The Way Out Is In / The Beauty of Imperfection (Episode #80)

00:00:00

Dear listeners, just so that you’re aware, in this episode on how to come home to ourselves, we do raise issues around people who can have suicidal thoughts. So if you have a particular sensitivity to this, then please be aware that it comes up during this episode.

00:00:21

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

00:00:44

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

00:00:50

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

00:00:55

And today, brother, we are going to be looking at why is it so difficult for people to feel at home in their own skin? Why is it that people feel that they’re not enough? Why do they go searching for things outside of themselves in order to feel better about themselves inside?

00:01:25

The way out is in.

00:01:39

Hello, everyone. I’m Jo Confino.

00:01:41

And I’m Brother Phap Huu.

00:01:42

And we are sitting, brother, in the Sitting Still Hut of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in southwest of France. And sometimes it’s worth just reminding our listeners that we’re sitting here because it’s like, you always say, brother, that Thay is in everything in Plum Village. But when we do this recording, we are sitting in his very modest kitchen and you used to sit with him here as his attendant and make tea. And we can look to my left and your right and there’s Thay’s very modest little bedroom with his bookshelves and where he used to read and write. Brother, when you’re in this space and before we get on to this, because we’re talking about feeling at home, does it feel like being at home when you’re sitting here, right now, in literally the place where Thay spent many, many days and nights?

00:02:42

Definitely. I think the first feeling today entering into the hut and coming into his living space was this sense of coziness, how cozy it is in here. And it’s so simple. It’s so modest. It’s esthetically though, it’s very simple. And at the same time, the energy that he has installed in this place is of presence. And he named the hut, Sitting Still Hut. As a practice, if we want to be in touch with him, all we have to do is sit still. And it does not mean sitting still in the hut in Upper Hamlet Plum Village, but anywhere in the world. Whether we’re on a bus, whether we are on a train, whether we’re at home and we just enter into a stillness thanks to the practice of awareness of breath or a kind of meditation, maybe even total relaxation where there’s a stillness, the energy of mindfulness is there. So by calling it Sitting Still Hut, it’s an encouragement also that we can be in touch with teachers from many generations through just a simple act of sitting.

00:04:06

Hmm. And it’s funny brother, because I wasn’t planning to ask you this, but now that as I hear you speaking, it actually links very directly to the question we’re going to look at. Because as you say, when you come here, in here, you feel cozy, you feel at home, you feel you can just be present, be yourself, be at ease. And that’s so often what people aren’t feeling in their own lives. And in my practice of coaching, I would say the majority of people that I work with, when you get down to the core issue, people are most unhappy about themselves. That people feel that they’re not enough, people feel that they’ve got an imposter syndrome, they’re a fraud, that they just don’t have the capacity to find their own happiness within themselves. That they spend their lives looking out into the world and trying to change the world in order to feel better about themselves, to find meaning and purpose outside of themselves. What do you think is at the heart of this, brother? Why is it that people don’t feel at home? And often, of course, we’re talking largely about Western culture. There are many cultures in the world where I think people probably very much feel at home. What is it about culture, the way we are brought up, the way we see the world that makes it so hard?

00:05:34

Hmm. There’s so many layers to this question. And I think first I want to begin with this sense of competition that we have in the West and in the education as well as the way of thinking of success in our way of life it is to have more. It is to be better. To be better than who? You know, be better than maybe our friends on the right, our friends on the left. Or to be, to outshine somebody who has made us suffer. And there is always this feeling of running towards, running after. So there is a projection of views and of experience that we have received as an individual, just growing up in our society, that we know that we have to do more to get more. We have to do better to also pay our respect to our parents. And I speak in this tone where those of us who are of different ethnicity, who grew up in a more white society, because like for my parents who come from Vietnam, who were refugees, a big part of my upbringing was just like, I just want to become very rich so I can give back to my parents so that I can show my gratitude. So without even a kind of like proper education, like I just had this mindset, like I want to gain more. And to gain more, that means I have to be better than who I am already. So we are almost like we’re programmed in a way to sprint forward, whatever that forward may look like or may be. And then another element of it that I can reflect on in Plum Village and in my own personal practice, as well as being with so many friends throughout the years in Plum Village, it is an ancestral transmission of sometimes it’s like we don’t know how to love ourself. That there is a kind of cycle that we receive, like if we have suffered in our lifetime, all that suffering becomes a part of us without us even being aware. And then when we have children or we have continuation or even nephews and nieces or cousins, we transmit the suffering to them also because we haven’t yet been able to recognize and name the suffering that we have, to heal it, to transform it. So then these suffering becomes transmission by just being, just by connecting with each other. It’s like when a child is brought up in a family who all of the uncles and aunties use cuss words on a daily basis. That child will just naturally speak like that, whether that child knows it is correct or not correct, but because it is an indirect transmission. And I speak from my own personal experience. One of my uncles who I grew up with because my father was a refugee. I never met my father until I was three years old because he was on the boat and then refugee camp and then made it to Canada. And I grew up with a lot of my uncles, and one of my uncles was definitely an alcoholic and he always cusses. So I was told when I was young, like every three sentences, I would have like an F word in it because that was just transmitted by environment. So you see, like a human being, we are conditioned in our way of speaking, our way of thinking, our way of acting by what we receive. And so there is also a core of suffering that we receive… No matter, even if you are brought up in a very well off family or all the conditions on the outside looks, let’s say good. But if there are particular knots and holes that haven’t yet been discovered, those suffering will also be transmitted to you. And so there are individual, there are ancestral, and we also speak of cultural and society. So there is also like some suffering of society that we have received through our way of being in life, what we see, what we hear, what we watch. All of the conditions from around the world has a deep impact and it molds our consciousness, our mind consciousness, what we are perceiving on a daily basis. And then at the level of store, like there are pain and feelings that we have and sometimes we don’t even know where they come from. And when you connect deeper to it, you say, oh my gosh, it’s because I have heard of this. I have seen this with my own eyes, even though it was not me that experienced that, but that experience I have also received. So we, in Buddhism, especially in our tradition, the Plum Village tradition, our teacher would speak about sometimes we have to expand our mind and expand ourselves to see that our suffering is not ours alone, it is a shared suffering. And also when we transform the suffering, it is not only our transformation, but it is a transformation for the greater collective. And we don’t discriminate whether it is a small transformation or a big transformation because all transformation has an impact on the greater and bigger consciousness of our society. So when we talk about coming home to oneself, it is the whole journey of meditation. And in our Dharma, Dharma here is the teachings of the Buddha, but Dharma here is also, it’s just the teaching of Buddhism. So in our Dharma, when I say this means Plum Village, in our Dharma, we have a foundation of our destination, and that is learning to be in the present moment. And Thay, our teacher, he always says that our responsibility is to learn to be in the present moment and dwell happily in it. And when we hear the word happily, don’t mistaken it because I also had a wrong perception about it. For a lot of my early years, I thought like I had to be happy to be in the present moment. But when I revisited that sentence, dwelling happily in the present moment, it means that in the present moment, whether there’s a storm, whether it is a moment that is just blissful, peaceful, I can be happy. And if it is a moment that there is suffering, like I am not well today, I’m not experiencing joy and happiness, but I can still learn to tap into my happy conditions and be there for this moment. And I can generate happiness in this moment, even in the midst of having suffering and pain. And this is not easy, and for some it’s much easier than others. And I think the word love is a very beautiful word, but has also become, the definition of love has also been, I think in a way has tainted the word love. It leads more towards lust and desire and a kind of love, which is like, it’s just sex or it is just romantic. But I think the word love in Buddhism is very deep, and there’s so many layers to it. And a part of love, it always starts with oneself, like, can we learn to be kinder to ourself? Can we make ourself a little bit kinder, so our home in ourself a little bit kinder? And this is a real practice for many. And most recently, just a few months ago, I heard one of my Dharma teacher brother who is Western, and he was speaking to a Vietnamese sister. And two different culture, and in their conversation, they were speaking about how they can move in the world with such grace, some with grace, some with hard, heavy energy. And the Vietnamese sister said, well, because I know how to love myself. And the Western brother said, really? I don’t know how to love myself. And the sister is like, really? It’s so simple. You just learn to care for yourself. You just learn to smile to yourself. You just learn to smile to your suffering. You just learn to accept yourself. And then I heard the Western brother said, yeah, and that’s exactly what I can’t do. So it’s very interesting. And the brother shared that to me. And he asked me, can you love yourself? And I’m like, oh, I can, brother. I was like putting more salt in the wound. And I was like, yeah, I really love myself, brother. I really know how to learn to prioritize my well-being because in my journey of being in a community, knowing how to care for yourself is actually very essential to be in community. Because when you know how to care for yourself, then you are caring for the collective. It’s like, I’m going to be responsible for my emotions. I’m going to be responsible for my feelings. I’m going to be responsible for when I wake up, I know what to do rather than waiting for others to tell me and direct me all the time. So at the beginning, sure, you can have the guidance and so on, but you have to pick yourself up. You have to be mindful. You have to observe. You have to learn. You have to tap into your own insights that you already have inside of you. So I think part of the first journey of meditation is as simple and as difficult as coming home to your body. So that is the first journey and then learning to be at ease with it, learning to accept it and accept it as it is right now, but with the expansiveness of knowing that and we are not limited to this one moment, that we are also continuously evolving and changing like how we are conditioned. We, as practitioners, know now that we’re not only conditioned from the outer energy, we also have the capacity to condition ourselves. And that is part of the journey of arriving home, starting to redevelop our foundation of our home.

00:19:05

Thank you, brother. I was speaking to one of the senior monks a couple of weeks ago, Brother Phap Linh, Brother Spirit, who occasionally joins us on this podcast. And he was saying, well, a lot of people in the West suffer from two qualities that, or qualities in negative sense, that really rub up against each other. He said they suffer from self loathing and they suffer from perfection. In other words, they actually don’t like themselves and they’re trying to be perfect and that that combination coming together is pretty catastrophic. So just to talk about my own experience, brother, I mean, you know what you were describing about this conversation with this monk saying he couldn’t love himself, you know, this is something I felt when I was young. And I very much suffered from this idea of not being enough feeling I didn’t have a purpose, feeling I didn’t have any value in the world. And it took me a long time to get to the point where I could say I like myself and then another stage to get to the point where I could say I love myself. And I know that when I was able honestly to say I love myself, that my life completely opened up and became softer. I became more generous. I became more compassionate, more accepting because until that point, because I felt less than I was always trying to draw recognition and energy to myself. And also then looking at other people and thinking if a friend was doing well that I didn’t feel good about that because actually, as you said, in competition, I was feeling less than. And we’ll come on to this sort of idea of superiority, inferiority and equality complexes, which are known in Buddhism as the three complexes in a moment. But it’s a difficult path, brother. You know, it takes time and it takes, I think, and not to big myself up in any way, but it takes some determination and some courage. And it takes time to actually really look and be honest about what it is that we don’t like about ourselves, where that is coming from. It’s not like you can just tell someone, well, start loving yourself. What is there not to love? And to give you another couple of examples, brother, I remember many, many years ago speaking to the deputy headteacher of a major secondary school, so in England, which was teaching kids 13 to 18. And he was the deputy headteacher, very senior, and I was coaching him. And when I asked him at one point, let’s write down your qualities, and he couldn’t name a single one. And I was reminded of this because I was coaching someone the other day, really amazing person. And I said, well, let’s just name your qualities. And again, she was not able to, she found it so difficult to say what was obvious to everyone else was inside, but she found it so difficult to accept herself. So given all this, can you give us a bit more about what is the route we can take? Because one thing is you talk about learn to love our body, you talk about meditation, but for a lot of people, it feels like a really big mountain to climb.

00:22:40

Yeah, I think for the first thing is don’t give up. And I speak about meditation now a lot as it’s a journey. It’s a journey that the destination is in every moment. It’s not the destination in 10 years, in five years, or until I can sit and not move and have no feelings. That’s not the aim of meditation, is to erase all feelings and emotions and thinking. It’s learning to ground ourselves, it’s learning to guide our energies and to guide our mind to cultivate. So knowing that one of the causes of our suffering is not knowing how to love ourselves. And then we have to go in the art of meditation, we have to look deeper. It’s like, why is it that we can’t love ourselves? What makes it so difficult to say the word love, for example. But then, at the same time, when I say learn to love yourself, it doesn’t mean that we have to say, oh, I love me. But loving ourself can be in so many ways. Acceptance is a love. So expanding the value of loving oneself is important, like redefining what our values are. It’s like when I am overwhelmed and I know how to take a pause and I go for a walk on the grass, I go touch grass or I go in the forest and I just give myself this moment of just relaxation. Like that’s learning to love yourself. So it’s not, when I say that I do know how to love myself, it’s not like I’m patting myself on the back and I’m saying, Phap Huu, well done, you’re an amazing person. Actually that, culturally, in the Vietnamese culture, is like, that’s very egotistic. I can’t even… I can’t say that. And when I speak to my mother, I can’t say, I love you, mom. Like culturally, it’s a very hard thing for me to say, but I can share how much I care for her. Like I can check in how is your health? Like, are you happy enough? Are you eating enough? Like that’s love language in Vietnamese. So I feel like we can like expand and do a little bit of like yoga in our way of redefining love to ourself. And I think love in maybe the Western world, like Christmas is coming up, holidays is coming up, right? Black Friday is coming up. So the idea of love is like, let’s buy something for someone we love, we truly care. And I remember like having fantasy of like, oh, when I have so much money, I’m going to express my love in that way. I’m going to, I’m going to ask you, Jo, what do you want? Here’s my credit card. No problem. That was my notion of love, right? And I think we also have preconceived ideas of how to love ourself. And so I invite us to take a step back and to see already in our habit energies of our habit actions that we do. What are the things that we do that we know that we’re taking care of ourself? That is love. And very recently I’ve been allowing myself to have more alone time. And I just realized that I asked one of the brothers for a little space. I go in there just for a few hours on lazy evening and I just feel like, oh, here, nobody knows I’m here. Nobody can ask me a question. Nobody can bother me. I have time to just breathe and just to read or just to listen to something. And I’m realizing in this present moment, this is really important for me in order so that when I am out of the lazy day or the lazy evening, I can fully be energized to be engaged with my community, whether it’s offering a class, whether it is just having a cup of tea, whether it’s facilitating, et cetera, et cetera. And so now I understand that for me is a love language in order to care for myself. And it’s not bypassing anything. It’s just really identifying like this is the moment when I can really tune in and cut off the, we call them the winds of the world so that our consciousness is not always so stimulated. So Thay once said that our self has many windows, so our eyes, our ears, our nose, our tongue, our taste and our mind. So there are windows that impacts our state of well-being, state of being. And from time to time, as a meditator, we have to learn to close those windows so that the storm can settle and we can allow ourselves to start to feel what is present and what needs tidying up. And in this moment of action, of being still, that in our language, that is learning to love ourselves because you’re starting to identify and feel, ah… Like recently I’ve been very anxious. Where does this anxiety come from? Yesterday, our brothers, we did a beginning anew session with the monks. We do it once a month and we also expand a little bit more in the beginning anew. We allow each other to share where we’re at in the present moment in our practice. And one of the brothers was able to acknowledge that he’s been very agitated and the reactions have been coming sharper and stronger and it is not intentional but then it is rooted from his little sense of a soft burnout that he experienced after the summer retreat. So acknowledging that, seeing that, feeling it and being able to speak it and then sharing like I’m practicing with this and I’m giving myself a little bit more space. So in our language, the healing and the learning to love is not literally at the destination of like I am not burnt out anymore, but it’s already in the acknowledgement of actions with the energy of burnout. That already is love. That is already touching a root of it. So part of me, when I look at perfectionism, that is a crazy notion. Like what even is perfect? Like somebody who is perfect is, for somebody who is not spiritual, their idea is somebody who is very successful, knows all the answers, maybe emotionless, can weather any storm, can shoulder any responsibility. And so these notions that we carry on what it means to be perfect, I think in our times, with a lot of conversations I’ve had and even with you, Jo, in our podcast, we’ve explored how it’s important to even touch vulnerability, to touch the soft side. And I actually am recognizing just like in Tai Chi, like how softness and tenderness and, you know, when you are moving through the motion with each action that from the letting go of a movement can add strength to another movement rather than, I used to do a lot of Taekwondo, it’s a Korean martial arts and it’s very firm, it’s very strong, it’s a lot of kicks and our precision in the angles, 90 degrees, et cetera, et cetera. So I was, my mindset was very particular in horse stance have to be a particular, like a 45 degree, 90 degree knee bend, et cetera, et cetera. And then when you learn another martial arts, then you have to almost like unlearn that to expand, to see, ah, in this way of movement, this is also perfection, this is also ease, this is also wellbeing, this is also strength here. So I feel like in our times, and especially now for myself, like really even smiling to the imperfection that we have inside of us, it’s a joy. It’s a joy to say, ha, I made a mistake, I need to apologize because that’s a flower in action. So when we’ve done something that we know has caused suffering, we have the capacity to acknowledge and then to begin anew, to apologize, to say I’m so sorry for what I said. I didn’t… I was very unmindful. I wasn’t aware of the words I was using and the energy I was carrying myself with. So I think tenderness and compassion, I know we’re Buddhist community, so compassion is a verb in our language, we use it a lot, but I think in the mainstream thinking, I think people think compassion is very soft and it’s something that is very weak in a way, but part of the journey of coming home is there has to be the element of compassion because compassion becomes this foundation, becomes this base that allows us to accept ourself, to accept our unwholesome actions that we have already performed. We’ve also have already received even the unwholesome action from others that we have received and not to feel that that defines who we are, but in the present moment, in the action of recognizing also the other wonderful qualities that we have, I can still have a way to offer love. I can still offer a true home to myself, a true home that I can feel my breath, feel my body, feel that I’m a continuation of humanity, feel that I’m a part of this collective environment and that my action matters. So I think this kind of way of thinking, we have to remind ourselves again and again and again, just like Thay’s Dharma talk. Have you arrived yet, Jo? Are you home yet? Every time you come here, we’re asked to learn to arrive, learn to be at home. And as we progress on the path of life, not even meditation on life, I think that our definition of home also continues to evolve and our way of being in the present moment continues to deepen.

00:35:19

Beautiful. And brother, so just to pick up on a couple of things you said, what I’m getting from it is that when we learn to love ourselves, when we’ve learned to be tender with ourselves, when we learn to be compassionate with ourselves, then that’s the only time we can start to be tender and compassionate with those around us because if we can’t find those qualities inside of ourselves, I’m sure we will have said this many times in different episodes, but we forget so quickly that unless we are able to embody those qualities, then if we’re trying to show them to someone else but we don’t have them inside of us, that is false. That cannot be true. And that a lot of the time what people do is they make up for their sense of a lack by going into sacrifice. So they look to try and make it themselves okay by helping others, by being generous with others, by being compassionate, by giving them things. But actually what they’re really asking for is something back. So it’s not given with true generosity. It’s given because actually if you feel there’s an empty hole, you feel like if I give something, then I’ll get some feedback that will fill my hole. So one of the things I think is most powerful is that if we don’t feel it, we cannot give it.

00:36:46

Yeah, and sometimes we also learn from being with others though. I’ve learned a lot from observing my siblings, my brothers and sisters’ way of being together. I think one of my big learning in the Buddhist community as well as in the monastic culture is respect. I’ve learned that respect is also a form of love. And respect here is not like I always have to bow down to somebody, but I’ve really seen people care for each other, simple as that. Everyone checking in on each other. We have a whiteboard in the monastic residence and there’s a little section that says sick, if you’re sick or not, and everybody would write if they’re not feeling well, so we know if they’re missing from activities, et cetera. We know that they’re caring for themselves. And I think a lot, especially what now I am observing in a new generation of monks in our community, a lot who didn’t grow up in community, who are an only child, who grew up with also divorced parents. And so what they have felt around them was not love. So they’re relearning what love is. And a big part of it is not actually learning from a podcast, but is seeing it directly and learning to just tend and to care for. And I have to say this, and maybe I’m being a little bit biased, but on the Vietnamese side, it’s more easily shown in action. You don’t have to ask for it. It’s just delivered. I was sick this autumn and I have a roommate and I asked my roommate, oh, please, can you bring lunch for me? He said, of course, brother. And then dinner comes, nothing. But I’m sick. I’m like feverish, like flu. And then I’m like, brother, it’s like 7 p.m. Did you save me any food? Oh, you didn’t ask me. When I live with Vietnamese brothers as my roommate, you don’t even have to ask. Like out of a relationship of brothers in the community, I know you’re sick. Stay there. I take care of it. Very interesting. But it doesn’t mean that my Western brother that I’m living with now doesn’t love me, but it’s a different culture and it’s a different way of upbringing. And in a lot of the Vietnamese families, we live with community. So it’s almost like transmitted by the way of being together.

00:40:30

And I’m saying this, I’m not just watering flowers, we also have a lot of things to transform as a Vietnamese culture. But in some elements there, what I’ve learned in Plum Village is caring and action also doesn’t need to be asked. I think this is a quality that has been lacking in our mainstream society.

00:41:00

So taking that on a bit, brother, because what I hear also behind that is how do we go beyond this notion of a self? So when we look at the world and partly why people are unhappy is because, and you talked about culture, they’re inundated with images of beauty. They’re inundated with images of success. We see so many advertisements. We see so many photos. We see so many messages that are all about I am not enough and if only I had this or if only I had that. And what that’s constantly reflecting back is to the nature of a self. So you’re talking about that when you’re in community, then actually you are by nature looking out and there’s a sense of care, a sense of responsibility, a sense that it’s not just me, a sense of actually when I’m looking after another person, I’m also tending to myself and I know that when I’m sick someone will tend to me. So there’s a sort of a reciprocity there. How much of the problem of not feeling at home is the sense of individualism and a self and how do we start to move beyond it?

00:42:19

You’ve definitely hit the hammer on the nail.

00:42:23

Ouch.

00:42:25

Ouch. Ouch. I think all of us who are listening can acknowledge this, that a big part of our separation is this notion of self. And in Buddhism, the ultimate answer is there’s no self. And it’s a very big notion and even though you may understand it intellectually, but to practice it, it’s a life journey. And part of our understanding of the mind is first of all to learn to distangle all of the notions that I can survive by myself. I am. Me. Language wise, you are you, but when you meditate and you put the lens of a meditator, you can only be you with the non-you elements. So at the core of it, we are not a separate self. If suddenly we remove the conditions of our parents, we don’t exist. If we remove the conditions of nature, of the environment, we don’t exist. If we don’t have the water to drink, the rivers, the rain, the clouds, the food, Mother Earth, the cosmos, we don’t exist. And even to have language, the culture, the past that has come for us to have this language, to have this way of speaking, to have the notions to transmit, if we remove suddenly all of that, we also don’t exist. So at the core of our times together now, in Plum Village, it’s really, it’s a very difficult practice to be in community. But our teacher really believed that community is very healing to our times. And if we look back at our ancestral society and the wisdom that they have transmitted, even at the hunter-gatherers, they only survive through communities. And it was probably in the Industrial Revolution where our culture and our way of thinking and our way of being started to shift much more to an individual way of life. So having a house, having a car, having this, this, this, and this, we need all that to feel safe, to feel success, to feel at home. I remember my first time visiting Vietnam as a child in the year 2000, not everybody had a television. And of course, I grew up in Canada, it was almost automatic, it was automatic, every house, you have a TV or you’re not modern. Right? Or the house doesn’t even feel complete. And my first time in Vietnam, I actually experienced community watching. There was a series of, let’s say, Journey to the West, it’s like the Monkey King. And every week, only one episode comes out. So all the kids, all the neighbors would gather at the one house that has a television and we all watch it together. And instead of the owner feeling, this is my TV, none of you have the right to watch it. I work. I’ve gotten the wealth to pay for it, so only I can watch it. But instead, it was almost like, yeah, come, come watch. I have something that I can share to everyone. So in the past, I think we’ve experienced much more of community and we’ve experienced more of what it means to share and the joy of sharing and also the responsibility of being part of a community. So it’s like, if I can’t provide that, then I will help somewhere else. Like in our previous episode, when we shared about creating the album, so there are moments when the artist and the producer is in action, but those of us who are not singing at that moment, we will find a way to support that collective environment. It’s like, oh, you know what, let me make tea for everyone, because this track doesn’t need me. But I don’t fall into despair because, oh my gosh, they’re not using my voice. It’s almost like, oh, wow. And let me help here. And I feel like our society of way of promoting ourselves has been very, it’s divided us even more. You know, like the status, like what kind of job we have, what kind of responsibility we are serving. And how can we like dismantle this concept of self? It has to come into action with really the insight of interbeing. So our teacher gives us this homework and I still practice it on a daily basis. It’s like our community is like a body. Every member is a cell in this body. And there are moments as a cell, you have to work at the brain level. But then at other moments when you’re not needed there and you’re asked to go cook, sure, I’m there. I have this. I can offer a really good meal. And so we start to dismantle the kind of judgment that we give out. It’s like, no, I’m higher status than this. I’m a Dharma teacher now. I shouldn’t be doing this. Where are the novices? Bring them in. It’s like, and I practice this. I have to find very concrete things in my daily life. So I’m not saying that I’m perfect, there are a lot of times that I’ve also allowed myself to be carried away with self. And my office is when I exit my office, I’m right in front of the kitchen and the backstage of the kitchen. So I see all the trash, all the recycling. So part of my aspiration is I’m just going to clean up the trash and the recycling. I’m just, if the trash is full, take it out, bring it to the recycling area. And it’s just small action like that. But it helps keep me grounded. It helps tell me, and Phap Huu, you’re just a part of this community. Somebody got to do the trash. Don’t wait for the others. So I think concretely, there are practices very directly that you can feel interbeing, that we can practice. As a roommate, what can I do for my younger brother in the room? That maybe they may have an image and a view about who I am. And they may feel obliged to do this, this, and this. But at the same time, I’m your roommate. I’m just a human being. Remember my story with Brother […] Ting Chi? He’s like, I had to beg him in the room, I’m not an abbot, I’m not a podcaster, I’m just your brother. Just relax. Release your nervous system and not to also project. So in relation, I think we do this as individuals, me and you, Jo. I think the energy we give out to each other is to also stay connected to be beyond the self also.

00:50:40

Thank you, brother. What was coming to mind as you were speaking was what it’s like for young people these days. So I look at my upbringing. It feels like almost a bygone age. I had all my issues and insecurities but it felt within an environment that, of course, I had my sufferings, but it felt almost my surroundings, even when I was suffering, felt manageable. I understood sort of what was going on. It was quite simple. And young people today are bombarded with so much. And there are so many people who suffer from body image, feeling that they’re too fat, too tall, too thin, too short, that they don’t feel that they fit in because there’s so many demands on them and coming from so many different directions. Because part of feeling at home is not just feeling at home with ourselves, but fitting at home in society. And when society is demanding so much of us and then we feel we don’t fit in, that can be deeply painful. So what advice, if any, do you have for young people who don’t feel they fit in, who don’t feel they’re enough, who feel that actually, if only I was prettier, if only I was this or that, then maybe I’d be happy? How can people start to really accept themselves in such a hyper-capitalistic, hyper-sexualized, hyper-consumerist society?

00:52:29

Well, when you’re missing short, that’s me. I always had a complex like, oh man, if only I can be a little bit taller and so on and so on. Yeah, you know, it’s very real, these complexes. And that energy, it really drags you down a rabbit hole of not enoughness. And it’s very painful. I’ve experienced that. Now, as a monk, what I aspire to be and to have is actually not like the beauty outside. It’s not the body shape. It’s not a way of looks and so on, but I aspire to have inner freedom. And I think this is what I would share is that there are conditions that are out of our control, you know, and still to have the ability to see that, you know what? You are a flower in the garden of humanity. Imagine if all of us were the same, we’re all roses. How boring Earth would be. You know, imagine if there were only oak trees, then there’d be no fruits to eat, right? And imagine if there’s only apples, then we will never enjoy a durian. So the diversity of the planet can be a mirroring for us if we have a complex to see how in a forest that the forest is beautiful because of all of the different shapes and sizes of the trees and even of the weed, even of the mushrooms that thanks to all the conditions to be. So this kind of expansion and moving away from the normal mainstream view, and we all, I think, you know, tall, big, broad shoulders, whatever it may be in our way of looking is beauty. And, you know, when you become a monastic in one of the 10 novice precepts, there’s a precept on not wearing jewelry and cosmetic because our practice and our redefining of beauty is the inner beauty, is your inner freedom. It is your inner peace. It is your mindfulness, your energy of mindfulness, concentration, and the insights that you’re able to cultivate. That is the true beauty that outlasts the impermanence of body. And we have the five remembrance that can be very supportive in a way is that, you know, we’re all human beings. And you know what, even the most beautiful human being has to get sick, has to die. And we all return back to the earth. It’s a little bit extreme, but, you know, if we can just like see the impermanent nature of life and not be caught in an image and to not be caught and fixated that this is beauty. And being in the path of practice in this community, I’ve really learned the definition of beauty is so wide. I’ve seen people who are just so kind and honestly like, I’d rather be around someone that’s just always kind than somebody who is egotistic and good looking. Right? You don’t feel like you can be you around them. And then expanding on the inner strength that we’re able to cultivate. So the outer strength and the outer appearance is something that if we can now refocus on what beauty means, look at our inner strength, that will change our mindset, that would change the way we can move throughout the world. And I think for me, that was one of my biggest stability that I was able to gain is that if I can have my inner mountain as stability that I can always return back to my breath. I can still listen and still be with my breath in a difficult moment. That for me is the beauty that I can offer to the person I’m listening to or the community that I am with, the friends I’m with. It’s like redefining what beauty is. And I feel part of this podcast is to share that, what beauty really means. And our teacher Thay, I was always so captivated how magnetic he was around the walking meditation when all the kids would want to hold his hand and sit around him. And he’s not saying anything. He’s just drinking a cup of tea. He’s just walking in silence. And I think the beauty that he was expressing is his way of being. That he can move so freely on this planet and transforming so much of his pain and suffering through what he has experienced in life and not being caught by that. But now he’s walking with steps of freedom in this present moment, not taking for granted this moment of joy, of peace, of connection. And so for those of us who are young, we are always going to be tackling with this question, Am I enough? And not even young, even us who are older in life, guess what, young people, we still have these questions. But let us collectively transform this together so that what we can transmit to the next generation is you are enough and your potentials are all there. You just have to water the right seeds.