The Way Out Is In / Mindful Economics: In Conversation with Kate Raworth (Episode #74)

Br Pháp Hữu, Jo Confino, Kate Raworth


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Welcome to episode 74 of The Way Out Is In: The Zen Art of Living, a podcast series mirroring Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s deep teachings of Buddhist philosophy: a simple yet profound methodology for dealing with our suffering, and for creating more happiness and joy in our lives.

In this installment, Zen Buddhist monk Brother Phap Huu and leadership coach/journalist Jo Confino are joined by special guest Kate Raworth, the creator of Doughnut Economics, to discuss from spirituality to new economic thinking; individual, community, and planetary boundaries; putting ideas into practice; practicing true love and no self; avoiding the trap of fame; and much more.

Kate shares her journey into reimagining economics; the encounters that shaped her vision; regenerative enterprises and the inspiring communities making new economics a reality; and the discoveries made after attending a Plum Village retreat with her family. 

Kate Raworth is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and author of the internationally bestselling Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist. She is a Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

Over the past 25 years, Kate’s career has taken her from working with micro-entrepreneurs in the villages of Zanzibar to co-authoring the Human Development Report for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New York, followed by a decade as Senior Researcher at Oxfam. Read more about her work on her website.



Co-produced by the Plum Village App:
https://plumvillage.app/  

And Global Optimism:
https://globaloptimism.com/

With support from the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation:
https://thichnhathanhfoundation.org/


List of resources 

Online course: Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
https://plumvillage.org/courses/zen-and-the-art-of-saving-the-planet

Interbeing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing  

Doughnut Economics Action Lab 
https://doughnuteconomics.org

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_Economics:_Seven_Ways_to_Think_Like_a_21st-Century_Economist 

‘Five Contemplations before Eating’
https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/five-contemplations-before-eating/

Biocentrism
https://www.britannica.com/topic/biocentrism

Lily Cole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Cole

The Raft Is Not the Shore
https://www.parallax.org/product/the-raft-is-not-the-shore/

‘Begin Anew’
https://plumvillage.org/articles/begin-anew

Club of Rome
https://www.clubofrome.org/

The Art of Power
https://www.parallax.org/product/art-of-power/ 

Herman Daly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Daly

Chants: ‘The Three Refuges’ 
https://plumvillage.org/library/chants/the-three-refuges

Wellbeing Alliance
https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/ 

Economy for the Common Good 
https://www.econgood.org

Elinor Ostrom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

International Monetary Fund (IMF)
https://www.imf.org/en/Home

TED Talk: A Healthy Economy Should Be Designed to Thrive, Not Grow
https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow?subtitle=en

Barbara Ward
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ward,_Baroness_Jackson_of_Lodsworth 

Marilyn Waring
https://marilynwaring.com/ 

Donella Meadows
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows 

Janine Benyus
https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus


Quotes

“Doughnut economics is one way of trying to create an economics that actually is based on this planet, and lives on Earth. Economics, when you go back to ancient Greek, literally means the art of household management.”

“We need to create economies that are distributive by design, that share resources with all, that are regenerative by design, that regenerate the living systems, and that go beyond growth. That’s the essence of doughnut economics.”

“A volition and aspiration is a nutriment. It’s an energy to help us keep going. And the Buddha also gives us another antidote: aimlessness, which is to help us have an aspiration, but not think that, once we’ve arrived and completed that aspiration, that’s when we finally touch happiness.” 

“Man is not our enemy. It is ignorance, it is discrimination, it is ideology.” 

“I have arrived, I am home.”

“In the light of Plum Village teaching, that joy and happiness is not money, it is not success in wealth and in fame, but it is in the mindfulness that in this moment I have eyes to see, I have a family to love, I have a community to be with. I can forgive my parents, my ancestors, because I am their continuation. I am renewing them in this moment.” 

“I wrote a book, but actually it’s the practitioner, the people who want to try it and do it, that turn ideas on a page into a reality.” 

“The Buddha did not say that on the shore there’s no suffering. It’s how to be free, even in our suffering, how to still touch happiness while there are storms and misunderstandings.” 

“Don’t try to be the movement, join the movement.” 

“One of the chapters I wrote in Doughnut Economics is called ‘Nurture Human Nature’, and it starts with looking at ‘rational economic man’, a character that is taught in mainstream economics; it’s the individual, the autonomous, atomized individual, self-interested. He’s got money in his hand, ego in his heart, calculating in his head, nature at his feet. He hates work. He loves luxury. And he knows the price of everything, and he can never get enough.”

“The definition of economics is the management of scarce resources for unlimited wants, the self-interest. So the models we make of ourselves remake us. An economist called Robert Frank and his colleagues did research finding that students who go to university from year one to year two to year three of studying economics, the more they learn about rational economic man, the more they admire him, the more they value self-interest and competition over collaboration and altruism.” 

“Who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become. And this is a critical insight, not just for economics, but for any discipline, indeed any art, any belief system that tells us who we are. It remakes us.” 

“If you were holding a tiny baby and their temperature hit 40 degrees, would you say, ‘You go, girl, you burst through that boundary.’ No. You would do everything you can because when something is a living being, we know that life thrives within boundaries. Our bodies give us signals about boundaries all day.” 

“We’re all probably lightly sweating now because today’s going to become 40 degrees and our bodies will sweat trying to calm themselves down. Or we shiver when we try to warm up. Or our stomachs will rumble if we’re really hungry or we’re thirsty. So we thrive within boundaries and rules give us a freedom. And when those rules are shared and we know others are following those rules, it allows all of us to be free and to enjoy something, and to come out and be truly ourselves and vulnerable and open, because there’s a deep trust.” 

“I am a drop in a river and we’re going together and there’s no hurry and nowhere to get to.” 

 “Practice first, theorize later.”

“People in a place utterly know their context and know what would be useful and know what would be possible and what they have energy and excitement to try.” 

00:00:00

Dear friends, do you have a deep love for the Earth and want to learn how to bring the energy of mindfulness to your climate response? Well, we’ve put together an online course called Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. It is a seven week online learning journey where we will learn how to nurture insight, compassion, community and mindful action in service of the Earth. The course harnesses the wisdom of our teacher Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and includes new Dharma talks and practices, community sharing groups and live interactive events with monastic teachers. I’m looking forward to teaching at these live events together with Sister True Dedication, as well as many other monastic Dharma teachers and lay teachers. We begin on the 20th of October 2024 and learn together for seven weeks until our closing event on the 8th of December. And following the course, you’ll still be able to access all the talks and practices for one whole year. Join us by heading to the website today: plumvillage.org/zasp. That’s that’s Z A S P. Hope to see you there.

00:01:15

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

00:01:36

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

00:01:42

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

00:01:49

And today, dear listeners, we have a special guest, we have Kate Raworth, who is the creator of something called doughnut economics, which is a way of helping us to reimagine economics for the 21st century, where we respect planetary boundaries and also learn how to create a fair and equal world within that. And very similar to, in a sense, this podcast, which is about taking the teachings and applying them into the real world. Kate also helped found the Action Lab, which is a way of taking the theories of economics and showing how they can work in practice.

00:02:31

The way out is in.

00:02:45

Hello, everyone. I am Jo Confino.

00:02:47

And I am Brother Phap Huu.

00:02:48

And as I mentioned, we are sitting in Thich Nhat Hanh’s hut, the Sitting Still hut in Upper Hamlet, in the southwest of France, in Plum Village, with Kate Raworth, the creator of doughnut economics. Kate, welcome.

00:03:02

Thank you very much. It’s really, really wonderful to be in here with you.

00:03:07

Great. And so Kate came to Plum Village last year as part of climate leaders retreat and has now returned with her husband and her two kids for the family retreat. So obviously, something must have attracted you. But Kate, before we get into things, not everyone in the world has heard of doughnut economics. I mean, they should have done, but maybe they haven’t. So, do you want to just give for people, just to give a context to our conversation so they understand what actually is it and what are you seeking to do by creating it?

00:03:45

Okay. So doughnut economics is one way of trying to create an economics that actually is based on this planet, lives on Earth. Economics when you go back to the ancient Greek, literally means the art of household management. So how are we going to manage our planetary shared household in the interest of her inhabitants? What an amazing, noble quest to be part of. But the economics I was taught at university did not take me or I believe my entire generation, all of us, towards that path. So doughnut economics is an offering of a transformative way of thinking about it. And the doughnut, you’ve got… Is like, why is it called doughnut economics? Think of a doughnut, like the American kind, with a hole in the middle. If we think of humanity’s use and engagement with Earth’s resources radiating out from the center of that circle, then the hole in the middle is a place where people are falling short on the essentials of life. It’s where people do not have the resources each one needs for food and water, health, shelter, housing, education, communication, community. So we want to leave nobody in the hole in the middle of the donut, but, as we collectively, as humanity use and drawn out resources, there’s a real danger that we not only get people out of the hole and into the doughnut itself, but we start to push the outer limits of the outer circle. And that’s where we risk, indeed, we are pushing well over planetary boundaries, the life supporting systems that make life work on this planet, that give us a stable climate and fertile soils and healthy oceans and abundant biodiversity and a protective ozone layer overhead. So in the simplest of language, we want to leave no one in the hole, but don’t overshoot Earth’s limits. We want to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. And that’s the goal of getting into the doughnut. Can we live in the doughnut? And then the economics says, Well, if that was your goal, what kind of economic mindset would you bring to this? What would you be teaching students in their first lecture of economics? How would you begin? So for me, that’s the question of how should we think like 21st century economists. So I wrote a book whose subtitle is Doughnut Economics Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. And it’s very much ways of thinking, it’s not what to do. Right? Is not packed with policies, it’s how to think things like, well, the goal is to thrive in the doughnut, not to grow endlessly. Let’s reunderstand who we are as people. Let’s nurture human nature, not assume we are selfish, rational, independent individuals. Let’s recognize that the economy is made of complex systems. It can’t be reduced to mechanical interventions. We need to create economies that are distributive by design, that share resources with all. That are regenerative by design, that regenerate the living systems. And that go beyond growth. So that’s the essence of doughnut economics.

00:07:08

Beautiful. And Phap Huu, this sounds very much like Buddhism to me and the Plum Village teachings, which is something that’s relevant to Earth right now. Something that understands interbeing in terms of actually, we can’t look at ourselves alone, we have to see ourselves in the context of all of life. And it talks also about consumption, about how we consume differently. And it talks about fairness and about generosity. So does that sound very much like this is what we’re doing here as well?

00:07:44

Definitely. It’s something that as a practitioner of all ages, when I was listening to Kate, the word moderation became very alive in my consciousness. And we recite the five contemplations at least once a day in our eating meditation. And the third one is our practice to transform negative habit energy, especially the greed that is alive in all of us and learn to consume with moderation. And this wisdom comes from generations ago. And in this present moment where I feel like not only economics, but also the way of… why we go in that direction of deep consumerism is because of not feeling enough in oneself and having also… About the doughnut, we also have a hole. We have a void inside of us and the void is suffering and the void is pain. And when we are avoiding pain and when we are avoiding suffering, we seek material resources to make us feel better for ourselves and to feel also superior. And I think this is also at one of the core of transformation in the path of Buddhism, which is to come back to oneself and to understand that we are enough and to rebuild our understanding and our connection to Mother Earth and to ourself. And this collective consciousness that we have, we make this collective consciousness of consuming. Also, if we look at it, we can also, gives us the insight that as a collective, we can also transform, transform this understanding and this habit energy. So what Kate was sharing like, yes, this is also, as spiritual practitioners of Buddhism, at our core is to help come back to our understanding of moderation as well as interbeing, connectedness.

00:10:08

Beautiful. So, Brother Phap Huu, we should write a book called Doughnut Spirit.

00:10:14

Part two. Two to Kate’s…

00:10:17

Which is when we suffer, then we tend to overshoot to compensate for that. So that’s, we got another doughnut in the shop.

00:10:24

And I just want to say I love is a doughnut because, you know, in North America, when you feel empty, you go and eat a doughnut.

00:10:31

Yeah. And it’s almost the ultimate consumerist food. So there’s a deep irony… I’m very aware of this.

00:10:40

It makes it more beautiful.

00:10:42

Well, I tell you what it does make it more accessible for people who are intimidated by economics.

00:10:47

Yeah.

00:10:47

Most people when I was writing my book back in 2014-15, and I’d meet parents at the school gate, pick up time for the kids, and they say, what are you doing? So I’m writing a book about rethinking economics, and most people immediately draw back. And then they say, oh, I wasn’t very good at math at school, which tells you a lot about it’s intimidating, it’s complicated, it’s mathematical. And I would say, well, actually, the only numbers in my book are the page numbers. So we can all do this. So calling it doughnut economics, people like, hang on, that’s silly, it’s playful, it’s therefore not intimidating, and it means everybody feels that they can approach the conversation. But I mean, of course I feel slightly ridiculous sitting here with you in Thay’s hut, in the heart of the Plum Village tradition, talking about doughnuts, because they are the ultimate sugar, fried. Right? So there’s a playful twist there. From what you just shared, I want to say so many things. Last night, at dinner, so we were having dinner with the Dharma sharing family, so a group of about 12 people sitting together, we’re introduced to each other at the beginning of the week. And you build a really strong connection. I’d love to come back and talk about that. And I was asked by the sister who was holding our space to read the five, what do they call?

00:12:04

Contemplation.

00:12:05

The Five Contemplations. And it was a really big thing for me. I really believe in speech acts. I really believe in the power of speaking, which is why people say their vows, whether it’s becoming a monk or becoming married, where we speak and it’s really powerful. And you see it here, people… tears pulled out people’s faces as they say things that are so deeply true to them. So it felt very powerful for me to read, you know, I don’t recall the exact words, but the spirit is this food that we’re about to eat is made of the whole universe, of all of the earth and the stars from the sun. And this seeing the world in your plate, I find so beautiful that you just look at the food you’re about to eat and ask, Where does this food come from? What has contributed to this food? Many human hands. But the soil and all the bacteria in the soil and the sunshine and therefore the stars and therefore the the Milky Way, it’s cosmological what’s in your plate. So it was a real privilege. And at the end of it, the last one, end saying so that we are eating in a way that we can reduce and help stop climate change, but also that we are in service to all living beings. And for me, as I work on what’s called doughnut economics, of course, it keeps evolving, right? My book came out in 2017, but it has to be a living journey. You don’t want to be stuck holding a line, a text, you’re evolving, as Plum Village is evolving. And I’m more and more moving into thinking about in service of all living beings and going beyond what the doughnut stands right. Well, I’d love to talk more about this.

00:13:52

So if you’d love to talk more about it, why don’t we talk more about it? There’s a revolutionary act. The great thing is we have no schedule here. We haven’t planned what we’re going to say. So what does that mean to you? Because so… one of the deep teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh is to go beyond the human, the more than human, on the fact that interbeing is that we’re connected to all of life and all of life is in us and we are made of non-human elements. In other words, we’re made of the sunshine and we’re made of the rain and we’re made of the soil and we’re made of the, you know, the food we grow and all that. So what does that mean to you to go beyond this idea of, you know, the planet just being a boundary in a sense, just being something we have to stay within as opposed to actually it’s as important as us. And what is the doughnut for the Earth?

00:14:49

Yep. I’m going to step back slightly from that question and just… I want, the metaphor and I find metaphors really useful knowing that they’re just metaphors. Imagine a wide valley that we want to span, we want to cross. And most people just could not jump right across this valley. It’s too far. And the valley is like mindsets. So on the one side of this valley, on one hillside is Western economic education, which most people who are touched by Western society and Western mindset, which, by the way, is a lot of world. And it’s not just people who are taught economics, right? We all pick it up because we read it in the way our politicians talk, in the way journalists write about the economy. So we’re all actually caught in it. That mindset focuses on valuing… For markets, it starts with supply and demand, it puts a price on the individual item. It says there are externalities. There may be things we haven’t taken… No, you’re right, it somehow deeply knows about interbeing, because it says there are things here, but they are externalities, they’re outside of the price contract. It focuses on success as growth. It names humans as rational economic man, the individual, competitive, self-interested single person. So we are raised on that hill and taught that mindset. And if you want to do well in the world of business, this is the mindset to equip you. Now, way across on the other side of the valley it’s Plum Village. And it’s Buddhist tradition and many other traditions. I recently was been in wonderful conversations with a Hawaiian indigenous scholar called Kamana Beamer. So Hawaiian tradition, many, many indigenous traditions that the Buddhist tradition calls it interbeing. Others will call it by other names, but that interaction, interdependency and reverence for all life. So these are really far apart. And what I’ve only come to realize more recently is I think doughnut economics it’s not the same […]. It’s clearly not the same as… But it’s like we’ve built a bridge that has a foot in the middle of the valley because we can’t jump all the way across. So I think of doughnut economics and what I’m seeing it served for some people who are raised like I was in the Western economic mindset, it is a staging post that I can jump to. It’s an adjacent possible I can get to there. The idea that we could meet the human rights of all people. I know about human rights, we put the rights of all people at the center, leave no one in the hole. And then planetary boundaries, this very powerful scientific concept coming from Western science, saying there are life supporting systems of the planet. There are nine of them, we must stay within these boundaries. One of them is biodiversity loss. Right? Let’s not lose too much biodiversity. It makes sense. We can get there from our Western mindset to this point. What I’m now enjoying seeing and people, others who love doughnut economics and also myself is now that I’m halfway, of I can see much further from here. And now I can see there’s a beyond and I can see there’s interbeing. I can see the Hawaiian cosmology. I can see other indigenous cosmologies. I can see a biocentrism that would never have been possible for me if I had just tried to jump there from supply and demand. So I think of doughnut economics as one of the feet of a bridge that stand across a long valley and help people cross over. It’s like the way I often describe, a Western mindset recovery program. I am playful here, but it’s a mindset recovery. But I’ve been really touched, honored that some people who are raised and inhabiting much deeper philosophies and indigenous philosophies like my friend Kamana Beamer from Hawaii and I feel in this opportunity here in Plum Village or in Bhutan, reaching, saying, oh, out of everything we’ve seen from Western economics, doughnut economics actually makes sense to us. Right? So reaching back across this bridge from the other direction, maybe we can connect here in… use it as a connecting point or speak to the Western mindset through this. So it’s a really interesting place to be that I feel a huge value in holding that space, even though I can see a great value in going beyond it. And I personally actually torn, should I hold this space of hold the doughnut, even though I can see it’s still boundaries. Right? And it expresses all other living beings as a planetary boundary of biodiversity loss. What if we were to invite them into the center of the circle and say what All living beings, how do we live well together? So that for me is the place. And the last thing I’ll say here is I’ve been teaching this idea for 12 years ago, and I’ve been teaching it a decade long of students coming through universities. And 12 years ago it was, well, that’s a bit radical and that’s, you know, come on, that you’re pushing the edge of the envelope here that’s… Now students arrive and they say yeah, of course. I mean just go beyond though… This is very anthropocentric. And so there’s this beautiful graduation in the mindset of people arriving saying, well, of course, I’m going to leap beyond. And I say, please leap beyond. It’s my favorite activity to invite my students when I introduce the doughnut. I say, okay. And now let’s constructively critique it, let’s evolve it, let’s move it forward because let’s not get fixed in place. Let’s keep moving beyond.

00:21:11

So, brother Phap Huu, I want to bring you in here, because so much of what Kate is saying for me resonates with Thich Nhat Hanh’s approach, which is that he also, you know, he studied all the great sort of Buddhist texts, but the way he allowed people to cross the valley from an existing thinking to that place was through the use of metaphors, through very simple practical tools, never to talk in an esoteric way, but always to make it very grounded. So do you want to talk a little bit about how Plum Village and also Kate talks about the evolution that, you know, this is one of the great strengths of Plum Village is that nothing is fixed. That Thay said, you know, we’re always… So Thay is how Thich Nhat Hanh was called Thay, teacher. How that evolved, you know, how Buddhism was evolving, had to be relevant to this generation. And Kate’s talking about actually now this generation has changed and she needs to evolve. So there seems to be so much that we can talk about in that.

00:22:21

Yesterday when we had picnic lunch together in New Hamlet, Lily, Lily had a book.

00:22:26

Lily Cole.

00:22:27

Lily Cole had a book called The Raft Is Not the Shore.

00:22:32

Yeah.

00:22:32

So I feel like what you just explain, like, the two valleys, and the teachings and the views and the graduations of understanding. We’re creating a lot of rafts to help bring the big gap of understanding and connection. And I think I love what you were able to acknowledge, because if you were to write it now, it would be very different.

00:23:01

Yes.

00:23:01

Because your understanding has evolved and has grown, because your interbeing is blossoming. And I love this. And this is why our teacher and Plum Village is what it is today is because our teacher had this insight that the teachings should always be alive. And the valley of suffering has many ways, has many currents. And a skillful teacher or a skillful person who has understanding when they put the raft together, when they start building the raft, they can’t build it with just the idea of themself. They have to touch the suffering of the community of the present moment in order to find the right tools and the right materials so that it can sail the current of today. And so how this insight helps us is the insight of never being caught, even as we are sailling and the raft becomes heavier, we should reevaluate the raft. We should look again at the raft and understand is it still a supportive understanding to help us reach the other shore? And even as we reach the other shore, in Buddhism, we speak of bodhisattvas, and bodhisattvas are the ones who… their love is so big and they want everybody to reach the other shore. So even if we reach the other shore, we’re ready to go back on the raft and go back to the other shore and bring more people over. And, in a way, this is also interbeing in spirituality. We call it deep Buddhism when we have deep understanding. When we have deep understanding, we’re also not selfish. We’re not okay with just us understanding and touching happiness or having enlightenment. We want all humans to have a way out of suffering and to even go beyond, we say we want all beings to be enlightened. So our great vow is to sail, keep sailing the raft to bring passengers over and over. And it’s not limited to human beings because in interbeing when we are sailing this raft together, our understanding expands to animals, plants and minerals and to all beings. And also understanding that we cannot be alone. And so I think that when we, as a practitioner, and as educators, and as changemakers, how Thay has continued to stay young and continued to stay energetic and enthusiastic and it is always asking, how can I renew the raft? And I think this is where he has so much joy and his curiosity kept his teaching and his insights evolving and new. So the practice of beginning anew is not just within relationship, but beginning anew, also in the understanding of happiness, suffering and change. Also, economics, like when we think of… I love how you brought back like it’s how we’re taking care of our home. And just, you know, like what I imagine, like in education, like in the first year or two, like to teach the children the understanding of where the food comes from.

00:27:03

Yeah.

00:27:04

And we have a Happy Farm in Plum Village, and all the children have an opportunity to go and, you know, be in touch with the farmers, see where their French fries come from, potatoes. See where the ketchup come from, actual tomatoes. And this is interbeing in action. Right? And it’s not in theories. It’s not in books. And also to understand the relationship of gratitude. I think gratitude now is it’s very much… It’s more of a distant thing. You know? But the gratitude that we’re practicing as a practitioner is in every moment, like the gratitude to have food in front of our table, to know that this is not simple. This is a gift. The whole cosmos has come here to offer us this piece of bread, this tomato, etc.. And then it’s not simple to be together with loving human beings and not to also take this for granted. And also then to see the interbeing of this moment. Like in this retreat, in the summer retreat, whenever I see a child and I may get irritated and may get annoyed, you know, like of the noise that they’re making, like in our dining hall is like sometimes the peak of the noise is like it wants to blow up the roof. Right? And I’m like, breathing in, breathing out. But then there’s a deeper level of seeing is that… but how the environment of feeling safe in this place, physically safe, emotionally safe, spiritually safe is much higher than my judgmental mind of like, this is too noisy. But for them to be in a community where there is understanding, there’s embrace, of course, there’s boundaries also, but there is safety. So like all of this becomes for me then becomes like, I see it as the raft that we’re helping people have a deeper understanding than the other rafts that are being presented outside, which, you know, it’s a lot about success and a lot about money. Like about the dollar signs. Right? Like whenever we read a post, we see a sign about the stock market and so on, like what that does to us emotionally? And then when people read the news about climate change and seeing the disaster, the fire, for those who have a spiritual dimension or those who have a love towards, beyond humans, they get impacted very differently. But I feel like this, that impact is not the same impact of when you see dollar signs and how that becomes your own safety and comfort.

00:30:02

One touches the mind and one touches the heart. So, Kate, a couple of things Phap Huu mentioned in where we got to so far is about touching our suffering. And also he’s talked about rafts and that, and I know you and I sort of looked at each other with a bit of a smile because we met for the first time, I think probably about eight years ago.

00:30:26

Eight years ago?

00:30:26

Eight years ago. And we met on a small Swedish island with the Club of Rome, which is an organization that was looking at new economics and how to renew our way of thinking and acting in the world. And you were in pain.

00:30:45

I really was.

00:30:47

And we then sat on the plane on the way back from Sweden to the UK. And what I love about Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings is that the older I get, the more I see how they have like a cup of tea, like putting a tea bag in hot water. They infuse so many people’s lives. And actually I read you, I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Art of Power, and I read you a small section of that which touched the place of how to let go of the suffering and of the past and be in the present moment and renew ourselves. And then I mentioned to you, I think, something to the effect of you were concerned about, you know, you being a ship sailing off from the harbor. And I said, well, you’re one of many boats. You know, it’s like a flotilla that we all need to be, we all need to have our boat that goes out. But we’re part of a flotilla of boats or maybe rafts. So do you wanna just talk a little bit about just, you know, what it was like? Because this practice is about being in our suffering, recognizing our suffering, and then not being a victim of our suffering. Do you wanna just maybe talk a little about that, just that process for you?

00:32:11

Absolutely. So it was 2015, I think. I was, I had left my job at Oxfam, which I had loved, and I’d worked there for a long time too. Because I’d drawn the doughnut in 2012. And it had this, as an image, it has this resonance, this traction. People had just been drawn to it and it has sort of kind of flown and taken off and people start saying, you’re the doughnut lady…

00:32:37

Say, I don’t make doughnuts.

00:32:40

I don’t eat doughnuts. What have I done? And I left my job at Oxfam to write a book. Okay. If the doughnut is the goal, what’s the mindset? So I had said, right, you know, I’m going to leave the security of a community of working at Oxfam and a paid job and all that. I’m going to just go freelance. I’m going to take the risk. And by the way, it’s a really high risk thing to do to write a book. You know, I’ve got a 10,000 pound advance. I mean, I was very, very fortunate. A foundation said we really support what you’re doing, we want to give you a stipend to live off. And I just want to say that because that does not happen for most authors and it’s a very vulnerable thing to do, but it’s even more intellectually vulnerable because the donor had been, had had resonance. And then I was thinking the subtitle of the book was Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. And I wrote on Twitter, you know, I’m thinking about this, send me ideas. And people would send me these ideas, I think, is that genius or is that completely crazy? And especially around the concept of growth, can we have growth? And I got really tied in knots. And of course, it was banging up against all my economics training and all my… And I lived in Oxford, which is where I’d gone to university, so I kept bumping into my old professors… sort of the, you know, am I really losing the plot or am I finding a path, of finding something different? And I was very stuck. And I was invited on this, a small gathering of people on this beautiful island in Sweden. And I thought, this will help me get out of the hole. I was really on… I’d actually got a list on my desk of all the people I was going to write to tomorrow to say I’m sorry. What was I thinking? To my agent, the publisher, to the foundation, to my parents, you know, I’m just, I can’t do this. And I was invited to this island and I thought, okay, this will, I knew some of the people going, this will kind of kickstart me again and I’ll find out the feet again and it’ll be fine. And it didn’t. And it was good to be in that company and hear them talk, but I said almost nothing. And then there was this very cheeky and playful person called Jo who was there. And we… Who I just, yeah, I just could tell that was a really open soul here. And we were at the airport on the way back, a group of people, and the two other people who had just drifted off and something in me just made me want to connect with you. And I just said slightly bizarrely, you know, we’re about to get on a flight, go home. I said, I’m not usually like this, by the way, I’m normally more animated or something. I was I wanted to explain myself. And I got on the plane and there was no one sat next to me and, you know, buckled in off, we’re going home. And then when the seatbelt sign came off, I saw Jo ten rows ahead pop up and he comes back and he said, I think I meant to come and talk to you because you were reading The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hanh. And you’d opened it and the page you’d opened it, there you’d stuck my business card, I’d obviously given you a card. And you sat down in the empty seat next to me and just essentially gave me the most extraordinary support, listening, coaching all the way back to London. And what came up was, I think you must have asked me, you know, thinking metaphorically, what is it you’re doing? And I said, well, I think of new economic thinking of as a sort of flotilla of boats going out towards a sort of a shared shore, going back to this lovely metaphor you were using, Brother Phap Huu, of the raft…

00:36:08

Is common metaphor.

00:36:09

Brilliant. And I, you know, I want to be part of that flotilla. And some boats are really big and they have engines and some are tiny, some are rowing. And but this flotilla going and you… And I think like my fear, so to go to the fears, I know the doughnuts really resonated and what if this book just doesn’t… What if it’s a flop? That fear of following something that’s been successful and taken up with and the fear of putting yourself out there and also not knowing what on earth to write next. And you said, Well, why don’t you just put your boat, just put your boat in the water and just go, go with flotilla. And many, many other things that we discussed. And when I got home, the beautiful thing was my daughter, who was about eight, she’d said, Mommy, I made you a little paper boat. I couldn’t believe it. There was this little paper boat waiting, I was like, how does that happen? And also, even in the flight, you got up and went off to the loo and I picked up this book you were reading and I’d heard of Thich Nhat Hanh. I was like, What is this book? The Art of Power?… And opened it randomly at yet another page. And Thay, who had written that, he said, For example, I wrote a book that was really successful, and then I was writing another one and I was afraid… I don’t believe this. There’s just this flirt from the universe, these lovely ideas that just resonate. And when I got home, I said to my partner, I was like, I met this guy Jo. Who is he, Jo? Jo who? I said to my partner, Roman, you know, I don’t know if I’m going to carry on writing this book, but if I do, that conversation really, really, really helped me turn around. So thanks, Jo. But yes, rafts. Right? And shores. And I wanted to come back to the bridge metaphor. It’s a similar idea. And I just wanted to say, of course, I know that even if I’m saying the doughnut is like a staging post, a foot in the bridge towards the other value. Of course, when you reach at what you thought was your other value, you can see further. The horizon is further that No, no, no. This actually isn’t the shore. Go further, go further. So I also don’t want to position any other person or my views like, you know, that’s it. Because we’re all on a journey and wherever we arrive we see actually there’s new layers to take off further to go.

00:38:22

Beautiful. And I love this conversation because, you know, it’s so flowing effortlessly. But Phap Huu, let’s talk about that, because my experience, you know, a lot of people will have sort of Thich Nhat Hanh, you know, and especially those who maybe didn’t know him as an enlightened being that he had made it to the other shore. And then he just sort of sat there and sort of spread his understanding and wisdom. But actually, he constantly saw that there was more and that, you know, he was saying, you know, even I could take one of my calligraphies, I could study for 150 years and I could go deeper. So actually, it would be worth to talk about where is the other shore? Does it… Is there… how many shores are there? But more to the point, how do we relax into the no destination because so many people, and you mentioned earlier, Kate, and we start off with a goal and then everything is directed towards the goal. And that becomes very brittle because either we get to the goal and realize actually that’s not the end point. Or sometimes we fail to get to that goal and then think, oh, have we made a mistake? So how can we see life in a way that doesn’t determine what the shore looks like, but use it as a metaphor for our journey?

00:39:46

In Buddhism, one of the Buddhist teachings is having a volition. A volition and aspiration is a nutriment. It’s an energy to help us keep going. And the Buddha also gives us another antidote, which is aimlessness, which is to help us have an aspiration, but not think that once we’ve arrived and completed that aspiration, that’s when we finally touch happiness. But to understand and to see that the process and the journey that we go through in ripening that aspiration, whether we experience heartbreak or we experience a lot of support or we experience doubt and we start to face challenges, all of that in the spirit of aimlessness is the journey and at the same the destination, because you can only arrive and meet those sufferings in the present moment in the difficulties. And then that becomes an ingredient for your shore that you are rolling towards. And then when you have all of this understanding, when you arrive at the shore, whether that shore, for me in this present moment, is for me, I’m just speaking my shore, in this moment, is understanding my impact with this community, right? So if I’m to think like 22 years ago, when I ordained, my aspiration was just to be a happy monk, because that’s what the happiness I received, as a kid, coming here, that’s something I wanted to give back. So my shore was like, okay, I want to be a happy monk. And when I arrived and I ordained, first day, I got it. I was so happy. But that’s not the end, because we have to keep cultivating the shore and we have to build a community on this shore. And I think the hard part is for a lot of the understanding of success is arriving there and we feel we’ve accomplished, we’re finished. But the deeper we’re in this journey of life, especially with the insight of interbeing, okay, you’ve arrived there now help others. And help build a community, help build a path that others can also walk to arrive there. And there are many who choose to be solo and just feel okay with that, but in the spirit of Plum Village and in the spirit of our teacher, during the war, I always remember he said, like, I’m here to help relieve suffering. And that relieving suffering is not mine alone, it’s the community that is around me. But when I release suffering outside the transmission of relieving suffering, as a transmitter, but I also get it in return. I also receive back the cessation of suffering by seeing them with hope, by seeing them with a smile. So the shore that we look at from the beginning is just one view. But as we are arriving at the shore and we’re on the shore, we know it’s not the end, because how do we develop this shore so that it is a refuge for all? That’s the hard part. And I think that’s not only the hard part, but that is where we have to be. We have to have a spiritual practice to return back to foundation in order to not lose our aspiration. Because many people have arrived at the shore and the mind of not enough or the grass is greener on the other side, another shore, we go back and we take another journey. And for some, it’s important to take that journey again and for some, they take a journey, many journeys, and they come back to the original shore that they’ve already arrived at. So I not to be dogmatic with this answer because I also feel like the Buddha didn’t think like one path is the only path. But for the understanding that the Buddha had, which is all of his teaching, has only one purpose, and that is the cessation of our suffering to help everyone touch liberation and freedom. But the Buddha did not say that on the shore there’s no suffering. It’s how to be free, even in our suffering, how to still touch happiness while there are storms and there are misunderstandings. But because we’ve had the raft, we’ve had the journey, we can bring that understanding of that raft to meet the journey of being on the shore. So I think here we can evolve. We have one book, Crossing the Shore, and then we have another book Being on the Shore. And I think Plum Village is a metaphor of Thay’s journey. Thay had to cross many shores, the shore of suffering of the country, the North and the South, brothers killing each other. And how spirituality became a shore, a bridge to voice the humanity that we can still see in the pain and suffering. Thay brought the light of hope. Thay brought love, Thay brought understanding through his poetry, through his writing, through his social activism with the young community of just bringing hope and to remind that man is not our enemy. It is ignorance, it is discrimination, it is ideologies. And then he crossed the shore to America to shine some light of suffering. What is really happening? And then that light that helped light up a deeper understanding. And then he brought the practice of mindfulness in a new way. He’s not the origin of mindfulness, but he helped build a new raft that so many people can apply it into their daily life in this century. And then being exiled, he crossed another shore which is touching the insight of I have arrived, I am home. And then building that home so that it becomes a refuge for all walks of life. And I think one of his courage was not to be caught in also the idea of Buddhism. And he continued to expand the shore so that it can embrace all beings and all religions. For example, when you take the five mindfulness trainings in a traditional temple, you have to take the three refuges. You have to declare I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the sangha. That is traditionally how you become a Buddhist. And many folks came to the shore of Plum Village and said, Hey, I want to plant my roots of spirituality here, but those three vows is becoming an obstacle to my root religion. And Thay said, oh, that’s suffering. I will remove that because Thay had a deeper understanding, because if you practice the five mindfulness trainings, which are the foundation of mindfulness and ethics in our tradition, that embraces the three jewels, which is the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. So cultivating the shore and building the shore sometimes is I think it’s deeper, it’s a deeper investment than the raft part. But we all need a raft. But once we arrive at the shore now, how do we build it so that it becomes a foundation for us, a refuge for us, so that we can have a home to embrace and take care of our pain, suffering and develop and cultivate our happiness and our suffering and our joy. Because suffering and joy are very important investments that we all have to make in order to build a culture and an understanding. And in the light of Plum Village teaching, that joy and happiness is not money, it is not success in wealth and in fame, but it is in the mindfulness that in this moment I have eyes to see, I have a family to love, I have a community to be with. Or I can forgive my parents, my ancestors, because I am their continuation. I am renewing them in this moment. So the shore of Thay that he’s built and developed as a home to continue to transform, reconcile, have new ways of seeing and new ways of being to continue to bridge also the spiritual and the world. And we just say the world, but Thay says, in the world there’s a lot of spiritual, hidden spirituality. And we can now see in economics, looking with the eyes that that Kate has explained, there’s deep spirituality in it because there’s care and love.

00:50:08

Beautiful, brother. And, Kate, that brings me to Thay’s, what Brother Phap Huu just said, which is what you talked aboutm you know, when you were starting to write the book and it felt quite lonely that you had lost your community by leaving Oxfam. And now you built a very big community. And the Action Lab is about building many, many communities. So I just wanted you to riff off what Phap Huu said in terms of how you see community and what you are building. And also, you know, how do you… One of the things that I felt was so important about Thay was he never got caught in the fame trap. He always stayed true, you know. And that creates a lot of trust, obviously, that that people can see Thay and say he is who he is. He’s what he says is who he is. Who he is, is what he says. So how do you, in a sense, I don’t know if it’s necessarily the right word, but protect yourself, just the word it comes up in my mind, protects you from fame. Because, you know, wherever you go, people come to you because they’re looking to you for something, aren’t they? They’re looking for an answer. They’re looking for inspiration. They’re looking for hope. And you have become a sort of lightning rod in the world of economics to ways we can regenerate communities and nations. So, coming back, the importance of community and the communities you’re helping to build, but also how do you not get caught in the trap of fame?

00:51:45

Lots of things.

00:51:49

That was the easy part of the question, by the way.

00:51:52

So much I want to say about community and I want to bring it to the experience of being here as well. Where to begin? So doughnut economics is an idea. It’s a book, some words on a page. And I drew on so much economic thinking that I’d never been taught. And that was the joy of writing the book, actually, drawing on Herman Daly, who founded Ecological Economics, and Nancy Fulbright, Marilyn Waring, who founded Feminist Economics, and Jeanine Bennis, biomimicry and Donella Meadows, Systems Thinking. So I was bringing together… The names, you can hear the names, these are still from a Western mindset tradition, right? But these from outside economics. But I was bringing these and celebrating the work of many and making these ideas dance on the same page and calling it doughnut economics. But it comes out as a book. And the most thrilling thing that happened for me when the book came out in 2017 was that people would, you know, you give a talk and you’re doing a book signing and people would say, not only could you sign the book, but could you sign the book and I want to give it to my brother or I, for myself or my mother, I want to give it because I want to put this into practice. I’m a teacher. I’m actually teaching this already in my class. I know it’s not in the curriculum, but this is what the students should be learning. So I’m pushing the curriculum aside. Wow. What? You know, thank you to the teachers for that pioneering. And I’m a town councilor. Could we do this in our town? Like, what would it… ? Can we try? Can we? I’m a mayor. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m setting up a company that’s ethical clothing, or we’re building a forest to sequester carbon. This is almost the logo of my company. But people getting excited and saying, I’m doing this. And I really feel, and this very much ties back to Plum Village, I really feel and I often say that 21st century economics, the art of household management, 21st century economics, will be practiced first and theorized later, like it’s the practice where it gets… where we figure out how often through experiment, often through… but it’s the practice. So I wrote a book, but actually it’s the practitioner, the people who want to try it and do it that turn ideas on a page into a reality. And it’s messy and it’s hard, especially when you’re trying to bring out… This is a really nice metaphor. So let’s go to a town, town councilor or a mayor says, We want to do this here. Well, there’s now over 90 towns, villages, cities, regions, districts, states around the world that have publicly said we are engaging with the concept of doughnut economics to transform our locality. But that’s really hard because you’re taking a town or village and you’re trying to orient it towards thriving, but you’re in a region within a nation that has regulations that a country that’s growth and you’re within the global capitalist system and the financial system that is extractivist and accumulative. And so you’re trying to bring about transformation in this small place. And of course, you’re going to hit the tension. You’re going to feel the… It’s not going to be fully possible because you’re in an untransform system, and yet you try. So I’m just now seeing how utterly like this it is. And yet, you know, you’re never going to be able to transform your city alone. Of course you can’t because it’s part, it’s interbeing. It’s part of everything. It’s connected to global supply chains. It’s regulated by the global financial system, by the national regulations. People come and go. And yet you try. And so I’m just so struck by the mayors and councilors and teachers and people working inside companies or communities who say, and yet we rise and we will. And we’re going to have a go. And the old system is not going to just roll over and say, please go ahead, thrive. It’s going to undermine. It’s going to resist, it’s going to mock, but we’re going to do it anyway. So Doughnut Economics Action Lab works with people and organizations worldwide who on finding out about these ideas say this looks like a really valuable tool for us. And it’s a really important point for us that we never lobby. I’ve never once tried to convince anybody. There’s no pushing, right? No persuading… No. People in a place utterly know their context and know what would be useful and know what would be possible and what they have energy and excitement to try. So it’s those who say, I want to bring that here. And we’ve put the… we’ve turned some of the ideas into we call them tools, like if you want to do a doughnut. Downscale the doughnut for your city, there’s a tool for doing that. It’s in the commons. So it’s online, it’s free, it’s available for anybody to download. We just ask for reciprocity. Please just share back what you learn, or share back how you innovated. And it’s quite light framework so you can adapt it. It’s being used differently in Chile, in Stockholm, it’s being used, you know, wonderful different adaptations in China and in Mexico City. And we’re all enriched and amazed by the brilliant things that people do in the ways they play with it. So that’s what Doughnut Economics Action Lab is doing in the realm of schools and education. How can we introduce new teaching methods and ideas in towns and cities, in the world of business, in communities, in academia? That’s the work we’re doing. And that’s a community, although we also say don’t try to be the movement, join the movement. Again, back to the raft conversation, Jo. Right? One of many boats. This is a flotilla. We don’t want to say it’s this boat, you’ve got to be doughnut. You know, there’s a world of what’s known as new economic thinking, let’s come back to that, of Economy of the Common Good, the Wellbeing Alliance, so many different ways of thinking. These are just different portals, entry points. Right? The raft is not the shore. There are many ways to get onto different rafts to head in the same direction. So let’s not try to compete. And I often point people, actually, you think you’re drawn to doughnut economics, but from what you’re saying, actually, I think you want to do the economy for common good. That will… Or point them in a different direction. And it’s a real pleasure of seeing yourself as part of a much bigger ecosystem of change makers and saying, what is it that we are particularly contributing here? What role can we play in this bigger team? But can I bring community to here? So one of the chapters I wrote in Doughnut Economics is called Nurture Human Nature, and it starts with looking at the character, rational economic man that is taught in mainstream economics, as I was saying, it’s the individual, it’s the autonomous, atomized individual, self-interested. He’s got money in his hand, ego in his heart, calculating in his head, nature at his feet. He hates work. He loves luxury. Brother Phap Huu is laughing.

00:58:55

That’s how you’re describing me perfectly.

00:58:59

And he knows the price of everything, and he can never get enough. Right? And these are literally the traits that are written into equations that represent humanity in mainstream economic models. Insatiability, of course, there are unlimited wants. That is almost in the definition of what economics is the management of scarce resources for unlimited wants, the self-interest. So the models we make of ourselves remake us. And economists, an economist called Robert Frank and his colleagues did research finding that students who go to university from year one to year 2 to year 3 of studying economics, the more they learn about rational economic man, the more they admire him, the more they value self-interest and competition over collaboration and altruism. I mean, if you want to be… if you want to succeed, you’ve got to, you know, it’s… who’s number one? Look out for number one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, you got to… don’t be the mug. All this stuff. So who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become. And this is a critical insight, not just for economics, but for any discipline, indeed any art, any belief system that tells us who we are. It remakes us. So when I come to Plum Village, and this is my second time coming here, I find the form of community, the way of living, and you could call it social technology, it’s a way of living together that we all encounter as we literally walk in with our rucksacks. And where are we going to pitch our tent? And that kind of the bustle of day one and the stillness of the monks and nuns, absolute stillness next to the kind of restless and bustling crowd. It’s so wonderful. But we come with all our vulnerability. So I’ve come here with my whole family, which is my husband and my two children who are 15 year old twins, and they’re a girl and a boy. And so, in a way, we’re on a family holiday. But actually, because I’ve got a girl and a boy, they’re staying in different hamlets. So my husband and my son are in one hamlet and my daughter and I are in another and because they’re teenagers they’re on the teen program. And as we were coming on the train on the way here, I gradually realized actually my daughter will be off doing her own thing. I’ll actually be myself, on my own. And for me, that was actually, wow, I get to be Kate and I get to just I’m not really I’m not here with somebody. I’m not here at work. I’m not here somebody’s wife. I’m not, you know, constantly checking in with my partner. I mean, we switched our phones off, so we’re just we’re off. I’m not checking in on my daughter all the time. I see my baby twice a day and she’s really happy. So, I mean, I’m Kate. And of course, what comes up is, well, who am I? I’m just Kate. Who am I? Who am I? How will I be… ? Who will I be counted as? But also the loveliness of just having the space to see what happens. But I arrived on the first day, and I knew already two people who were here, that they were with their daughters. And I had this thing like, I won’t make any friends, and all the human […] but I’ll just alone. It’s fine. I’ll sit on my own all week. I’ll just eat my breakfast on my own, we can be fine. And I noticed that there was a moment at the end of the first day, I think it was, that we were called into the Dharma sharing family. So small groups of about 12 people that we will be together. We were sitting and eating together. We will be chopping vegetables together through the week. And I felt this deep human when we stood in a circle and they said, This is your family. And I think they were all utter strangers. But the relief to belong as I really loved noticing that in myself. And then we went around and said each other’s names and we learned each other’s names. And so I just noticed the deep, deep human need to belong and be recognized. You’re Kate. And that’s all I wanted or needed. And so I love that coming here, because the way we live here, when we’re staying here is so utterly different from our other lives that you step into a different kind of human relation and you can really notice the vulnerabilities and the worries and the calm of meeting others. And then within the circle. So we share, we go round and each person might speak for three minutes, whatever’s arising in their heart at that moment. And the first time it might be a little bit awkward. What am I going to share? And then the second time and then people start sharing very vulnerable things as someone chokes up and can’t speak against speech acts. Right? They’re saying something so simple. Somebody said, you know, my children are off and I’m not here as mother or wife, and I feel like I’m here as a child, she said. And her voice choked. And that was all she shared. And that’s everything. And she shared so much. And it was beautiful. But that vulnerability, when you hear someone’s voice crack and then everybody goes to another level of sharing. And then you feel deeply connected and you chop vegetables together in silence and you feel this great connection. And so I now feel I’m in a circle with people who I really, you know, I will stay in touch with beyond here. I feel I’m really connected. And then the wonderful twist of it all is it’s just random who I’m in a group with. And it could have happened with 12 of any of the a hundred so people who are here. So it just makes me think about how humans so… we are so prosocial. We are the most sociable of all mammals. We desperately want community. And it’s so… I want to say it’s so easy to create, but it’s so it’s so beautifully held here. And the way it’s done, it’s learned over many years and held by somebody very thoughtful among […] and holding the circle. But it is easy because humans are so willing to connect. And it just makes me think how we’re just waiting to connect and to care across religion, across ethnicity, across, you know, I’m English and I met a wonderful Irish woman. We talked about the kind of English Irish history and we are friends now because we went and found a table together because we didn’t have enough tables. And that bonded us. And so small acts of collaboration and listening and sharing, we want to connect. And I find that extraordinary and asking myself, how can there be more opportunities in the world for people to do that rather than compete or conflict because of labels I hear about you or how I see what I think you must be. And then we, you know, the kind of the reptile in us rears up and we are in fear, in defense. And so I find it extraordinary… I think this is my fourth day here, and I feel deeply at home and deeply connected to the people I’m with… Deeply and lightly. So I find that really fascinating, the ability to build community. And if I step back slightly and economize, you know, not economize it, but speak to it from the theories that I’ve drawn, Elinor Ostrom, a wonderful political scientist who recognized that in groups that thrive together, there are what she called these core design principles. There are principles. She studied so many groups and said there are principles that arise again and again, like a shared purpose, like agreed rules, like there are, not punishments, but there there are consequences for breaking those rules. And those are graduated. The more you break the rule, you know, at some point people might have to say, you need to leave this community. If you really don’t share this, you need to step out. There’s fast conflict resolution. There’s self-governance, there’s recognition of the governance by others. And when communities managed to put those rules in place, even if they haven’t named those, you know, she’s just she’s naming and listing it in one way. But other groups find it naturally when those are in place, gosh, humans can thrive and we can come out of ourselves and allow ourselves to be vulnerable with others. So it’s just really fascinating to me how we do this. And of course, it’s beautifully done when there are no phones, there’s very little… there’s wonderful food and sitting in circles, but it’s so simple, so much of the complexity of other life is stripped away and the humanness comes through and we can experience it.

01:08:04

Thank you, Kate. We’ll come back to the fame bit in a minute. But, brother, it feels important because what Kate named as those sort of in a sense principles of a healthy community seem to be reeling off Plum Village.

01:08:20

I know, I recognize a lot of the committees that Kate was naming. Like we have the Dharma teacher body, we have the teaching body, we have the caretaking council, we have the bhikshu. So all of these little circles that are in the bigger circle, which is a community, it does need to be put into place. And creating a community, when we say freedom, it doesn’t mean you do whatever you want. And I think a lot of people who when they think of a joyful and free community they think is a place where there’s no rules and actually that will never be sustainable. And in the core of all Buddhist tradition, coming from the Buddhist time, we have the six harmonies. And it needs to be shared… One of the harmonies is understanding that we’re all practicing one of an ethics together. And for us, as monastic, we have the precepts, the Vinaya, the monastic codes of the monks and nuns and all of us, we have to apply that. We have to practice that. That’s what keeps all of us in harmony. That’s what unites all of us. And then when you’re in Plum Village as a lay practitioner, we have the five mindfulness trainings that we, even if you haven’t taken it, but in a way like you want to respect these rules because that is the essence of this community, such as we’re all vegetarians here, we don’t smoke and use alcohol here and so on and so on. And these principles, they become guiding means to keep all of us supported and united. But also there is space for creativity. So one of the harmonies is also we practice the same Dharma. So in Plum Village, if you don’t want to play the Plum Village game, which is like the six exercises of mindful breathing, the engagement of in these retreats and you just want to sit alone, you got to find another community that sees that that is part of their harmony. And another one is learning to speak with compassion. We can speak about the truth and about injustice and about things that are not right, but how do we share it? How do we speak it that builds a community and builds understanding instead of targeting and judging each other and criticizing and putting each other down? So there are rules, sets of rules that are so important in our community. And we, I as an abbot, have had to ask people to leave the community. And when we think of harmony, sometimes the compassion is not embracing all. But it’s also seeing that there are some elements that we need to get, we need to show that element another path because it is damaging the whole for us. Like when there is a tree that is in a lot of pain and that is rotting and if we don’t take care and remove that rot, it will rot all of the other trees. And it’s, that, in a way, is also right mindfulness. That’s right compassion. How do we take care of the community? And this takes a lot of practice of seeing the success and happiness and transformation of community beyond oneself. Right? And I do this when I… There were some monastics and they suffered so much as monks. And I just say, you got to disrobe. And I’m sharing this with a lot of love and understanding because the robe becomes your prison. You had an ideal, an idea, about monastic life, and it is just not in harmony with your energies. You’re actually somebody that needs to be in a relationship. You need to love one person and know the boundary of that and not just feel like suppress here. And then, you know, because the suppression leaks, all these other energies that they’re suppressing, maybe they’re flirting with everybody, you know, and they’re just finding themself draining their energy and draining other people’s energy. And all of this we do need, we call it the Sangha eye, and the Sangha eye needs the light, which is like our guidance, our insights, our precepts, our mindful manners also. We have one rule which is really unique is, you know, monks and nuns we fall in love with one another. You know, when you share the same aspiration and you see that person so beautiful, so your love manifests. We all have love for one another. But when it surpasses a particular line, it becomes romantic. And it’s very hard when you’re in love to know that you’re in love. So we have, our teacher has put out a policy is like, if four monks tell you that you’re in love, you can’t deny that you’re in love. And the mentor has all the right to guide you and to say that you need to distance yourself from this person on days of practice, on a community work day, you need to intentionally not be with that person. And because when you’re in love, you’re drunk in love. So you say, No, I’m not in love. That’s brotherhood. That’s siblinghood, that’s sisterhood. But if the four say no, no, no, that is beyond siblinghood. And you have to really be very intentional. Our teacher has even sent monastics to different centers because they were so in love. So to distance themselves, so intentionally help them refocus their direction of practice and intention. So rules are very important, so important.

01:14:26

Boundaries. I wanted to come back there, actually, because you began asking me, you know, planetary boundaries? And I can say, well planetary, but why would we see it as bounded? But actually boundaries, I think… I often say boundaries unleash creativity. Or we could say boundaries can unleash freedom. Boundaries really matter. And actually, when I drew the doughnut first, some colleagues of mine, way back in 2012, some colleagues of mine said, some American colleagues actually said, We Americans, we don’t like boundaries. We want… If we see a boundary, we want to shoot right through it. And I said, well, really? You know, if you were holding a tiny baby and their temperature hit 40 degrees, would you say You go, girl, you burst through that boundary. No. You would do everything you can because when something is a living being, we know that life thrives within boundaries. Our bodies give us signals about boundaries all day. Right? We’re all probably lightly sweating now because today’s going to become 40 degrees and our bodies will sweat trying to calm themselves down. Or we shiver when we try to warm up. Or our stomachs will rumble if we’re really hungry or we’re thirsty. So we thrive within boundaries and rules give us a freedom. And when those rules are shared and we know others are following those rules, it allows all of us to be free and to enjoy something and to come out and be truly ourselves and vulnerable and open because there’s a deep trust.

01:16:07

Yes. I just want to rip off this because sometimes people, they see us monastics, we have so many rules. And they’re like, that’s not freedom. But actually, it’s thanks to the understanding of the boundaries. If I overstep this, this becomes suffering. So what is freedom? Is freedom from suffering. And so all of the monastic clothes that we have, it helps us stay aligned with our deepest aspiration. And some ask, why are monastics not allowed to have romantic partners? Isn’t that a suppression? Isn’t that not a deep practice of true love? And I say, well, we got to unpackaged what love is. Because I think in our 21st century, we think of love as more in the line of desire and lust and being able to have as many partners as possible is almost like a competition. And our teacher said, like, empty sex only creates more suffering and loneliness. And I shared, well, you know, as a monk, when I practice true love, I had the freedom because I’m not bound to just one person. My practice of love is to include as many as possible, as well as my love is to see that your happiness is my happiness. When you go through suffering, I just want to simply be there and listen to you. That is also love. And because I am not committed to just one person, there’s a freedom there with the freedom of no jealousy. Because I am… I don’t belong to anybody. So when I am involved with all of these friendships, and I have a limit to my love also, I have a limit to where I take my relationship to with each person. I have to have clarity as a monk, this is as far as I go. And I have boundaries. If you want to speak to me, I will… because I’m heterosexual, so I’m very aware of that. So when I’m with women and practitioners, I’m very aware of how I position myself, and that is the boundaries to protect our friendship, to protect our relationship. And that offers freedom because then we don’t overstep anything which becomes suffering. So boundaries are so crucial and Plum Village is still a community with harmonies because we are practicing this. And we have elder brothers and sisters in the safeguarding team, we have the Vinaya that we… the pricept that we recite every two weeks to remind us of our path of practice. And like Kate shared from the beginning, there’s a power to speaking it. We would, the precept would be recited out loud and we all have to listen to it. Even though I practiced for 22 years, I still do it every two weeks. This is a commitment and to support a community it is a continuous investment and a continuous growth. And I would say is the same with any partnership, like a family. That is a community. There are boundaries that we also have to practice and we also have to maybe not the same precepts, but like what is our commitment as a relationship, as a partner? What are the things that we want to recite, you know, once every two weeks to remind ourselves of our commitment to each other? So I think there’s so many elements of, I would dare say in the monastery, that we can take that raft, reevaluate it how to make it work in a family setting. And it can really offer a lot of clarity.

01:20:08

Beautiful, brother. And one of my brothers, like my siblings, was setting up a community and he had this problem that everyone involved wanted to create a community, but they wanted to create their community and they wanted to they thought their idea of community was the right idea. And it all fell apart because… And he said, well, Plum Village is so lucky because it’s got 2600 years of sort of wisdom and knowing what works and building it, but redefining it. And that allows the community to hold. There’s a centrifugal force around which that community rolls. And without that, all you have is, as you said, the individualistic mind, which is so embedded in us, has a desire to take control. And it does.

01:20:56

Can I just share one thing I learned yesterday? I went to Lower Hamlet. It was lazy evening, and they do it every week for the children, as they do a soccer tournament. So it’s the children versus the nuns and the parents. And I came because my childhood friends are here and their children are here, and I’m like their uncle. So I want to support them. And the beauty of community was so strong that what I was witnessing, especially among the children, because they were playing against the nuns and the parents and they wanted to win. And what the beauty that I was recognizing, there was no superstar. Somehow the children they united as the outcome is just scoring and whoever scores we celebrate. And definitely I can recognize a few kids that were more talented than the others. But when a goal was scored, you just see all of them celebrate together. And it was really, it was a tribal energy, which was like, the outcome is the most important thing. And all of us are part of the means and we’re going to support in order to reach the goal, which is just to score. And one of the beauty was, in one of the games, there’s a child, I think it’s his second time here, he’s from Korea. And for whatever reason, he was the one that scored a two goals for the children. And they they celebrated him. They even carried him. And he was having a deep moment of celebration. And he was walking out of the field as they finished the game. And I said, Thomas, you did so well. And he looked at me with actually some sadness and he said, You know, brother, actually outside I’m really bad at football. But in this moment I’m being celebrated. And it was like he didn’t know how to take this in. But what was so beautiful was how all of the other kids celebrated him and how he was being embraced. And it didn’t matter if you’re good or not because you were the one that scored. And I just said, Well, Thomas, breathe it in. You were there at the right time, at the right moment. And the ball just happened to be at your foot and you scored. And he was like, brother, I love Plum Village. And so I… Because I was watching myself, I didn’t play. And what was so beautiful was the collective energy. And I was watching all of my emotions. And because I am very competitive when it comes to sport and I was recognizing myself, if I was in there, I would definitely not let the kids win. But at the same time, I was able to just watch the happiness as a collective. So real. This is not intellectual. This is right in front of my eyes and I can feel it. And community is in us, is so deeply ingrained in us.

01:24:44

So, Kate, coming back then to my question, my second part of my question. So in a sense, you know, you talked about when you got to the stage of not knowing if you could write the book, there was a sort of loneliness, the sense of not being part of community. Now you’ve created this vibrant, growing in a positive way, sort of enthusiastic community, which you are, you know, helped to lead. And what is it given you personally to be part of that? But also how do you manage the boundary of your emotions to produce that language of how you protect yourself or just, not, let’s change that word… how do you stay in balance so that you don’t slip into a thing of look what I’ve done, this is me and that the mind, that sort of thing… Look what I’ve done. So how does that work? How are you feeling nourished, supported by the community you’ve helped develop? And how do you stay within your own personal boundaries of recognizing it’s like the football metaphor, that you were there and the ball landed at your feet and you scored some goals. But it’s not just you.

01:26:02

So the moment that the bull landed at my feet was back in 2010, when I came back to my job at Oxfam, from having a year of maternity leave, two tiny twin babies. Global financial crisis had melted down the world, and the world’s economists had said, we need, obviously, we need to rewrite economics to reflect financial realities. And I remember sitting there with these, knee deep in the care economy, right? Raising twins, having worked for three years in Zanzibar with the communities living, dependent upon the forests, having worked… having immersed myself in everything but mainstream economics for a long time, global supply chains, labor exploitation, human rights, barefoot entrepreneurs in Zanzibar, myself immersed in the care economy, so really immersed in the full values of life. And there’s the world’s economists, when the Queen of England says, why didn’t economists see it coming? So they stumbled. We must rewrite economics to reflect financial realities. And I just thought, well, we’ll be damned if we’re not going to rewrite economics for that. I mean, to the ecological breakdown of the world, the social and huge scales of inequality in the world, and we’re only going to be right economics for that? So the stock market doesn’t crash and the banks don’t collapse? And I came back to work and somebody showed me, you know, what’s happened while I’ve been away. And there was this diagram of nine planetary boundaries, round like a football. And I literally had a visceral reaction to seeing this diagram, which was a circle with these radiant overshoots of some of the planetary boundaries. And I thought this is the beginning of 21st century economics. So somebody had done a wonderful pass to me of this… and I thought, well, if there are outer limits beyond which we shouldn’t go, surely they’re in the limits of every human’s need, real need, not that greed and consumption, but the deep need of having enough food. And so I drew a circle within a cicle and that became the doughnut. So just as you threw that metaphor to me, Jo, just like a football, that’s what comes to my mind the moment somebody passed me the ball. And totally aware that I was building on generations of work. In fact, it was only after I drawn that literally people said to me, Do you know back in 1974, a British economist called Barbara Ward had said literally, there are outer limits and inner limits. She had spoken the doughnut, but she hadn’t drawn it. So it’s that amazing feeling of drawing on something that was in the ether, I never read, but the ideas are there and I just I literally drew them with a pen. So huge awareness that you’re drawing on many people’s work that you may no longer be aware of where it came from. Many, many people helped you line up that goal. And then I wrote it as a book. So what… How did you phrase it? You know, what you did… I wrote a book. And again, it was drawing. And I, by the way, as you well know, I nearly fell out of that. Right? I really nearly didn’t write a book. And thanks to people who saw me and spoke with me and helped me, I held it together and did. And celebrated naming many of the places, of the ideas that I was aware of where they come from, the ones I could name. So I wrote the book. That’s what I did. But then the thrill is what people do with it and put it into practice. And so the organization that I co-founded, and it was really important to me to co-found it, not to, you know, I find it funny when you see I’m president and CEO… Whoa, I have made myself king is like, that’s a weird thing to do. So I co-founded Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and the name is really important. I never wanted to found an institute to like… It’s just too heavy. I actually never wanted to set up an organization. I love ideas. So it was a responsibility to create an organization that I felt I should do. But it being an action lab only when I came across that idea, I thought, I can do this. It’s all about action, right? It’s all about practice. Practice first, theories later. So let’s see what happens when people try to put these ideas into practice. I mean, it’s fine to write grand ideas on the page of a book, but actually, how do you try and introduce systems thinking into the way your council runs or create a regenerative enterprise that gives more back to the living world than it takes and still make enough revenue to keep the business going? I mean, these are really not easy to do. So the easy bit is to write the ideas down on the page. What if we did? I have huge admiration for people that I think of them as kind of pioneering, change makers who say, I’m going to do this even though I know we’ll run into the limits. So the action lab, and it’s a lab because it’s all about experimentation. We don’t know what will happen. We don’t know where it will take off and where it will start, but then maybe fizzle out. And of course that’ll happen. And also, I don’t know how long the organization lasts for. We’re not trying to create something that lasts forever for its own sake. It pops up and it’ll pop down at some point. It’ll have been a useful innovation and it’ll let go and something else will happen. So Doughnut Economics Action Lab, oh yeah, I could do that. And so it’s just about the practice. It’s about working with people who are putting these ideas in practice. And I get a thrill when I point to the work of others. So we have a team now, 15 of us, when somebody say, I really want to talk to Kate about business, I say, actually, you really want to talk to my wonderful colleague Erinch because he’s leading that work. I want to talk, I want to do this is my city. Oh, you want to talk to Leonora. She’s doing… she knows so much more about how to put this into practice and what’s happening in towns and cities. I mean, so it’s not me, it’s others in the team. Or actually, you don’t want to talk to anyone in our team, talk to the deputy mayor of Grenoble because they’re doing amazing things in Grenoble. And sometimes when people invite me to do a keynote speech, if it’s in a place where there’s any practice happening, I say, actually, can we make this a connote? You know, I don’t want to be this pinnacle keynote, keynote. Can we have a connote. I’ll talk about the ideas, but really then, let me invite in somebody who’s doing it here where you are. And then if you’re interested, you could connect with them. But they can speak of practices of which I can’t at all because I’m not doing that practice. I haven’t set up a company around this. I mean, I’ve set up an organization, but I’m not a mayor or councilor and I’m not teaching in high school. So I’m not the expert. I don’t know. And I love that it’s this community of people who… We’re setting up peer learning groups as well. So if you want to learn how to set up a small community organization, learn from other community organizations who’ve done it. And the power of peer to peer inspiration has been massive for us. Thinking about how you can enable ideas to spread and scale at the speed that these times require, right? So we put them all in the commons, and I need to say, we are funded by foundations, right? That’s what makes it possible. So we don’t have market based relationships and that makes it possible for us to say everything we put, we create, is in the commons, you can use it and adapt it and just share back. But peer to peer learning. And it happened when I noticed you, I could go on podcasts or give a TEDex talk or something and say, What if a city did this? But it was when the vice mayor of Amsterdam said, Well, we’re going to put the doughnut at the heart of our circularity policy. I mean, that’s just a whole different speaking because other cities say, Wait, what? It’s when we see somebody who’s like ourselves, also a mayor or of sustainability leader or a teacher, it’s like ourselves. But they’re doing that thing that we thought was impossible. But there they are, they’re doing it. That is massive inspiration. Go talk to them, learn from them how they persuaded their colleagues, how they adopted the idea, how they’re getting started, and then do your own version. So it… And one of the chapters of the book is How to be Distributive by Design, and this spreading of the idea is literally distributive by design. The expertise in the learning is everywhere. So it’s not with me at all.

01:34:34

So Brother Phap Huu, one of the reasons I’m enjoying this conversation so much is because the flow between what Kate’s saying and Plum Village practices is so sort of sweet because Kate answered the question without directly answering the question.

01:34:50

She’s practicing no self.

01:34:53

Exactly. So what she’s expressing is humility. It’s not me looking and sisters, so all that she’s just coming together and bringing, passing, holding the baton for a while and then passing it on, not being attached to it, this being the way and the only way, appreciating impermanence, which is that this, this is helpful at the moment and at some point it may not be helpful. And also generosity, which is I’m sharing this openly and that I trust that other people, what they’re doing are reinspiring me, that it’s a circular flow of energy. So that sounds very Plum Village to me.

01:35:43

That speaks on we call this virtue. There’s virtue in the insight and there’s virtue in the actions, and the virtue distrusts. And sometimes they don’t know Kate, but they read the book, they see the understanding, and then they see also, I believe when you’re practicing this, you’re also expressing the generosity for people to be a part of the mission in their way. And, you know, there’s one time, I was sitting with Thay in this hut and it was in the summer retreat, and Thay said, you know, Phap Huu, there’s one thing we can always trust. It’s that the people that are coming to Plum Village are people that have the aspiration to bring love and understanding into their life, because that’s what we’re representing. And what we’re representing is very real. But if it’s fake, then it will attract fake people. And Thay then said, and for the community, this is very important. If there is still understanding, there’s still siblinghood, there is still a real practice in the community, then we are authentic and the moment we are fake, Thay said, close the doors, no retreats, and you have to rebuild. You have to always come back to our essence and make sure that what we are teaching and sharing, we are walking it. And even if we’re not perfect, we’re going in that direction because then it is more than just the theories, it’s more than just the notions. It becomes alive in us. And I do believe that when you come to a Plum Village retreat, it’s more than just the Dharma talks, right? That’s what I got when I was a kid and I came. It’s what I was experiencing in the community. What I’m experiencing is something very real. These are people that are putting it into practice. These are folks who are really transforming themselves in order to transform the world. And actions and words, when they go together, they become virtues. And I think the virtue is also something that gets transmitted in also aspiration, just like Thay has… He’s not here anymore with us, but his virtue is still very alive. And that is something that is action beyond times, because it is not just limited to just him as a human being, but the insights and the transformation that he was able to show in his life has penetrated into the collective consciousness. And it’s being now cultivated by all of us and will be its own flower and plants in its own right. And so therefore, as leaders and as those who create something that has the power to shift, the power to change. The insight go as a river, I think this is what Kate you spoke on, is like, you see yourself as a drop of the water and sometimes your drop has a big impact. It helps push forward. But sometimes the water also needs to support other communities to keep going. So Thay says the reflection of the river is very beautiful, because it’s going in one direction. But who do you think is pushing it? And at the essence, it’s just the water pushing it. And who is the water? It’s all of us. And sometimes we are that big drop of water that comes in and just gives a big splash, you know, and helps move. But then if the water thinks, if that drop of water thinks it is more superior, then it doesn’t touch interbeing because the essence of it, it is just water. And that gives the freedom and that gives the practice of humility and the practice of community. You know, one of the things that I’ve watched Thay throughout his life where I really felt Thay never got caught in the limelight was how he scheduled his way of life to always have elements of community. He would give a Dharma talk and he would be the one leading the walking meditation. And then he would then sit with everybody to have a meal. So the way you position yourself practically in life