The Way Out Is In / Stepping into Freedom – Live Recording with Q&A Session (Episode #67)

00:00:00

Dear friends, welcome to the latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In. And today we are presenting the inaugural live podcast that we recorded in London before a sell out audience of more than 400 people. And, we chose the topic stepping into freedom, and it was just such a lovely event because normally Phap Huu and I are recording in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Sitting Still hut in Plum Village, and it’s just the two of us with a sound engineer looking out over the forest. And this time we were in a packed hall in central London, and it was just so wonderful to interact with a live audience. And half of it is around talking about what it means to step into freedom. But more importantly, we left half of the episode for live question and answers. And we hope that in the questions that you also see yourselves and can learn something as we both did. We hope that you enjoy this episode, and soon we’ll be returning to our normal schedule, sitting in the Sitting Still hut, looking out over the forest, being quiet and being peaceful.

00:01:40

The way out is in.

00:01:53

So, dear friends, welcome to the inaugural live recording of the podcast. The Way Out Is In. I am Jo Confino. I work at the intersection of personal transformation and systems evolution.

00:02:08

And I am Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk, student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village tradition. And dear friends, to begin, I would like to invite all of you to breathe together with the two of us. So allow ourselves to just relax our shoulders, having our feet firmly on the ground, resting our hands, our arms. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go. And just be mindful of our body weighted, seated on the chair. Don’t think about the breath, just feel the breath. As you breathe in, I know this is an inbreath. As I breathe out, I notice this is an outbreath. Inbreath. Outbreath. Breathing in, I fully take refuge in my inbreath. From the beginning to the end. Breathing out, fully one with outbreath. From the beginning to the end. Breathing in, connected to my body. Breathing out, connected to this community. In, body. Out, community. Thank you so much, dear friends, for breathing together.

00:04:26

Thank you, brother. That’s calmed my nerves. So the practice does work. And they’re laughing at my jokes already. So, brother, normally we record our podcasts in the Sitting Still hut, which is the tiny wooden hut of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village. And it’s in the middle of the forest so we look out over the beautiful Dordogne countryside. And it’s just the two of us. And it’s… Now we are on the road, we’re in London. We’re in front of a sellout audience of more than 400 people in central London. How does that feel? And why is that important? Do we care?

00:05:11

It feels so wonderful just to be in the presence of so many people. I feel very honored, to be honest. And, I was nervous, but, as I heard Thay’s voice, the way out is in, just coming back to the present moment. And there’s nothing to be afraid of.

00:05:31

Yeah, great. So, when we were invited to come to London, we were asked what topic to do on to choose. And straight up in my mind came stepping into freedom. And you, in a very Zen way, just smiled at me and I took that to be yes. And it’s too late to change our mind. But, when I think about it, the reason that just came straight to mind, because I think that’s so much at the core of what we’re all looking for. We’re all looking to feel free, to be ourselves, to find happiness, to be recognized, to love and be loved. It’s like at the core of our deepest aspiration in life. And yet, often times we don’t feel like that. We feel disturbed in our mind, we will be suffering from whether it’s anger or frustration. We’re too busy. We have all our obligations of life. We’re constantly bombarded with news and social media. And so we have this real dissonance between this wish to be free and our everyday lives. So I think it’d be really good this evening just to explore that, explore… So that we sort of, in a sense, connect people’s everyday lives with the practice of how we’d be free. So, in the light of the Buddhist teachings and also of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, it’d be great to start off with just saying what is freedom from this perspective of Buddhism?

00:07:06

When I started to be trained as an aspirant, an aspirant is somebody who has the aspiration to be a monk or a nun. We are given a book, and the book is called Stepping into Freedom. And the practice of mindfulness is at the core to touch our inner freedom. And freedom is always freedom of what? Just like when we practice mindfulness. I know mindfulness now is a very popular buzz word and everybody like wants a certificate of mindfulness. So I had a friend who came to a retreat for eight days and she keep asking me, where’s my certificate? And I said, you’re not free yet. You got to come back only when you are free I’ll give you a certificate.

00:08:04

Sounds a bit like a cult to me.

00:08:06

And part of the practice of mindfulness is to touch inner freedom. When we speak about freedom, our teacher always relate it to true happiness. For Thay, happiness has to have the layer of freedom in it. And happiness is to be alive. Happiness is to know that I have a body. I can feel my body, I have aspiration, I have things that I need to do for myself, for my family, for my community, for everyone that I love and for the world. But the foundation of our action, where is the energy coming from? So when we don’t practice, we have many sets of habitual energies that we have received. When we are born into this life, we have a whole package of seeds that we inherit. Seed here is like emotions, feelings. And some of them, they are from our parents, from our ancestors, from our parents’ love. We are taught love the moment we manifest. But then we are also inheriting their pain and their suffering, their experience. And when we are living, we may not even know why we have a particular tendency. So mindfulness, to practice, is first just a practice of mere recognition, to call our habits by its name and to recognize what are the sources of energy that comes in us. And that already is the first step towards freedom. And freedom is a continuous energy and a continuous insight that we are cultivating. And our teacher is very firm when he said we all have the ability to have freedom, but here the freedom is not from outside in, but the freedom is what we cultivate from inside out. And I believe him, and I trust him because he went through so much suffering. If any of us have dived into the history of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, he went through two very intense war, the French colonization and then the American War or the Vietnam War. But in Vietnam, we call it the American War. And he had to embrace all the pain, all the suffering. And he could have been trapped by all that pain and suffering. But I remember my first time meeting him in 1996. I was just eight years old, my dad took me to Plum Village for the first time, and I remember Thay walking into the hall and everybody stood up to welcome him. And just his steps. As an eight year old boy, I was like, this man is free. Like his steps, it was almost like he’s floating. And later on, I read more about him before he was my teacher. And in my head I said, if anybody can be angry, he should be angry, because he was exiled from his own country. If anybody who should be suffering and in pain, it’s him. A lot of his own students were killed unjustly. And there’s still so much pain and suffering that is represented in the next generation that he is embracing and caring for. But here, he can smile. He can still generate love. He can still be so present and not be attached to the war. He wasn’t ever using the war to affirm who he is. He was free from that. And that is something that I still aspire to walk towards. And when we talk about cultivating is very practical. It’s not just a mindset. Mindset is like a will. But for us, aspiration has to go along with action. So very concretely, in the Plum Village tradition of Buddhist practice, all of our Dharma, we have to engage it in everyday life. Our teacher was once asked, what’s the difference between Buddhism and engaged Buddhism? And he said, If Buddhism is not engage, it’s not really Buddhism. That’s just philosophy. And he once said this, not to tickle any philosophers in this hall, but he said, I blamed the philosophers for making Buddhism more complicated. But freedom is not a notion. It’s not an intellect only, but it is something to realize in each and every one of us. We take an example. We all have a routine in the morning, how we wake up, whether we reach for the phone right away or we take the first step and we realize as we get up of our bed and we realize waking up this morning, I have 24 brand new hours. And I practice to look at all beings with the eyes of compassion. That is a choice we have. So if we recognize this glimmer of life, this glimmer of a moment that we can make it into a moment of freedom, we have freedom. And then we don’t just stop there. It’s a continuous journey for us, engaged Buddhism. It’s wonderful to have the ability to have moments of sitting in stillness, 30 minute, 45 minute or even ten minutes. But if we don’t have that pleasure, even just seven minutes with a cup of tea, can we truly just have that cup of tea. Can we just be? That is the freedom that we are cultivating here. And it sounds very simple, but to apply it on a daily basis, it’s a whole determination as well as diligence, and that can also replace different habits. So in our practice of mindfulness, freedom is to be free from the energies that are pulling us towards the past, and energies that are pushing us towards the future, but also energy that keeps us floating around in the present and to have an anchor to ground ourselves. And we are all allowed to think. I know there is sometimes a view that, you know, Zen meditation, we don’t think, and we are only in the now. And Plum Village practice is only about smiling. But why not? Why not? Why not smile? Smile is…. Thay once said this, smiling is already an act of peace. And I’ve walked the streets of London. I smiled to everyone. Some people didn’t know what to do. There’s like, What does this monk want from me? And there was this particular person just kept staring at me. So I went and I just smiled back, and it shocked the person. But there are, for me, it’s just like to have this freedom, to be able to walk freely in the street of London has been 22 years of practice. I had a lot of complexes growing up and adorning myself with disrobe and shaving my head and walking this path. Sometimes we call it, we are going against the stream, the stream of the norms. Right? And we, as monastics, we give up our possessions or our aspiration to have a job, a family, etc. but we are seeking a deep freedom in our action. And when I was still a novice, I, whenever I walked the streets of Bergerac or Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, I felt very, very afraid. So I wasn’t free because I was so scared of people’s perception about me. And so in the practice we start to see our own inner fears. And so the present moment allows me to touch the inferiority complex. I’m in fear in this inferiority complex. And how do I liberate myself from this? And that’s a journey that I have to take and the courage I have to give myself to embrace, to recognize, to hold and to be authentic. And the freedom here is to give us also authenticity. We can find ourselves at a conference, which I was just at a conference in Paris. It’s the first time I had to represent the community to give a keynote speech. So there was so much pressure that I gave myself. And the moment I recognized, just be you. Just go up there and flip the calligraphy, just like what I did, and it’s okay. And then, when you’re up there, you just give the best you can with freedom. And then after that started to become relevant. Broter Phap Huu can you do this? Can you do that? Can you interview here? Can interview there? And a part of me was the pride, the ego, the manas was coming up, was like, oh, I can get people’s… I’m starting to gain a reputation da da ra ra. Then your mind goes on and on and on. And I was losing my freedom. So 22 years of practice. Right? Don’t think that after 22 years, you stop practicing. This is when you apply. Oh, what is manifesting? What is coming up? And I gained my freedom. I said, No, today I gave two talks already. That is enough. And you’re not allowing yourself to be pulled away, to be dragged, because we’re in it for the long run. So this is just a glimmer of my own personal practice with discovering my inner freedom. But how it connects directly to everyday practice, what we need to develop the foundation, for us to cultivate that freedom in the way we sit, in the way we are present. We speak a lot about true presence in the practice of Zen or the practice of meditation. Why are we meditating? It’s not to run away. Meditating is to be present. And if we allow ourselves to be truly present. We start to see ourselves more clearer. We get to identify the energies that pull us away from our freedom.

00:21:01

So thank you, brother. So I just want to pick up on one thing you said, which you said, you know, after my two talks, I know that’s enough. I’m enough. And I want to pick up on that, because in my experience, a lot of people don’t feel they’re enough. And so they’re always looking outside of themselves to grasp something that will help them to feel that they’re good enough. And I very rarely have a bath, but when I was in London, there’s hotel, and there’s a bath, and I thought, oh, I’ve got to have a bath, because actually we’re about to do a podcast. I need to think, what is freedom for me? You know, what actually is freedom? And what came up as I lay there was it’s attending to my pain. It’s actually just saying, actually, I have a lot… in my life, I had a lot of suffering and a lot of pain, and if I don’t attend to that, I’m a victim of my pain and suffering. And if I’m a victim, I am going to be looking outside of myself for something to grasp on to that says, oh, if I only do this, if I only achieve that, if only people think of this of me, then I will be enough. But we know that the way out is in. So, what is the way that we help ourselves to feel that we genuinely are enough? Because when we love ourselves that we can truly love another person, and when we don’t love ourselves, we don’t truly love, we don’t really have the presence to love another one. So how do we start to work with this feeling? I’m not enough.

00:22:40

That’s a big question.

00:22:42

I know, I just get to ask the questions. It’s great. What’s the answer?

00:22:47

This summer, last summer in Plum Village, I had an opportunity to sit with 60 something teenagers. And I asked them all, which one… How many of you feel like you’re never enough? And 9/10 of the room all raised their hand. And here we can see something very common, which is the ability to come home and just to look at ourselves and accept ourselves. It’s a journey inwards to understanding our own suffering. And in the understanding of our suffering, we can start to recognize that we’re also not just suffering. I know a lot of times we hear about Buddhism of suffering, suffering, suffering. But, you know, that’s the one thing that aligns and unites all of us because part of the package of being a human is suffering. But the other end, which Plum Village is also very famous for, is we talk a lot about happiness. And in our modern times, the advertisement, the social media, the things that we are told to receive in the future, it’s a promise to feel enough to feel good about ourselves, to then be embraced and recognized and so on and so on. But like many friends, even if you receive a status and you’re praised, you’re loved. But once the screen is off, and once you’re sitting on the sofa alone, you’re once again with the emptiness inside of not feeling enough. And this emptiness is not the Buddhist emptiness. So here, in our Dharma, Thay speaks about the simple joy that we can recognize in our life. I love this phrase, he said that all of us, we are a flower in the garden of humanity. Each and every one of us is a flower in the garden of humanity. And a garden that is very diverse is beautiful, it’s colorful, and it offers its uniqueness, it’s different cultures, it’s different understandings. And a lot of us, we were that fresh flower. Maybe as a child. Every time the children come to Plum Village, it just gives this life force of youth and freshness. And a lot of us, we forget to tend our own garden. And we forget to tend the flower that is present in us, and we allow the demand and the expectation to remove us from the simple joy in our life. And so here, when the way out is in, we just start to come back. And it’s not about the thinking, it’s the feeling. Like you’re feeling your breath, you’re feeling that you are here. You start to look at your own life. This is a homework that you can offer yourself. What are the things that are supporting you in this moment? You start to identify them. We all were given this task as a young novice or an aspirant. We call it a Cong Phu book. And Cong Phu doesn’t mean martial arts, Cong Phu actually translates as practice. And even martial arts is a daily practice. So meditation is a daily practice. Recognizing our inner happiness is a practice. And the first step in meditation is to see that we are enough. Sometimes we just have to say it. When I would walk the streets and these nerves would kick in, and I start to understand my habit, I look down, I don’t want to look at anybody’s face. And I would tell myself, it’s your right to look up. You have the right to look at people. And you even have the right to smile. So these trainings are very simple. But they start to become my own strength. It’s a foundation of freedom that I am building for myself. And as we start to come home to ourselves, not only do we touch the flowers in us, but we also start to see the weeds. We start to see the dead leaves, or the dead flowers that are in our own garden. But our art as a meditator is we don’t look at compost as something negative, but we look at it as an ingredient to keep tending and nourishing the field, the grounds. And so if we are able to cultivate and care for our joy and happiness, now we will also receive the ability to look at our suffering, and not to be afraid of our suffering. And to really start to accept it and see that this is also a part of me. And that already is freedom. When you start to accept all, these are some of the suffering that I have received, and these are some of the suffering that I have created. But in this present moment which embraces the past, which the present moment, it is building and cultivating the future, you have an opportunity. This is the key to freedom. The key to the present moment. This year, the monastics in the Rains Retreat, we were relearning our teacher’s teaching on ethics because our practice, a practice also has to have ethics. And he said this, he said that the practice of mindfulness is our key to free will. He said, I may be the first person to say that mindfulness is free will, because once you start to have the awareness as a foundation of your body, speech and mind, which are our three actions that we are generating and offering, they become our legacy. So our free will is to shine the light on how do we want to produce our thoughts, how we want to produce our speech, and what kind of actions are we cultivating so that it becomes an impact? So coming home, the word home here doesn’t hold us in a country, a house, but home here is the present moment. Home here is wherever you go, you can have freedom. And this is also what we called our mobile spiritual dimension. So for us, a spiritual dimension is not on a cushion. A cushion is very supportive, in a monastery is great, and we are able to cultivate this freedom. But meditation should offer us flexibility and freedom to be in all situations and still hold that freedom.

00:31:12

Thank you, brother. I want to come back to time, because while we talk about the present moment, we also have a life span. And in my last sort of interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, he said, if I live for another 100 years, I could focus on one of my calligraphies and still learn more and more. So mindfulness is often seen these days as a tool. And as you said, start off by saying, you know, eight days, I’m a mindfulness instructor and I’ve done it. My experience of the paht is it is a lifetime path. It’s not something that can be rushed. It’s not something that is going to happen tomorrow. It’s like a slow accumulation of wisdom. But a lot of people want instant noodles. They want it to work now, and they want it to be proof that actually this is going to help me. So, and I remember Thay, I remember once actually asking the most senior Western sister in Thay’s tradition, I said, Doesn’t Thay get bored with saying the same thing over and over again to you? And then don’t you get bored with Thay saying the same thing over again? And she said, but we keep forgetting and we need… Are we actually practicing? So I just want… Well, the present moment is here. I want to just talk about time because freedom, I want it now. But freedom is something that is generated throughout our life. So can you talk a little about that aspect of it and not that need for it to be, if it hasn’t worked after two weeks, it’s not going to ever work for me and I’ll find something else.

00:33:06

Yes. Deep Buddhism, which our teacher emphasized that that’s what we practice. And he said that, the teachings of the Buddha and the practice of the Buddha, of Buddhism, should be beautiful at the beginning, in the middle and in the end. What does that mean? That means even as we just start to meditate, we can already touch insight. That insight is not something that is promised 20 years later. Enlightenment is not promised 100 years later. Enlightenment is also what are we being enlightened from? What are we awakening from? And that’s why we have to understand the practice of meditation. Sometimes we, in Vietnamese and Chinese, we would call it a path, because the path is continuous. Because as long as we are alive, we’re walking this path. And there’s a lot of, I think, misunderstanding that, once you gain something, even insight in meditation, you’ve accomplished something. You’re done. And I can share with all of you that I had the greatest honor of being my teacher’s personal assistant. And I’ve watched Thay grow as a teacher. When I first came in, we were the first group of young monks and nuns. We were called the six baby monks and nuns. Very naughty, very naughty. What we would do, we would sit in a circle at meetings and we would tie the robes of our brothers to each other, so that when they stand up and turn to bow, they would pull each other. This is… Like one time we got so in trouble because of this. But we had to be, we had to live our youth. Right? We were… I was 14 years old and others were 15 and 16. And at that time, like Thay was starting to have a very large community of monastics. So his journey of a teacher was expanding and he was super strict. If you came in late for his Dharma talk, he would stop the Dharma talk and he would look at the door and say, who’s late? Announce your name. So you just want to dig a hole and hide for the next month. But through the years of him having more and more monastics, I saw his tenderness and his love and his compassion being more as his way of guiding us. And Thay was a very attentive teacher, so he would, through his bread and butter, which is awareness, he would be able to know which student needs sweetness and which student needs the Zen stick. So some students, if they’re too smart, then they will take advantage of kindness. So Thay would have to be stricter. But if some students, they’re very vulnerable, they’re very fragile, Thay would use love and kindness. And there is some in between. So Thay would be ninja mode so. But… And a part of it I got to see and understand the journey of life through my teacher. And not only did his way of training started to evolve, but also his teaching started to evolve. And if any of you wants to read a book on the Buddha’s life, I highly recommend Old Path, White Clouds, that’s a book that he handwritten himself of the life story of the Buddha. And in 2013, I was walking with him in Upper Hamlet, at the stone building, where he wrote the book. And he paused. And he said, Phap Huu, if I was to write it now, the book would be even better. Because I have learned and grown as a teacher, and because part of Buddhism is that we start to touch the inner teacher in us. And the Buddha was not a perfect human being, and one of Thay’s greatest aspiration was to make the Buddha human again. Because as Buddhism became a religion, sometimes we look at the Buddha as a god. But for us, the Buddha is a teacher. And because he suffered and transformed his suffering, all of us who are human beings, we also have Buddha nature in us and the freedom in us that we have to touch and cultivate. And this is just one example. I like to share a direct experience with Thay, which is even our teacher who has the label Zen master can even see that he can grow. He can continue to, his insight continues to flourish through direct experience. So when we talk about time and so on, the present moment allows us to be the best version of ourself in that moment. But as we continue to grow and evolve and our insights will continue to grow, and for us to not be attached to that even insight, we have to be free from that. This is a challenge. We think insight is, you know, the third training, mindfulness, concentration, insight. Why do I have to throw insight away? It’s because it’s like if we’re climbing up a staircase and if we’re at floor number six, but floor number seven is right there. You have to have the courage, and you have to have the ability to let go of what you know now, and you have to take that step to the next step. In order so new insights can grow and manifest. And the idea that we practice and we don’t suffer anymore, I was also caught in that view. And for my first years of training, my birth name was responsibility. My parents gave me that name, so I’m already a very strict person. So when I started to get training, I wanted to be perfect. And I gave myself that pressure. And by year five, I met my first crisis. I said, What the heck am I doing here? Why is my head bald? Why is my head bald? Why am I wearing this brown robe? There’s so much temptation outside. And I still have so many difficulties. It’s not working. That mind started to, that perception started to kick in very strongly. And it was the teenagers that saved me. They were the bodhisattvas that helped me overcome my crisis. And during the teen retreat that we offered, a teenager, before she left, she shared to the whole group is that whenever I have difficulties, I just can be grateful that I have monks and nuns that are my friends, and I feel already at ease. And those words became an anchor for me. I said, Phap Huu, you don’t need to think you have to be great. Just being a monk, you’re already offering somebody happiness. Simple as that. And then, you’re 16, this close to this disrobing. And at that time, the grass that is greener on the other side, my mind was so attached to that. And what happened in that moment is my own self, I blocked everybody from me. My own community from me. I closed my heart. And, luckily, one brother, he asked me, What is going on with you? And I said, Brother, it’s not working. I’m still suffering too much. And he said this, and it really woke me up, he said, It’s because you’re practicing that you can suffer. It’s because you have mindfulness that the suffering is coming at you so that you can learn to embrace it. Stop hiding from it. And in that moment when I accepted that I was suffering, and I accepted that I’m not a happy monk, my heart started to open and the two words, please help, were so hard to say. But it was those two words that opened the door of my own pride so that… Some of my brothers and sisters are here, they had tea with me, and they watered my flowers. They reminded of the goodness that is there. So when you’re going down, this rabbit hole of deep suffering, be very mindful of our pride. Be very attentive to what we are cultivating in our minds and what we are closing off to the support that can be there. And so, for me, suffering and freedom also goes together. I can be free in suffering. I can still be free while I’m suffering. And I don’t have to wait to the end of suffering to be happy. And Christiana Figueres, she once told us that, actually, this is what we have to be able to do, or else there’s no chance for our sustainability in our well-being, because we are going to embrace and meet a lot of suffering. But our responsibility, each of us, our responsibility, is still to touch the freedom and the courage that I can still smile, even in the midst of the storm.

00:44:52

Thank you, brother. And, you picked up on vulnerability. So I just want to focus on that in a bit because you talked about pride. Because pride is like shields up. It’s actually a defense mechanism. And vulnerability often people see as a weakness. They say is, you know, we have to show our perfect faces to the world, on social media and to others. We can’t admit to being weak or being uncertain because, actually, then people will think we’re not up to it, whatever that means. But actually vulnerability is an extraordinary power and strength. And in all the work I’ve done, and in group work, when one person shows vulnerability, it gives permission for everyone to start opening up. And so people feel freedom is actually often they mistake it for protection, that I’m more free if I’m defended, protected, I’ve got a safe space and I don’t let anyone in. But, actually, vulnerability starts to break that down. Obviously it has to be… Can’t be naivete. We have to look after ourselves. We have to create healthy boundaries, and we’ve talked about this before. But the power of vulnerability is that it shows our tenderness, shows our heart. It shows that we’re not perfect, and we accept that rather than hide it away, we offer it as a gift. I just want to sort of… Is there anything you want to pick up on? Just that the power of being open and the conditions that are necessary for that. Because one of the things in my experience of Plum Village is people come and the reason they transform in the moment we have these moments of deep understanding is because they feel safe. And when they feel safe and held, they feel at home. And when we feel at home, then we trust. And when we trust, we can be vulnerable. So the conditions need to be there to be vulnerable. But actually that is often done in community.

00:47:01

Yeah. Well I think you gave the answer already.

00:47:04

Okay. Next question.

00:47:10

But I think we can associate it to the practice of mindfulness.

00:47:14

Yeah.

00:47:15

Because awareness is to feel. Awareness is to honor what is in the present moment. And vulnerability is a part of it. Grief is a part of it. And I also learned so much from when I can be vulnerable with myself, such as when I can know that I have limits. There are things I can’t do even though I want to have all the answers, but there are moments I just, brother, please be compassionate on me, I don’t know. And leadership, I think we have this… our civilization, our times, we give it a coat as, you know, somebody who knows all the answer. Like always solid, no emotions and just action. But I think that’s such a wrong perception. And I think that that particular guard is actually just, we’re just hiding from our own self. And the more that we hide from our self, the more we will disconnect. I think vulnerability is one of the bridges that allows us to be human. It allows us to feel one another. It’s just like, if I suffer and I can share that, then you know I’m not perfect and you can accept me. And then you can also feel that we’re not alone on this path together. And so vulnerability becomes a great strength. But we shouldn’t also be attached to vulnerability. So everything… there’s a middle way. This is very important in Buddhism. The Buddha has shared that we shouldn’t be too extreme and we shouldn’t be too loose, like a musician. When we are tuning an instrument, if the string is perfectly tuned, it will play the melody it needs. But if it’s too intense, it was snap. And if it’s too loose, it would never offer anything beautiful. And so the middle way to what we apply our vulnerability, we have to shine that light also. We shouldn’t also use vulnerability to gain something also, right? So there’s always an ethics to it, a right mindfulness to it. So much later in 2014, our teacher used the term a lot right mindfulness because there is wrong mindfulness and there’s wrong concentration and it’s wrong insight. And so there is right mindfulness and there’s right concentration and right insight. So there’s also right vulnerability. But here I think that in our times vulnerability is not really giving permission to be expressed. And I think looking back at my own journey, yeah, you know, when Thay died, when our teacher passed, I think the whole community, we needed to cry. And I remember the live stream, like a lot of us were very open to our tears. And in a lot of the comments were like, aren’t you guys not supposed to feel? Wait, why are the monastics crying? Aren’t they Zen masters? Aren’t they able to control their emotions? And I think that’s also a wrong perception because we’re all humans and through vulnerability, through grieving is an expression of love. Sometimes vulnerability is an expression of love to our self. So the vulnerability is to see and feel and to also honor what needs to be there. Only when we honor it can healing take place. Can transformation be part of the journey of mindfulness.

00:51:55

Thank you, brother. Just to get practical for a moment. So one of the things that I think holds Plum Village together, of course, all the practices, all the trainings, and freedom is also just seeing, experiencing that a lot of gratitude, actually, because when we held tightly and we’re suffering, we think that everything’s about us. And when we have gratitude, we open ourselves up to the world. And in a sense, all the Plum Village teachings are about gratitude. And so my gratitude for the food, gratitude for each other. And I’m just wondering if you can talk a bit about, just from a practical basis, because often people are very attached to their suffering. And actually the practices are not just one practice that release us, but this sort of sense of gratitude for life that helps us to sort of open up our hearts, open up our minds, and actually see that we are interare with everyone. So given, you know, that the heart of Thay’s teachings are about interbeing, how does interbeing relate to freedom?

00:53:12

So if we are familiar with interbeing, we will know what it means. But if we are not familiar with interbeing, this is the insight that everything is interconnected to each other. Just like when we look at our own selves, we think we have a self, which is true. So Buddhism does a lot of contradiction, just FYI. So there is a self, but the self can touch the non self. And the non self teaches us that I cannot be here if my parents weren’t together. I cannot be here if my parents didn’t suffer and go to a retreat. And I cannot be here if none of you are here. I cannot be here without the sun, the environment, and so on and so on. So when we look deeper and deeper into our self, we can touch the deep wisdom that we are not alone, and this can also be a support for our own journey of I am enough because if you are there, everything is there. And so interbeing, when practiced on a daily basis, very practically, life becomes a miracle. And life is a wonder. And it comes down to the essential simplicity of life. So in life we have the mundane, the day to day, you know, eating, walking, conversation, connecting. But how are we eating? When we’re eating the food, do we touch interbeing? We can all be a poet and see the sun, the rain in this bread. Thay has that calligraphy, the whole cosmos is in this piece of bread. And if you can just eat mindfully like this, you start to also have a deep relation to the environment. And by having a connected relationship to the earth, we fall back in love with the earth. And as we are in love, we want to care and hold and protect. So interbeing becomes not just a theory, but a direct experience. And by interbeing the gratitude of life continues to show up. But are we mindful enough to recognize that? Are we mindful enough to see that this is a happy moment. Right? Or are we just caught in our radio station? And that’s why to have this anchor of coming home to the bod, for us, we use the mindful breath. Whenever we hear the phone, we practice breathing. That’s really our training. It’s made the podcast.

00:56:33

And what a beautiful sound.

00:56:34

Yes.

00:56:35

It’s just like the birdsong in Plum Village.

00:56:38

And so pausing, moments of pause like this can also just remind us that life is beautiful. And like I said, even within pain and suffering, life can still be beautiful. And so the gratitude it can rekindle the fire of life in us. And from time to time, we have to be skillful in our way of life. Right? When it’s too regular, be spontaneous, be an artist and remind yourself of the wonders of life. And that’s why, for us, a regular schedule is very important. But then from time to time, we have lazy day. Go and dance in the fields. Go, and, you know, the brothers just go have a picnic. Sometimes we would organize canoeing trips for the whole monastic sangha, 50 something canoes down the Dordogne river of France. And that’s meditation, because that is enjoying togetherness. So don’t forget to water the flowers that are also present in us. And then there are moments and we have to water our stability, the solidity, the mountain in us. And then there are moments when together we meet a difficulty. We need all our stillness to reflect on it. The stillness that offers the light of calm to see what is really there, and then the space that we can all generate inside of us to have freedom and to be open. Openness is a part of freedom. To have openness to cultivate that maybe my view is not the greatest view. And maybe other insight can help my worldview, become more compassionate. So openness is also another layer of freedom.

00:58:49

So, brother one, one of the things around, when I used to attend conferences, they always said they would be at the end of it, you know, or that part of it would be question and answer. And people would endlessly talk and then in the last five minutes, they would take one question. And I always thought that shouldn’t be like that. So today, this evening, we have decided actually that, half the time is us sharing, but then half the time is for questions, because actually you are the audience you are here to share and to learn. So what we are going to do now is we’re going to just stop this section, and Brother Phap Huu is just going to close this section with a short guided meditation just to bring us back to ourselves. But just before he does that, what we’re going to do is we’re going to have a microphone at the front here, which is coming very mindfully. That is the slowest microphone mover I’ve ever seen. Beautiful, thank you. And there’s going to be a microphone up there as well. And what we’re going to do is ask people just to come and line up behind each microphone and not to do that yet because we’re going to do the meditation. And then once we’ve done the meditation, Brother Phap Huu will just introduce what a Zen question and answer session looks like.