The Way Out Is In / The Heart of Meditation – Part One (Episode #61)

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

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I’m Jo Confino, 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 today, brother, look who’s in the hut. It’s our favorite… Oh, I’m not allowed to discriminate… It’s our favorite guest, Sister True Dedication. We, brother, we try and bring Sister True Dedication often, and it’s hard to capture her, isn’t it? Hard to get her to come and join us. So, sister, it’s a joy to have you here today.

00:00:56

Thank you so much. It’s lovely to be here with you both smiling already early in the morning.

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Sister’s here, weeee. And today we are going to be talking about meditation. And brother, we’ve… People will think, well, we’re on episode 61 or 62, how come we aren’t only talking about meditation? But I think we maybe go into that, but today we are going to talk about the way of meditation.

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The way out is in.

00:01:43

Hello dear listeners, I am Jo Confino.

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I’m Brother Phap Huu.

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And I’m Sister True Dedication.

00:01:49

And, Brother Phap Huu, how come it’s taken us so long to talk about meditation?

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If you actually listen to all of the episodes, they are all meditations, but I think we all are caught in an idea of what meditation is in a form such as we should be sitting very still with our back upright on a cushion, levitating and having no thoughts in our minds. And therefore we have received questions as well as feedback and comments asking us to guide and to talk about meditation. But if we actually reflect on all the topics that we have addressed and shared through the two of us with also many of the guests that we’ve had, meditation is deep looking. So all of our discussions is a process of deep looking into happiness, suffering, well-being, ill being, the past, the present and the future. But it is true we haven’t specifically talked about like a sutra or… Actually, we have, but maybe we haven’t touched the foundational one of our tradition in the Plum Village school, which is the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing. So in today’s episode, we would like to do that and we will hear about the exercises. But with Sister True Dedication’s presence, her and I, we will help break down the practice of each meditation and how to apply it. And I think we can even do it as we are listening to this podcast. And we also have to understand that meditation, as mentioned before, it has two wings, like a bird. The first wing is learning to stop, learning to identify like stopping because our mind is always moving, our mind is always seeking. Even enlightenment is a seeking, but having the capacity to just arrive in the present moment, to be in touch with the very here and now. And there are so many layers in the here and now, and we always come back to the body, first of all, because we have to know that we are alive, we are present. So having the capacity to stop is the first wing of meditation, and stopping here is not just physically, but is also bringing the mind to the present, and we can identify that if it is running towards the past or being carried away by the future or even being lost in the present. And that creates a habit of procrastination, of daydreaming, of nonstop thinking. And please understand, we’re not saying that thinking is wrong. There can be productive thinking. We speak about right view in Buddhism. And the second wing of meditation is the capacity to look deeply. But meditation always has to have an object, like to meditate we generate mindfulness, and mindfulness also has to have an object to be mindful of. So that is why for us, the breathing, the breath, it doesn’t come from the tradition of Plum Village, it originated from the Buddha himself. So the teachings of Plum Village and the teachings that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh has chosen to be a foundational practice and study, it comes all the way from the Buddhist time. So Plum Village is actually also very traditional. A lot of people think that Plum Village is not traditional. I would argue back that actually we are very traditional because a lot of our Dharma, we take it from the root of the Buddha’s time, like the 16 exercises of mindful breathing, the four establishments of mindfulness, which is connected to the 16 exercises of mindful breathing. We always teach on the eight noble path, deep listening and loving speech, ethics, the five mindfulness trainings, the 14 mindfulness trainings. So I would like to say that our meditation has a very deep root, but sometimes friends and folks misunderstand it because our teacher has spoken in today’s language and sometimes simplifying it. It sounds simple, but to truly apply it into everyday life, this is where it takes trainings, it takes experience, and it takes a community to reflect, to support each other, as well as growing in a way of meditation is to not see that there is an end to it. And I think a lot of us growing up in a more Western background like there’s a goal and we need to meet it and we’re done. And I think that has also been applied to meditation, mindfulness or spirituality. We think that there is one aim and if we practice for this long, then we will feel successful, accomplished and then we’re finished. But even the Buddha never stopped practicing after his enlightenment. Even our teacher never stopped practicing after being called a Zen master. So we have to change our view towards meditation, to see and understand that meditation is a path of practice. And each step, each breath is a journey, is a continuation. And we will grow in our own understanding of the breath. And what I really like about mindful breathing is that there’s no excuse, that none of us can have an excuse to not practice because as long as we are present, our breath always accompanies us. So our practice is also learning to befriend the breath, and seeing the breath is our spiritual foundation, our spiritual home. And it’s mobile because wherever we go, that breath is with us.

00:08:58

So thank you for that introduction. So I have been slightly concerned about doing this podcast, which is maybe another reason why it’s number 61 or 62, because I am not a natural meditator. So Paz, my wife, is sitting here, she gets up every day and the first thing she does is sit and I don’t. And so one of the questions I want ask, so I love sitting with the community in Plum Village, but when it’s on my own, I find it very difficult to have the encouragement or the sort of sense that actually sitting is going to help me because I like to… I feel I’m a mindful practitioner, through the day I look deeply, but I don’t naturally sit. So Sister True Dedication, before we dive into sort of, you know, the Plum Village tradition of meditation, is it essential to meditate in order to be a good practitioner of mindfulness? And, you know, is sitting the best way or the most effective way in your mind to actually gain these deep insights? Or is it just another way of doing it? And actually there are other ways that are just as effective. Is it a personal thing or is that actually there is a collective sense that actually everyone can truly benefit from this?

00:10:18

Some really good questions there, Jo.

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Something to wake us up in the morning.

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So I think, first of all, to also put you at ease, I think we may have had this conversation before.

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Probably.

00:10:31

That I also really struggled with sitting meditation at the beginning and I was very like wholehearted practitioner of mindfulness coming on retreats here in Plum Village, going back to the UK to work in London. And the one thing I could not do was the sitting meditation. I could do 20 minutes of walking meditation on the way to work. I could have all these different poems, the gathas integrated into my day, when I would pick up the phone, when I would go to the water cooler, when I would make my cup of tea. I had all sorts of practices of deep listening to my colleagues, like I was applying mindfulness, but I was really struggling with the sitting and the best place that I learned to sit was on the London busses. Busses rather than tube because we know that the London tube is super noisy. And it was a nun here in Plum Village that told me because I said I just feel so full and my life is so busy. And when I sit still, I just feel like my life is… I mean, my mind is so just busy and it’s just like, I don’t know, so much activity. And she said, Well, you need to learn to create islands of peace in your day. So actually she’s like, Don’t try to connect the dots, you know, don’t try and have a whole day in mindfulness, but try to have these little points of mindfulness through the day. And she was the one who said, when you sit on the bus on your way to work, don’t listen to music, don’t read a book or magazine. And this is before smartphones. So nowadays she’d say, Don’t scroll. And so I took this advice to heart. I would sit on London busses, take care of my posture a bit, follow my breathing, and just be there for life, for the city. And I think I really fell in love with London sitting like that on the bus, following my breathing, but just, you know, being aware of the people around me, having eye contact with people around me, looking at the streets, looking at the trees, the old buildings, the crazy street names. And it became… so my sitting began on London busses. And really it was only after quite a few years of that, maybe two or three that I started to have my own sort of more quiet sitting meditation that actually then the next step was in the park, before my lunch, because I insisted on taking my full hour long lunch break. I wanted to eat in mindfulness with the five contemplations. And then after I’d eaten, I would then sit quietly, you know, for five or 10 minutes in the park and just be aware of my breathing, the birds, the grass, the leaves, the trees. And for me, that started to integrate a deeper stillness into my day. And I think what meditation in the sitting position offers is this combination of stillness, alertness, kind of deep calm, and as Brother Phap Huu was saying then, then the deep looking can arise from that stopping and that stillness. And so for each one of us, we may have to be quite creative to find what will be the moment for us when we can have real stillness. And sometimes, like after meals, the body feels very calm and satisfied, so that’s a good trick that I learned. But there may be other things we do. It may be after doing a bit of gardening, we then just sit outside with a cup of tea and create the stillness there. Or it might be by the beach or in a sort of beautiful place somewhere that’s sort of calm. But what I started to realize, you see, is that everything I’m doing before that sitting is determining the quality of that ten or 15 minutes of sitting in stillness. And so this would be, in our teachers language, that’s the insight of interbeing. Like how we live the other moments of the day is going to determine what’s the state of our mind and body when we sit on a cushion. So if we kind of rush to have our timed 10 minutes of single pointed concentration and our mind is full of what we’ve been watching, what we’ve been hearing and what we’ve been worrying about, the quality of those 10 minutes is not going to be so high. So it’s to kind of create all sorts of like zones around that silence and stillness. And so even if it is only five or 10 minutes, it can have that quality and that depth and spaciousness. And then for people like you and me, Jo, then it starts to feel delicious. It starts to feel like refreshing water, you know, it feels calming and wonderful and it doesn’t feel like yet another thing that we’ve sort of crammed into what’s already a very kind of full day.

00:15:22

And sister, what you’re offering here is because a lot of people have a fixed idea of meditation as you sit on a cushion in a lotus position, in a quiet room with your incense and maybe an altar. But you’re broadening that out because obviously sitting in a quiet room, which is your space and a sacred space, I’m sure, is for some people very wonderful and very necessary. But what you’re doing is broadening it out, saying actually meditation is not a fixed point in time or a fixed place, but it’s a way we see the world.

00:15:56

Exactly. And I think that’s what was so important to Thay, was to bring meditation like out of the meditation hall and to integrate it into our daily life for it to be accessible to everyone. So there’s a sort of, there is a doorway, a pathway to touch peace and stillness in our day. We don’t need to be in a temple. We don’t need to be in a formal setting in front of an altar, even at home. But that that stillness, that peace, that presence is available to us. And the doorway for each of us to reach it is the breathing and is the simplicity around that moment. And that’s where we really have this just direct authenticity of Zen, which is there in the present moment, whatever it contains. And having taken care of our body mind in such a way that when we then show up to say, Alright, I am just going to be here in this moment with my breath and body to be in touch with life, whatever it’s got in it, if it’s got a city in it, if it’s got a park in it, if it’s got, I don’t know, an ocean in it or whatever else it’s got in it, we say I will have this total complete presence. And I will kind of be still in my body so I can really pick up everything going on in me and around me. And that makes it such a different enterprise or pursuit than this idea I need to attain a certain thing with concentration. And in the deepest aspect of our tradition we learn there’s nothing to attain. There are fruits that may ripen and we will get to them in the later steps of these 16 exercises of mindful breathing. But ultimately there is no kind of goal. We’re not sitting for anything. I remember one time we wanted to have a session in London and to call for peace, and it was the time there was still so much fighting in Afghanistan and we wanted to have a sitting for peace. And Thay summoned us into his room and and said There is no such thing as sitting for peace. We will sit in peace. And so that became the theme of this gathering that ended up being 3000 people in Trafalgar Square in 2012. We were sitting in peace, not kind of for peace. And so how could we create in the center of the city, there, in Trafalgar Square, one of the biggest and busiest squares in London, generating that energy of peace right there in that condition? And Thay would say that is just as powerful as a deep contemplation on the top of a mountain over many hours for several thousand people to do that for half an hour in the middle of a city.

00:18:39

Beautiful. Thank you, sister. And Brother Phap Huu, before we go into the practice of meditation, so you joined the monastery age 13. It was your birthday the other day, and you’re now 36. Happy birthday. Happy continuation day, brother. Yay. So you’ve been meditating within this community for 23 years. So is it… It would be just lovely for our listeners just to have a sense of how is that experience for you? And does it ripen and deepen? So what is the experience for you and how does it support your life?

00:19:21

Sitting meditation was also the hardest practice for me too. I think we’re all in the same boat. It was so dreadful because I was never taught to sit still. I was never taught to sit still. We were never told and instructed how to feel the body, how to be aware of the mind. So suddenly arriving and making the decision to become an aspirant, you have to dive into the world of the monks and nuns. And it is every morning sitting meditation and every evening. And I will confess that I just forced myself, I had to force myself to sit on the cushion. And the hardest part was just staying awake. And I would just like keep falling asleep through the meditation. And I did many techniques to stay awake. And the best one was just to do full lotus and be in pain and just to feel the pain and the sensation of it, which made me very flexible. But what I would like to really emphasize is that the sitting meditation itself has become the foundation of stillness for me. It’s just like exercising, like when you first start, you don’t know how. So like when you first start stretching, then suddenly there’s pain there. Or when you start lifting weights or doing a pull up, your muscles become sore and I guess like the sitting stillness, the sitting in stillness, the soreness was the agitation, the mind telling me, wanting to move, wanting to leave this hall, like there were times like I was just sitting there and my mind was like, What are you doing? And it is exactly in those moments that you get to hear yourself. You get to identify the emotions that are present. You get to identify your own thoughts like, and you get to see, Oh, my goodness, I have these thoughts because I’ve been consuming this, this, this, and this. So for myself, the form of the sitting meditation it is actually for myself has been very important because it has interbe into my daily life. So I experienced stillness thanks to the sitting, so therefore I know how to be in stillness. And I would say that when we talk about true presence is a cultivation, we have to know how to be present. And in a lot of our sharings we talk a lot about the power of presence. And the sitting meditation is a cultivation of true presence, is a practice of learning to just be there for yourself. And we spoke about the four mantras, and the first one is I am here for you. As with sitting meditation is a direct practice of I am here for me, I am here for myself, for the discomfort, for also the stillness that I get to touch, the peace, the insight that ripens as well as the sitting itself is healing. When I first heard this from Thay, I didn’t quite understand it because it feels like I’m not doing anything, where is the healing? But the healing is that in that moment I am peaceful. I am calm. There was love. And that energy becomes a reality. And it is healing the past. It is healing the wounds that I have experienced, the non peace that I have touched, you know, by being bullied or being abused and so on. So in that moment of real peace, of real stillness, there is the healing. So the sitting is the healing, the sitting is the peace. And we can even say to uncomfortable sensation, thanks to the stillness is being transformed by us, giving it permission to be present and embracing, looking and caring for it. So the sitting meditation for myself, it has ripened a lot. On a busy day, the sitting itself is just to sit and do nothing. Our teacher used to encourage us and he uses this encouragement and I think is so, so skillful. Thay says sometimes when you don’t want to go sit is exactly when you need to go sit, because in that moment nobody will bother you. You have 30 minutes that nobody is allowed to interrupt your stillness, but if you don’t go sit, then people will interrupt you. People will ask for your attention. You get lost in your emails, you know, in project planning, etc., etc., etc.. So sometimes I think even as meditators we create a view like meditation is doing. But here Thay is saying meditation is being. So the sitting is to be alive, is to be very present. And just to, you know, just to go back, and I think I was just a teenager, so like falling asleep was just very normal. And being annoyed was very normal because it’s the first time I’m not with my video games every day. I’m not with my cartoons every day. And the television, which was always on it became white noise. Right? Is this that we call it? White noise? And to sit in stillness with the whole community, the silence is very powerful. And that silence of sitting with others when you want to give up, you’re reminded or you are encouraged by the other’s presence, the other’s stillness that are there for you. And I’ve grown so much in just learning about my body thanks to sitting meditation, you can see how much tension you allow yourself to have. And just by being present and just having the insight of your own body is a whole journey in itself. And we will get into this in the 16 exercises of mindful breathing.

00:26:50

One last thing, sister, that comes to mind as brother’s speaking, before we sort of dive in, is brother was talking about, you know, when he was 13 about cartoons and TV on. And now, of course, with social media and you know, there’s this whole sense now that people’s attention span is virtually disappearing, that people will sometimes, if they watch a video, you’ve got to reach them in half a minute because then they’ll switch on to something else. So I’m just wondering, in this modern time, one question is, is meditation actually becoming more important as a practice? And secondly, if someone is listening who is, in a sense, caught up in social media and this addiction to smartphones, how can one start to ease oneself into attention? Because actually meditation is bringing is about deep looking, about bringing one’s attention to a singular place.

00:27:49

A really good point, Jo. I was having the same feeling listening to Brother Phap Huu, because I think our society has just literally moved in such a direction that there are no natural points of stillness in our life anymore. And I think they were there in the past. I think life was not so fast. It was not so full. There was not so much striving. And we all get caught up in it. And it’s not that in the monastery we’re completely free from it either. We can feel this incredible pace, this incredible busyness, this incredible overwhelm. So it starts to become like a survival need, as a human right. And Thay used to say, we have the right to sit. We have the right to sit in stillness and in peace. And we have to kind of reclaim that for ourselves. And then for each one of us, it is this art. What will that look like for me? What will stillness and silence mean for me? And how can I make it make sense in my day and with what I’m doing? And so, as you say, for those of us who are more full and more busy, maybe living at a higher speed or whatever, I think the trick is we have to enjoy it, so to not think of it as hard work. It has to be something that feels delicious and feels wonderful. So another trick that I had as I was edging closer to the stillness of sitting I realized that every time I sat, I wasn’t at peace with my body. That was the first problem, actually. I could not come back to my body and feel in peaceful relation with my body. So one of my tricks was deep relaxation so that I will make peace with my body through the practice of deep relaxation. I made a commitment to do it every day over the course of about 18 months. I think I kept on going. And through that that became the door for me to be in good relation with my body. Because you’re lying down. It’s fine. You have permission to go to sleep, it’s fine. And as long as you’re slightly awake, we’re in this kind of kindness and compassion for our whole body. And so for me, that was my door to sitting meditation was through the practice of deep relaxation because it was where I unlearned all the toughness I had towards my body. So for those of us that have done sports, if we’ve had whatever kind of energy in our family around taking care of the body, it may not have been there. Right? So we have to kind of unlearn that toughness of seeing our body as an instrument, something just that is helping us function in life and like kind of like being a bit brutal with our body or a bit tough. And then I had to discover for myself how I could make peace with my body, not blame my body, but thank it for making my life possible. So for me, the trick was the deep relaxation. So for anyone listening who’s like, just even the thought of sitting in silence is so challenging to trust that kind of a training and a discipline in the deep relaxation, a commitment to that over a few weeks, a few months is already opening the door a little bit wider to the peace of sitting meditation, because as we enter these first few steps of the 16 exercises to be in kindness towards our body, in gentleness and acceptance as Brother Phap Huu was just saying, it may be that we need that practice of relaxation first to be better friends with our body.

00:31:20

And I love that way of describing it, which is the worst thing is when people feel they need to force themselves to meditate, and if they don’t do it well, then they berate themselves and use that as a way of attacking themselves.

00:31:34

And I think the body can so easily be uncomfortable. I think I had months when I first ordained, when I was a novice, I had months, I was like it is just so uncomfortable. And I, you know, I really understood that the posture when we come to the sitting meditation, the posture is the sitting and every kind of couple of minutes having to readjust my posture to open my shoulders, lengthen my spine, relax my jaw, you know, like it felt like such hard work. But actually it was a kind of a way of training my body and every muscle in my body to find a position where I can be at ease and at peace, where the lungs can open and have a nice deep breath, where my shoulders can be relaxed. And all of the posture aspect of the sitting meditation is then kind of helping reveal the stillness. And so even though… So it’s not to say, as Brother Phap Huu was saying, it’s not to say that it kind of will happen right away, but there is a a kind of a cultivation of the body and our relation with the body that’s then the foundation.

00:32:39

Thank you, sister. And brother, before we dive in, which I know we keep saying before we dive in, but is there anything you want to say as a sort of opener in terms of before we go into the specific exercises about how you help someone who might be sitting here listening to us who is either starting out or maybe even just finding it a bit difficult, or how you might introduce meditation.

00:33:11

To meditate is to be alive, to meditate, is to connect, to meditate is to really feel that you are a miracle of life despite knowing that you have agency over your own breathing, your own deep looking and understanding that comes with it gives you that freedom. So meditation is freedom. Meditation allows you to be exactly how you are in this moment. And the 16 exercises of mindful breathing is a real gem in Buddhism. When our teacher was going through his difficulty as a young monk, he shared with us that when he found the sutra on the 16 exercises of mindful breathing, he felt like the happiest person that day. He said that I found treasure. I found the greatest treasure in Buddhism, and it comes directly from the Buddhist teaching and it is still so relevant today.

00:34:20

Thank you, brother. So actually, let me just, because there’s a book of Thay’s, Breathe, You Are Alive, which goes into the sutra on the full awareness of breathing. So actually I just want to read his opening paragraph because it speaks directly to what you said, and I think it’s very helpful introduction. He said, In the sutra of the full of awareness of breathing, also known as the Anapanasati Sutta, the Buddha shows us how to transform our fear, despair, anger and craving. And speaking to what you said, brother, I was so happy the day I discovered this sutra. I thought I discovered the greatest treasure in the world. Before I’d been content to simply gain knowledge, I didn’t know how to enjoy the present moment, how to look deeply into my life, and how to enjoy the positive conditions that were all around me. This sutra is so basic and so wonderful. There are many great sutras, but approaching them without this sutra is like trying to reach the top of a mountain without a path to go on. So now maybe we should dive in. So there are 16 exercises. We’re not going to do them all today. We might get through eight today and then we can do another recording for the next eight. But maybe I should read… There are four preliminary exercises and maybe I should read the first two which are on breathing…

00:35:44

So I have an interesting question here, Jo.

00:35:46

Oh, dear.

00:35:47

Which is whether we would like to base on the sutra text itself or whether we’d like to base on how Thay teaches it or whether we’d like to kind of jump between the two.

00:35:58

Well, why don’t I read out the traditional text and then I think let us then redefine it, because I think the whole… What is so extraordinary about Thay is that he said that Buddhism should always be revitalized for each generation to make sure that it is appropriate for each generation. So maybe we start off with the traditional text and then we can go to the revised text and also explain why it was revised, because I think it’s quite useful to understand why that was done. So why don’t I do the original text and then you can bring it up to date, sister. Does that work? Yeah.

00:36:35

Okay. Can I make a joke?

00:36:36

Yeah, of course you can. Absolutely. We need one.

00:36:40

Because you’re the ancient venerable here, and we’re the new generation.

00:36:45

I want a high platform now to sit on, please. You can just bow to me. That would be great. Okay, here we go. Breathing in, I know I’m breathing in. Breathing out, I know I am breathing out. So the first one is breathing in a long breath, I know I am breathing in a long breath. Breathing out a long breath, I know I am breathing out a long breath. And then the second one. Breathing in a short breath, I know I’m breathing in a short breath. Breathing out a short breath, I know I am breathing out a short breath. So this is venerable Jo reading the first. And now my novice, Sister True Dedication, would you like to explain, you know, bring us up to date, and then we can start sort of explaining what these mean.

00:37:46

Yeah, well, what’s so wonderful to know about Thay is that as we’re Mahayana tradition, Thay also had access to the Chinese translations of this sutra, as well as the […] and his, you know, deep mastery also of classical Chinese. It was one of the first languages he learned as a young boy even before entering the temple. So Thay has this deep capacity to read these old texts and to be able to access them in their essence. And so when Thay was seeing how we might apply this, he was drawing on both the Mahayana tradition and the Southern Theravada tradition, so we are quite rich, we’re doubly rich in the Plum Village tradition. And for Thay, those first two exercises, he simplified them with such elegance. The first step being to identify inbreath and outbreath. To identify here means to come back and know that it’s happening. So we come back into that, the physical experience of the breathing when we identify it. So that’s quite close to the traditional one. But then the second one then becomes to follow the inbreath, in and out. And Thay then developed this, at a certain point he started saying, follow the whole length of the inbreath from the beginning to the end and the whole length of the outbreath from the beginning to the end. And so what Thay is doing here is he’s already transcending whether it’s long or short. So in some of the traditional translations, we can get caught in, Oh, if it’s short, I know it’s short, and then we start measuring. Is it short? Is it long? Is this a medium breath? What’s going on? But actually we are identifying in the most basic way, just to note, this is in and this is out. It’s a very low level, low entry bar here. We just know it, just tell the difference. In this moment, right now, as we’re listening, are we breathing in or are we breathing out? There’ll be a moment when it’s one and there’s a moment… Moments when it’s one and moments when it’s the other. So it’s very simple. But right away our bodies needing to perceive a quality of our physical experience in this moment. So that’s our door right into the present moment. We’re starting with being aware of whether it’s breathing in or out. And then this following the length of the breath, there’s already this insight in Thay’s updating this, whether it’s long or short is fine, and we are being with it with all its qualities. And now also knowing what we do about the body, we know there can be… There’s the quality of length, but there’s also the quality of sort of jaggedness, you know, is our breath catching? Maybe because our sympathetic nervous system has been activated and so our vagus nerve is maybe interrupting our breathing a little bit. So there’s a lot of data in our inbreath and our outbreath. And as we’re following it, we’re perceiving all the aspects of quality of that in and outbreath. Is it regular or irregular? Yeah, jagged or smooth, long or short? So Thay kind of expands this second step to be following and being with in a really deeply non-judgmental, non discriminating way the quality of our breathing however it is.

00:41:23

Beautiful. Brother, you know, some people who might be listeners… you know, focusing on your inbreath and your outbreath, following the length of your inbreath and outbreath. You know, what has that got to do with life? You know, we’re breathing all the time. So by paying attention to our breath, what difference does that actually make?

00:41:48

That is mindfulness itself. And in these two first practices of identifying and then following, you are also developing two of the trainings in the Buddhist school, which is mindfulness and concentration. So what benefit? Well, the first benefit is the breath helps bridge us from our mind to the body. That just to identify that you are breathing. And I would also like to add on you don’t have to think about the breath as you feel the breath, because the breath is already happening. And so when our teacher has updated in his way of teaching and sharing it, it is like just know that you are breathing. And by knowing that you are breathing, knowing that you are there and because you are there, then you have agency. By being present we allow ourselves to to be the best version of ourselves. But the second exercise is very important because we can be mindful, we can be aware, but we may lose our mindfulness really quickly because we have the habit of thinking of the next thing already. And Thay always gives us this image is like, we’re invited to go and look at a beautiful sunrise. And as the sun starts to show itself, there is an awe, like wow. But we’re so conditioned to then take it for granted, think about the next thing and we lose that moment. So the second exercise of mindful breathing to follow and to take refuge in the inbreath from the beginning, all the way to the end, it is developing our state of oneness. Nothing can interfere us in this moment. We are truly present for our breath as being truly present for ourself. So this exercise of mindful concentration has really transformed my sitting meditation because I recognize how quick it is for me to jump from topic to topic, from thought to thought and being uneasy and being agitated. But when I have a foundation to take refuge in, every time a thought comes, I say, I’m just going to stick with my inbreath from the beginning to the end. And I start to develop this stillness with one with the breath. And it has translated throughout my whole life. Whenever I am emotional, I can just feel my breath changing. When I’m agitated, my breath is very different. When I’m angry, my breath is very different. So by knowing your breath, you also know yourself. By connecting your emotions to the breath, you can accompany the emotion and not allowing the emotions to then hijack you in that moment. You allow your breath to become your foundation of being in that moment. We’re not suppressing the anger, we’re not suppressing the feeling of irritation, but identifying, Oh, I’m irritated right now. If you cannot identify your breath, don’t even think about identifying your feelings and emotions. So, yes, the word basic, but I think a lot of us now we’re using the word foundational or fundamental, like the breath is the fundamental place to take refuge in for it to shine the light of mindfulness to what is happening inside and around us. And then to not be lost in our emotions you develop this concentration of staying with the emotion by the hand-helding of the breathing. So for me, this is why there is a power to mindful breathing here where you don’t lose yourself, but if anything, you are allowing yourself to be truly there for exactly what is happening. But you don’t allow yourself to be hijacked by the mind, by the emotions, by the feelings. But the breath continues to be this thread for you to see, to think, and to say things in a more compassionate way. Essentially, as meditator, that is what we want to bring to the table in every approach, in every connection is that understanding which develops our compassion and love.

00:47:31

Thank you, brother. And sister, you know, you’ve both been talking about the fact that meditation is not a separate part of the day. It’s not like you rush to your meditation. You sit and then you get on with your life. That actually the meditation, both before and after, has a deep impact. And so I’m just wondering just whether you want to add anything to what Brother Phap Huu was saying about if you develop your breathing in your meditation, how that helps you in the rest of your life.

00:48:03

I think the breathing for me has opened up new levels of experience. And the reason I want to say this is because I think I first came to this practice thinking that I practice mindfulness with my mind actually. And I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve tried the breathing thing, but now I want the deep stuff. I remember having a consultation with a nun, and I was kind of like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve done the breathing, but I really want to understand how I can progress through my practice. And it was like it was a bit like I had somehow… the image I have is like dragging a kind of animal by a lead and pulling it to, like, food or water and forcing it to drink. Like, she just brought me straight back and then started doing this immersive guided meditation on the breathing. And my mind didn’t want to go there. I was like, No, I want the deep stuff. By being with our breathing and our breath we’re opening up doors of experience that are not normally available to us in our daily life, and especially here in the West, where our particular paradigm that we are living in excludes other kind of modes of perception and ways of being in an embodied, interrelated way in the world. And so by establishing ourselves in the body, I want to say by opening up the door of our body, by opening up the door of our senses, is where we start to experience are embodied mind. Because if we think our mind is there without our body, we’re kidding ourselves. And with this practice of mindful breathing, we’re establishing a real quality of presence and perception around our ways of being in touch with ourselves in the present moment. And in these first two exercises Brother Phap Huu was sharing about, yeah, have the sleepiness, right? Or the kind of overactivity, and I was sharing about the overactivity or so that we can have. And there’s one story I have which is I was the bell master for a Dharma talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, by Thay, our teacher, and I was falling asleep. And I just don’t know what happened, I could not stay awake. So I’m just a couple of meters in front of him and he could tell that I was just really struggling to keep it together. And suddenly he started teaching about there are two ways to follow our breathing. He’d say, For example, if you’re feeling a little bit sleepy, you must be sure to follow your breathing at the level of your nostrils. And then he gave this guided meditation, you focus on your nostrils and the coolness of the air coming in and the warmth of the air flowing out. And you keep your focus of attention at your nostrils. And if you are feeling, you know, agitated, overwhelmed by emotions and little bit restless, you follow your breathing at the level of the […] point, the kind of belly button, the deeper breathing. And so if we are choosing to practice these first two exercises of identifying the breath and following the breath as a way to if we recognize right away, oh, we’re agitated, we might put our hands on our tummy. And in the sitting posture, you know, naturally in our tradition we like to hold our hands in our lap and we can feel that our belly expanding and contracting with the in and outbreath. And that will be our grounding place to kind of hold our attention. And if we’re feeling sleepy, we hold our attention much higher up at the level of the nostrils. And that was somehow I don’t know what is happening, but it really helps to kind of oxygenate the brain. And we really feel much more alert following the breathing there. So this is actually a deeper point. And there’s many hundreds of books about this, where we follow the breathing, how we follow the breathing. And in the Plum Village tradition, we can have these two practices, the calming way of following the breathing, the more alert way of following the breathing. But also, and this starts to bring us to the third and fourth exercises, the breath is an embodied breath. It doesn’t exist outside the body. So actually, we are following the breath within the breath. So that whole experience of the kind of mechanism of breathing as we breathe in, our entire body is participating in that inbreath and receiving that inbreath. And as we breathe out, the entire body is releasing the outbreath. So we are following not a thing, the breath is not a thing. We’re following an experience that is happening throughout our body and can be marked either at the point of the nostrils, at the point of the diaphragm, or the entire sort of upper trunk and the whole body receiving and releasing the breath.