for granted of the present moment. It is not to see that we are limited also from just this body. Our loved ones are not limited from just them, who they are, but even if they are not here anymore, their kindness we have received from them and we are their continuation. So the fifth remembrance, it has this thread of what we, in our language, we call interbeing, meaning we inter-are with everything that we exist and we respond to. We cannot be by just ourselves. We have to inter-be with everything. We have our parents deep inside of us. We have the education, the teachers before us that have taught us how to love and understand, how to speak, how to write. The wisdoms are not even ours, right? Like what I share, I really feel sometimes I’m just passing it on. And because the wisdom have been passed down from generation to generation, all of this awareness can see that how life is so wonderful for us to even be here. There’s so many layers of conditions have to come together for us to even to be alive, to be present, to be breathing. And then, the knowledge that our action is our deepest continuation it gives us responsibility and agency. Like if I want to be remembered for who I am in a way that can be a support for someone, there are actions that I can produce that they can learn from. Like in the Dharma, Dharma means, in our spiritual world, we have a tendency to speak about the teaching Dharma or the written Dharma, but our teacher also shares that our way of being is a Dharma in itself. Our nonverbal Dharma, the way we show up, the way we are kind to each other, that is our belonging that we are giving. When we meditate on death, and I have, it’s very humbling because we are so little in this whole universe and we can feel how precious this life is. And that will almost like a software update from time to time, like I would do this death meditation for like a soft update to not take for granted of the present moment of the community that I’m a part of, as well as the loved ones that I have in front of me, beside me, or even far away from me. And in the monastery, every Sunday after lunch, we would read requests where people would write down by hand or type it out, and they would ask us to send our energy of compassion and love to their loved ones who are going through difficulties. And so many of the requests that we always read is somebody going through treatment of cancer, or somebody who has just received a diagnosis that they are on stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four cancer. I remember in the early days, it was very shocking to me because I was so young and alive, and so to know that there are people getting sick every day can be actually very enlightening, right? And it can allow us to touch life deeper, to have the agency to live deeply this moment and not to be afraid of impermanence, but knowing that we are of the nature of imperminence actually can give us so much power.