The Way Out Is In / Silence (Episode #94)

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Dear listeners, before we start this latest episode of The Way Out Is In, we want to let you know two pieces of news. The first is that the second book by Phap Huu and I, Calm in the Storm, Zen Ways to Cultivate Stability in an Anxious World, has now been published and you can buy it at any good physical or online bookstore. And the other is that at the end of January of next year, Phap Huu and I will be leading a pilgrimage to India where we will be recording a special series of the podcast. And this is to let you know that you are invited to come, if you would like to. And the pilgrimage, which is following in the footsteps of the Buddha, is between January the 31st and February the 13th. And is being led also by Shantum Seth, who is a master at leading people through the life of the Buddha in situ in India, actually visiting all the sites of the Buddha’s life from birth to death. And if you would like to know more information, you can go to buddhepath.com. And if you decide to come, we will go on a real adventure.

00:01:26

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

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

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

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And dear friends, today our topic is silence, thundering silence, noble silence.

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The way out is in.

00:02:28

Hello, dear friends, I am Jo Confino.

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And I’m Brother Phap Huu.

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And brother, we have had a bit of a standing joke over the years that we should do an episode on silence, because it would give us a great break. We would just sit here and there’d be nothing to do, nothing to say. And that we could all sit here for an hour and a half in pure silence. And then I was on a walk yesterday with my wife, Paz, who’s sitting with us, and we were thinking, oh, what would be a good topic for today? And she said, well, how about silence? Because there’s so much to say about it. And it made me think that actually it is a really good topic because it’s such a core part of the Plum Village tradition and of living a good life. So brother, in Plum Village, silence is often referred to as noble silence. So can you give a sense of what is the point of silence?

00:03:26

Silence is there. It’s always there, but we are so noisy and we’re so busy. So we cannot feel and we cannot hear what is present. So noble silence is a practice for us to just learn to listen. What I have learned from musicians is that you need silence for a note to be played. And we need silence so that we can cultivate our minds so that our third training, which is the training of cultivating insight, has an opportunity to be cultivated and manifest. So noble silence is a very direct order in a way. It is a fundamental practice in Buddhism as a whole, in Plum Village, I would say that it is not as strict as many other Zen tradition, and there are other communities that practice Buddhism or other monastic culture where silence is probably the fundamental policy of the way of life. In Plum Village, our teacher has once shared with us that silence is very important, but the silence that we are learning to cultivate is the stillness that we all need. And what does that mean? That means that even in the most busiest place, we have the capacity to be in full stillness, in full silence of our minds, of our worries, of our anxieties so that we can hear what is around us. Of course, we do practice real noble silence, where normally in the monastery, most of the time is officially starting at 9:30 PM, which is near the end of our last activity of the day as a community. And it stretches out all the way into after breakfast, after we wash up breakfast. And the silence there, it is to help us ease into the evening, ease into our rest and the silence helps us also just to hear ourselves, to contemplate the day, what have we done today? Our life is shorter by one day. Meditation, the second wing of meditation is all about reflection. It is to look deeply. How can we listen to ourself and how can we look deeply if we’re so busy, if we are always plugged in? So silence is a, it’s an obligation for us that no, not obligation, I would say silence is a place for us to allow ourselves to have spaces of deep reflection and silence is also to hear ourselves. So it’s not like to quiet our mind only, it is like to see what is our radio station that we have inside of our mind. When we learn to allow ourselves to be in silence, the silence become very delicious because it gives us just this immense feeling of spaciousness. Silence is also very scary if we are not trained in it. And it is scary because we get to see our restlessness. Maybe our anxieties, our depressions, our fears all have a chance to be there. And maybe some of us hearing this will probably be very afraid of that, but then there’s something to fierceness in Zen. It’s like, you have to meet the beast. You have to make your monsters in order to really learn to embrace and love yourself. So silence is also a language of love and noble silence is a distinguished silence that we are giving ourself the space to reflect, the space to be alive. It is not a repression. It’s not, it’s not to repress ourself of speaking, of thinking and so on. But actually that this noble silence is a silence of being present. And that, that is where nobility comes from in the word noble silence. And there’s stories from the Buddha’s time. There’s one very particular story, which is, you know, the Buddha had a very crazy life, even after enlightenment. And one of the crazy parts of his life was one of his own disciples, which is his cousin, Devadatta, I think that’s how you pronounce his name. Devadatta in Vietnamese. And he wanted to be the next Buddha. He declared himself as the leader of the community and that the Buddha should rest and let him take over. And the Buddha said, oh heck no, not on my watch. And what he did, his cousin, the Buddha’s cousin, what he did was he split it to community. He gained political powers. He became friends of a prince who wanted to overthrow his own father to become king. He violently put his own mother in prison, no, his father. And then his mother had to roll dough of bread in her body. And when to visit her husband, which is the king in order to feed him because they were starving the king. And the prince was overruled by his greed of power. Even though the king Bimbisara had the intention to, at one stage, you know, give his throne to his son, but the fear and the whispers and the news and the informations that the prince was receiving, led him to this deep fear. So this divided the whole nation and he then became king. And when the prince became king and the king died, I forgot his name, but the prince went into deep depression of what he did, even went into a deep sickness in the mind. And he went to seek the Buddha for help. And in the story, the king, the king now, which is the son, the prince, comes to meet the Buddha and he enters into the monastery where the Buddha is staying and he is frightened by the sight of hundreds of monks sitting with the Buddha in deep silence. And it was such a noble silence that the king himself was, it revealed himself of all his actions, what he has done and all of the bad karma that he is now receiving in his own ill being of the mind. And so that silence in a group can also be supportive as well as very confronting. And in our modern day, silence is, it’s almost a luxury, and we have to pay expensive money, we have to pay a lot of money to go to resorts, to go to wellbeing centers and to embrace ourselves in this silence. And we also have to, you know, give ourselves like a lot of luxury in order to curate this kind of state of silence. But in the practice, silence is always there. It’s free. It’s a part of the cosmos, it’s a of the offering. But none of us, we know how to access that because we ourselves have become so noisy, so busy and we don’t know how to heal. So silence is also very healing, because in the silence, we are allowed to rest. Our body is allowed to rest. Can we be at ease with our own body? Majority of us, we are very restless. We don’t know how to sit still. We don’t know how to breathe quietly. Our breathing of self is very noisy. It is very heavy itself. So there’s a lot to learn in silence. There’s a lot to discover in silence, as well as there’s a lot to celebrate.

00:13:07

Thank you, brother. And I know that one of the things I love about the Plum Village tradition and Buddhist teachings in general, but also how Thay taught it, he says, don’t, don’t trust me what I’m saying, but it’s good to experience the teachings. So given that, I suggest, why don’t we just sit in the silence just for a minute or so, and just taste it. And for those of you who are listening, it’s just experience yourself in the silence. See if you are able to calm yourself and just be aware of what comes up in your mind and just be present to who you are in this moment. So let’s just have a moment of silence.

00:15:05

So dear listeners, that was just over one minute. And it’s interesting, brother, because what comes up for me is discomfort. And it is because, you know, for me, the podcast is all about, you know, keep it moving, keep it smooth, have a flow, but it’s based around words. So having a minute silence in the… towards the start of a podcast feels like there’s something wrong, you know, I need to fill that space. And isn’t that so true in our modern society that, that we are so distracted that silence looks awkward and a problem, something we need to fill. And we don’t realize that in silence, there is… Silence is spaciousness. And there’s something about sticking with silence. There’s something like when we create silence, we’re creating space that in that space, we can create more silence. But to begin with, it can be very uncomfortable because, as you said, people’s fears come up, people’s sort of worries, people think actually, and people get bored because they’re normally so distracted. So it’s interesting to see what comes up when we actually are silent.

00:16:26

Yeah. And, you know, I was just reflecting on my teenage and my childhood because I have a lot of, we have a lot of children right now in Plum Village. We’re in the second week of our summer retreat and a lot of teenagers. And the cool kids were always the loudest, were always the most outspoken, rude and justlike loud, not just in voice, but also in body. And I remember trying to be that loud, you know. And it’s become a mainstream idea, also in leadership, also in success, in a way, like the ones who are successful are the one who outspeaks all the others. Coming to the monastery and the spiritual dimension, the silent one are the wisest. The silent ones are the ones… are unconditionally available and their love is much more boundless and they know how to listen. And so it’s almost like when you enter into this world of practice, you start to see how wrong, I mean, excuse me, I mean, I say this from my own experience, but how wrong our mainstream ideas of life is. And that’s why peace is such an ideal and it’s not a reality. In the last Dharma talk I gave, and I gave a Dharma talk on the last day of the first week of the summer retreat. A lot of people have a lot of fear about going back into the world because they don’t know how to integrate this way of being that they’ve experienced in Plum Village, which is… a lot with kindness, is loaded with kindness, it’s loaded with spaciousness and with presence. That we had that picnic in Son Ha showing half for a thousand people. Nobody was on their phones. Everybody was present. Everybody was engaging. It was a lot of noise, but the noise was, I would say it was noble because the relationships and the conversations that were happening were sound of just people enjoying the present moment and enjoying deep interbeing with one another. And that just means conversation. And the same, I had some business friends in my Dharma group, in my family pod, and they don’t believe that they can integrate this into businesses. And I challenged everyone and I said, you know, I think all of us, the first thought that we think of is like in the real world, this can never happen. In Plum Village, yes, because we’re not the real word. We’re our little bubble. And we can only say this is because we have been brainwashed. We have been given this view of how life should be. We should be very productive. We should very noisy. We should do, do, and do. And we shouldn’t have time to be in stillness. We shouldn’t have time to be quiet. We shouldn’t have time to be together and not have to say a word. Fun fact, dear friends, I think that Thay really liked me, it’s because I had nothing to say with him. When I was with Thay in the early years of attending him, I never asked him a question besides the question of Thay, would you like a cup of tea? Or how can I prepare your meal, prepare the desk and so on? But I never was there to extract from him. And I was very mindful because the world had so many questions for him. And the gift I can give him is silence. The gift that I can give him is my generous being that I don’t need anything from him, and that is a kind of stillness that you can offer someone. It’s very generous. And I think because I believe that, that I don’t need anything from him, his presence alone is more than enough. And I think that’s where our relationship really developed. I remember the hours of drinking tea with him, where we said nothing, Jo, besides Thay, would you like another cup? And for some people would think, oh, what a waste of time. You’re sitting beside a Zen master of the 21st century, and you’re not trying to gain more insight. So this extractive mind of consuming the silence is very powerful in our society. So my challenge to the whole community that we’re leaving the next day in the Dharma talk was, I think we have to reimagine what wellbeing is, what success is, how our modern world can be. I’m not saying should be. We are introducing another way of being that is so embraced with kindness. Like everything we do in Plum Village, the meditation is actually not that much in 24 hours, 30 minutes in the morning, an hour in the evening. And then we have all of these activities that are around us, but it is the intentionality that we put in the daily life. And everybody gets to understand and see their habits because they are slowing down. It is because the silence that is being offered and every retreat, we would curate the silence a little bit different. If we’re in a retreat that has more people that are recognized in a way, business people, artists, climate activists, leaders, CEOs, we would extend the silence even longer. Because everybody goes into, oh, this is like a conference. I need to show up. I need to tell everybody who I am, what is my name, what are my titles. This is my CV. Please accept me. Right? And we’re going to introduce actually, you know what? You’re going be quiet for half of the day, almost until lunch, almost like we would say into 11:30, which is walking meditation, but walking meditation is another hour of silence. So we almost have half of the day in silence. And we’ve received the feedback. At first, it sounds almost frightening to know that we can’t engage, but then their nervous system all gets to relax because we’ve been told that we’re not going to talk to each other. And we’re also instructed that communication is more than words. The way we look at each other in the line of getting food, you know, of just recognizing that that person is going to take that apple and your hand is also going there, but you’re recognizing, so you’re engaging and giving space for that person to take that apple and you take the next apple. And all of this is language in a way. It’s a language of recognition of being in the here and now, knowing how to step back to give space, being generous. And a lot of friends have shared that, that way of interacting has led to a deeper relationship with so many people, because then when you talk, your conversation is deeper than just, how are you right? It’s more, you ask deeper question. Like, what did that silence bring up in you? Almost like silence allow us to be much deeper in a way. And I think we’re afraid of being deeper also. We like to stay on the surface level because we’re afraid of going to the depths of our own consciousness, of our own being. So the silence that we cultivate in Plum Village, and as a practitioner, it can be in the physical schedule, which is mandatory silence, but it is also in the silence of when you’re in a space, when there is a lot going on, you don’t lose yourself. You know how to anchor yourself. That is a silence that you enter into and you are being nurtured by your own mindfulness, your own awareness, your own presence. And then when you speak and when you enact your action, it is very intentional. And silence is an art of resting. Like in this retreat, in Upper Hamlet this week, we have 450 people, that is much more than our day to day life. And I’m very aware of where there is noise and where I want to avoid, even in my own home. And this is because I know that I need the silence to care for myself, to protect myself in a way. The tea house is a very famous and popular space. It is the downtown of Upper Hamlet. It’s the heartbeat of the community in a way, but the heart is always beating and I don’t need to be there, because I have to preserve my energies for three whole weeks of being over 3000 people in Plum Village. So we have to become silence itself to give ourselves the space of rest, as well as to encourage others to be in silence. And I think in today’s world, every time we’re together, we talk, which is beautiful. I’m not saying don’t talk, you know, but there’s not many who know how to be together and not talk. And relationship and communication is as deep as talking.

00:27:49

Beautiful, brother. So there’s so much in what you said. So I just want to pick up on a couple of things. One is… So I’ve been in the world of sort of climate change and biodiversity for 30 years. And, you know, whenever I went to a conference, and especially in recent years, the conference has already a schedule. You’ve already got a list of people who are going to be attending. You’ve already got the pre, sort of the app where you can already get in touch with people. You’ve already seen who you want to speak to, who you want to avoid. You’re ready to say, oh, well, I think this person is going to help me with this. This person’s going to help me. And so before people even show up, there is no space. And then when people arrive, they’re always running around. And I remember I used to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos every year. Everyone who was… Because there was so much going on, everyone who was somewhere felt they should be somewhere else. And the person who was at the place somewhere else thought they should be where that person was. And everybody was actually feeling left out or feeling that they were missing out actually. And so it’s been a wonderful experience to be here for the Plum Village climate retreats. And exactly as you described, people show up. They don’t know who’s going to be here. There’s no schedule. There’s silence. There’s only first names, but it’s the spaciousness that is created just transforms people. And I just want to reiterate, one of the things you said is that the depth of communication that we think words are the way we communicate. And actually we know through, you know, many decades of scientific sort of study that that the words people use is very, very small percentage of the experience. We look at body language, we look at what’s not being said. And actually words are in a sense, literally a little, the tip of the iceberg. And the other thing brother is about, about really honoring people who are quiet. And I know you mentioned this, but I just want to reiterate this bit because in my career and life, there’s so many occasions, especially in groups where, and often it’s women, often men are the ones who dominate space and women are there, and it’s not just women, but people are there who are quiet and who listen and often get ignored. And yet they often have the answer. And so in every group I facilitated, what you do is you notice who hasn’t spoken. And then you bring them in and often they just need some support to say, actually you’re going to be welcomed in and you’re gonna be listened to and so much of the time they are the ones who come with the answers. So I’m just very aware of space. And I’ve also noticed sometimes in question and answer sessions that the elder monastics will answer last. The younger ones will often dive in with the answer. I’ve got the answer to that. And you have the elders and they’re just sitting there and they are deeply listening and processing. What actually is this question about? Is this question about just the words or what is the deeper meaning? What is it that this person is looking for at this moment? So I’m also very aware of the sort of that sense of stepping back and also, you know, another aspect is just the level of busyness and you’ve mentioned that. So there’s a Nordic, a big Nordic company I was working with and it was in financial difficulties. It had done very well for many years and in the last few years had really started to suffer financially. And I was working with the senior leadership team and there was an archivist who ran the archive of the whole company. It was very traditional in that they were the ones who looked at the history of the company. So I went to the archivist and I said, what is it that has changed that you think has led to this, this difficulty? And she said, in the past, people were giving space and time. And in that space and time they could create, they could understand what was going on and they could come up with solutions that really worked. And now it’s just time is money. And actually people are just hurrying around and by hurrying round, they’re missing on actually answers that are there if they were to create space for things to emerge in silence. So brother, I’d like to ask you a little bit about community and silence, because you’ve touched on it, but I want to go a bit deeper because I know a lot of times people say we’re social beasts. We love talking, we love connecting and it’s always based around talking. And one of the things in Plum Village is, as you’ve sort of described a little, is the community of silence and that often shows up in not just when there’s complete silence, but let’s say in the Dharma sharing groups and these are circles where people sit together as family groups and are able to share their deepest fears, hopes, worries, aspirations. And what they’re saying is held in silence and no one responds to them. No one tries to fix them. It’s just, people are just present for each other in a deep way. And I would love you just to talk a bit about the silence of listening.

00:33:58

The silence of listening is a whole art form and it’s a practice of embodied listening. And that means that we’re just not listening with our minds, but we learn to listen with our whole body. When we listen, all of our senses are very active, our ears, our nose, our tongues, our minds, our body, and our own reactions is the language itself. And our teacher used to train us, you know, come to Thay’s Dharma talk. Don’t bring a notebook. Don’t write what I’m telling you. And everybody ignores that cause everybody’s like, no, but the words of the wise Zen master, I got to capture it. And he said, well, the moment that you’re trying to capture something, you’re losing the next thing I’m saying. And he teaches us to trust our own consciousness, which is… Our consciousness is like land, a soil, it’s a farm. And we have many seeds in them. And when you listen to the podcast or the Dharma, or anything that is to nurture our own consciousness and body, let it just sink into our whole consciousness, our whole being, not trying to gain more, not trying to capture more. Like there’s this concept and Brother Spirit spoke about this in the science retreat, he’s like, we’re not here trying to gain more to enhance our label, actually Zen is about seeing our label and letting it go in order to see our wholeness, because our wholenes is not short sighted in just, I am a monk, I am a journalist, I am a coach, I am a business leader, I am my technician. We’re so much more than this. And we move throughout the world with this sense of belonging, being seen and being heard, being accepted. And I’m not, I’m still going through this, I’m not trying to criticize anyone, I’m just saying that we have created this way of view of acceptance. And in community this manifests beautifully in sometimes the loudest way. The ones who are not love are the ones who are needy the most. They don’t know how to be in the present moment. They don’t know how to be patient. They don’t understand the virtue of ripening. I want more. I expect to be enlightened in one week. So please, teach me. As how much can I teach when your cup is already full? So in the Zen way is that if you want to learn, the first thing to do is learn to let go, and that’s the hardest practice. And so when we’re practicing silence, it is also seeing what are the views that we’re holding on that is so noisy and that we are agreeing and disagreeing. And this is where our teachers say, and when you listen to my Dharma, don’t bring your mind of what is right and what is wrong. And this is a very difficult practice, especially for academics, especially for those of us in the realms of science, in the realms of philosophy, because there has to be something that’s right. And there’s has to be something that is wrong. And our teacher has also went deep into ethics, you know, in what we think in our Western ethical mind, in some other regions, they see that as not cultural. And we look at that as not cultural. And we all have very different views and we bring, when we show up most of the time, we’re bringing our knowledge of what we think is right and what we think is wrong. And so in listening, we want to put that aside. I’m not here to listen to you, to tell you what is right and what is wrong, I’m not listening in order to fix you. I’m just listening plainly simply as the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, her deepest vow is just to show up as a compassionate human being. And that is just to listen without an aim. And that is one of the most powerful presence and the most powerful gift that we can offer to one another. Majority of us, when we listen, our mind comes up with a solution. Oh, I know what to say. Let me come in. Let me chime in. And I see this in the monastics too. It’s like, I see brothers who have tendency, this person hasn’t even finished sharing the problem, cuts right through, I know what’s wrong with you, you know. And this is so like, we have been ingrained. And I’m so allergic when people say, I know what’s wrong. It’s like, actually, you don’t know, you think you know what is wrong. So we we’re training in the listening to also re-educate ourselves. It’s all about unlearning. How, now we’re going to speak. How do we speak? Do we speak in a way to make that person feel less than us, to be more superior, more superior than that person? Or are we speaking in a way to have empathy, to inter-be with them, to say, thank you so much for sharing your pain. I have that pain too. Or sometimes just saying, thank you so much for sharing. And I don’t know what to do, but what I can offer you is just this mind of I hear you and I see you. And you have to let insight come up slowly. And this is what is also, I feel, in my own… and I’m giving myself more permission to not give answers to people. Especially, you know, as a monk, people expect me to have answers. And the truth is, dear friends, actually, I don’t know most of the time. And when I hear something, I want to listen first. And the listening I feel is already an answer. Because the response is then will come… The answer will come with a response that is much more generous and less egotistic. Because what I’m going to share to you is just an experience. It is not the ultimate truth. We don’t… The only truth that I can offer you is I know that there is suffering in the world. And I know that we all have fears and we all have demons inside of us that we are trying to befriend and transform. And so this listening in a community comes at so many levels, Jo. And it’s very scary in a committee because in a true community, in true friendship, we will respond to you when you are so noisy. And when you are also not mindful. Because we are quiet so we can hear them, we can hear your thoughts even. We can hear your fears. We can hear your culture. We can hear your rigidness. It’s almost… OK, I give an example, something that just showed up very closely. We have a German brother and a Vietnamese brother. Two very drastic, different culture. This German brother is very good with rules and regulations. The Vietnamese brother is more in tune to community, will bypass rules and regulations. And there was a situation that was brought up and they asked me, and both asked me for the advice. And one side was coming with rules and regulation. And one side was coming from the community cultural aspect. And what was very interesting was, for me, was to listen to the two and I can hear on both of them the whole ancestral lineage what was coming through. And so in the listening, I’m listening to more than what they’re just saying. I’m listen to how they’re brought up, what they think is right and what they think is wrong. And then we bring, we share the space, and we share the solution together. We find the middle way. And everything is situational, right? Everything is conditioned, so we have to look at every theme and every question with all of this facts and all of its nuances of cultural aspect of understanding education, livelihood. And then you find a solution. And for me, we have rules and regulations in order to guide us, but the listening helps us to adapt. Listening gives us the art of adaptation, of being flexible. And in the listening, it doesn’t mean you just be quiet, but you know when is a space to share and how you’re going to share it. So you’re not trying to cover up the pain and suffering. What I see is a lot of times, when somebody expresses suffering, we want to have empathy, so we say, oh, it’s OK, it OK. You know, we use noise to cover up maybe our own awkwardness and our own discomfort of pain. And even we are shameful of our own guilt that can arise from what we’re hearing. And one thing that I’ve learned and one thing that I am working with, when we talk about feelings and emotions and mental formations in Buddhism, we have to learn to be responsible for them. I was very annoyed with the kids in one of the days. We were in New Hamlet and I shared this publicly, you know, turned it down the top. But it was my practice and I was standing up there. All the monks and nuns were gathering and were coming up to offer a chant. And the chant is beautiful. It’s with musicians, monastic musicians, and it’s the soul that Brother Spirit have like given to these chants, so it’s a real offering from our hearts. And the kids were just rowdy. They were just noisy, fidgeting. I just wanted to grab a microphone and just to scream: Shut up! And then I wanted to just like, if you don’t want to be here, get the heck out of this hall. And I just wanted to physically carry this one kid out, carry this kid out because I can see the ringleaders that are in the whole community. And it was almost like, I don’t know, almost like 150 or 80 kids in the hall, like they took up half of the New Hamlet hall, which is now the smallest hall in our hamlet. And of course, I did none of that, dear listeners, you know, this was all in my mind, my own podcast was in action and my own frustration was very present. And believe it or not, I still had a smile. In that moment, I really recognized all of the noise that was inside of me. And I didn’t want to make the kids responsible for my feelings. I want to be responsible for my feelings, this is the difference between a practitioner and one that is not a practitioner. Somebody that does not practice will blame all the kids for their emotions. But I want to take accountability for the emotions that are being present in me. And I’m practicing and I was breathing with them and I had a mantra and we have a gatha that says. A lotus to you, a Buddha to be. And I really see that these kids are the hope and the future of our civilization. Who knows, some of these kids will become presidents of our world, will become leaders of our word or just a happy couple, a happy parent, that will continue to shift and change our culture. And so in that moment, I was contemplating them and seeing them as the future bodhisattvas of our times. And I changed right away. And so because I’ve been practicing for 25 years, I can allow myself to let all of my noise be present for my silence. And that silence is my awareness. And I don’t let the anger and I don’t let the frustration overtake me where I would grab the mic and scream or I would physically, you know, move a child out, which I absolutely could have done, would have done if I wasn’t a practitioner. And what I was very happy was I didn’t put my emotions on the others, on the children. And this is a practice that we are learning in our times, especially in the practice of decolonization and practicing with colonialism and racism. And I learned this when I was in Fiji. One of our great elders shared from her practice of the way out is in, is to listen to your pain and suffering. And mindfulness is to name the suffering as its true name. And this elder with a lot of mindfulness, compassion, and pain was able to name her suffering in front of the community. And her suffering was recognizing that deep in her hate, in her pain, there’s a hatred. And she said, I hate white people. And it’s not the ones that are in the hall. It is just recognizing that pain from ancestral suffering, right? And of course, that opened a whole Pandora’s box for all of us to feel the pain of our world, the pain of those of us who are people of color, who have been colonized by the Western powers. And then there are those on the other side, those who are white, who the shame comes up, the guilt comes up, the pain comes up from their ancestors, what their ancestors have done. And then we had a deep listening. And one of our monastics, who is white, shared that they would like to represent all of the British ancestors because England has colonized Fiji. And particularly where we were at the retreat was one of the slave docks. And the pain and the guilt that manifested in our monastic was a pain that the body was shaking. And the monastic said, if you allow me, I would like to just prostrate and begin anew. And the friends, the islander friends, the Pacific-Islander friends, they said, we don’t need that, we absolutely don’t needs that. We just wanna be heard. We don’t wanna be given that guilt and shame for us to take care of. What we’re just asking for is that you know our pain and you know that we don’t wanna show up in spaces to be tokenistic. And even a word of sorry, if not done skillfully, can be seen as a tokenistic act. And our only request is that everybody takes care of their pain and emotions and mental formations and don’t put it on us, which is 99% of the time. What happens is then now we have to take care of your pain because we’ve shared our pain. And that experience that I had this year has really shifted me, Jo, and has really enlightened me deeper in the practice of when Thay, our teacher says that we have to know how to suffer. If we all know how suffer, the world will suffer much less. Because when we know how the suffer, that means we are mindful of our suffering, of our emotions, of our feelings. We’re not gonna put it on you now. I’m not gonna put it on my brothers, my sisters, my family. I’m no blaming anymore. I wanna take into account that this is also my suffering. And my transformation and my healing is also your transformation, your healing, my history’s healing and my future’s healing. And also the healing that is present here. And it’s very real. It’s an act, the three times in the present moment. And I see this because I have a nephew now. I’m a monk-le. And he is one of the happiest new descendants in our family. And it is because my dad, my mom, my sister and I were all practitioners. We’ve been doing a lot of work with our own pile of dung that we have received and that we’ve created ourselves also. And because of that transformation, when Kien was born, I can see him not having to transform those pain and suffering. He will still have some of it. And he will have his own when he grows up, but the work that we are doing in the act of healing, it bypasses time and space. The act healing is silence itself. The act of I’m suffering, I’m gonna go take care of it, it’s actually very respectful. Recently, one of our sisters died and we allow the silence to be there so that we can all just grieve. And I remember we’re all sitting in the courtyard of the monk’s residence and it was just tears. And then one of our elder brothers was howling in his crying, was like ugly crying, I would say. But it was so beautiful what the brothers all did. One came up and hugged the brother in silence, not saying any words, just being with the immense grief and all the other brothers just coming back to their breathing. Some cried along and some just, like you said, we’re in the silence to give more space of silence. So the feelings and the emotions can present itself so it doesn’t become a sickness later on. It’s not being suppressed and repressed. So there’s so much to learn in silence. And our teacher has instructed us some days we should practice noble silence. And we can, even if the community is not in noble silence, but we’ve been so busy, we can put a name tag, instead of our name, we say noble silence. And Thay instructed this, and I was listening to some of his Dharma talks and he used to give a lot of orientation, but later on he allowed them, he wanted the monastics to give orientation. And he said, in the practice of noble silence have a notebook with you and see when you want to say something, write it down. And the next day, see what you wanted to say. And a lot of times you said, oh, I actually didn’t want to say that. That was just my complexes speaking. So there are like physical practices for us to be aware of our mind. But then Thay is also like, I don’t want our community to just practice to be in the mountains, in silence, because we can all be in complete silence and cut off from the world and have our own peace. But then when we engage the world, we don’t know how to be silent. That is not engaged Buddhism. That is now applied Buddhism. So the middle way is very important. And we have to know the skillfulness of silence, right? Silence is not to then suppress or then to also bypass what is going on. So there’s a space and time for everything in our practice.