The Way Out Is In / You Are Already the Person You Want to Become – Live Recording with Q&A Session (Episode #113)

00:00:29

Good evening, dear friends. Welcome to this very, very special recording of the podcast, The Way Out Is In. My name is Es Devlin. I’m an artist who has only in the past few years discovered Plum Village. And I feel very honored to make a short introduction to this evening’s podcast. The title of this podcast is You are already the person you wish to become. And we all are. You all are, I can see. The three people you’re about to meet on stage need very little introduction. Please give a very warm welcome to our special speakers this evening. Thank you.

00:01:38

So, dear friends, welcome to this latest episode of the podcast series The Way Out Is In, which we are recording before a live audience in London on a Friday evening. And so we are very delighted to all be here. And before we actually get into the topic we’re going to discuss, we are going to invite Brother Phap Huu to do a short meditation. And the reason is because it’s Friday evening and you’ve all probably had very busy weeks and your minds are probably full and what we want to do is to help you to relax, to steady yourselves, to feel grounded, so that as we discuss this evening’s topic, it’s a chance for us all to learn. So we’re all in beginner’s mind. We’re here because actually we want to learn how to be more present, more at home, more peaceful, more confident in our lives. And so the best way to do that is to slow down, to stop, to be present. And that is the core of the teaching, to be mindful, to be focused. And when we do both those two things, then we might generate an insight. And would it be lovely if each of us were to leave this evening with a small, modest insight that may just niggle at us over the coming weeks and just help us to reframe an aspect of our lives, just to think about things maybe a little bit differently that might grow us and develop into something more significant. So, Brother Phap Huu, over to you.

00:03:26

Thank you, Jo. Hello everyone. I invite us to sit a little bit upright if we can so we can allow our body to enter into concentration, having our two feet firmly on the ground and making sure our arms, our hands are not holding onto anything. We can really rest in this moment. There is nowhere to go. There’s nothing to do. What a gift. And if closing our eyes can be helpful to stay focused and just bring your attention to my voice, allowing my voice to guide us into our body, into the breathing. As I breathe in, I’m in touch with my in-breath, just as it is. As I breath out, I am in touch with my out-breath, just as it is. I can feel my in-breath. This is in-breath. I feel my out-breath. This is out-breath. Let the breath be natural, we just have to be an observer, present. If the breath wants to be short, let it be short. If the breath wants to be long, let is be long. As you breathe in, you fully take refuge in the whole length of your in-breath from the beginning to the end. As you breathe out, fully take refuge in your out-breath from the beginning to the end. I am one with my in-breath. I am one with my out-breath. As you breathe in, allow yourself to breathe in a little deeper. As you breathe out, give permission so that your out-breath can be slower and calmer. Deep, in-breath. Calm, out-breath. As I breathe in, I’m aware of my whole body. As I breathe out, I allow my whole body to rest. Aware of my whole body. Resting my whole body. Aware of my face, my eyes, my lips, my jaw. I can relax in this moment. I can offer a gentle smile if that helps. Aware of my two shoulders. If there’s any tension, I can drop my shoulders. My two arms, my hands. Aware of the whole upper body. Offer tenderness, allow the upper body to be soft. Our legs resting, our two feet firmly on the ground. Dear body, thank you for always being there. In this moment, please rest. Breathing in, I know I am breathing with community. Breathing out, how wonderful it is to be breathing in community. In, aware of community. Out, how grateful I am to breathe together with community. I listen, I listen this wonderful sound of the bell guides me home to the here and now. Thank you, dear friends, for breathing together, how wonderful it is to just sit in stillness.

00:11:27

Yeah, actually we were going to have an episode of the podcast which is called Silence and just not say anything the whole time. It feels that would be perfect to do tonight, that would give us a break. So I have to tell you, it is a real joy to have Sister True Dedication here and Brother Phap Huu and I are always sort of scheming to see how we can convince her to come and join us because it’s very rare that she will take the time because she’s so busy doing so many things to get her to come. So getting her to come to London is for us a big deal. And so we had to sort of plan it, so I sent her an email just sort of saying, oh sister, we’re doing a podcast in London, would you like to join? No response at all. So we thought, but we thought well she probably read it, so it softened her up a little bit. And then I think Phap Huu, you were on a train.

00:12:13

Yes.

00:12:14

… with Sister TD, she had no escape, the emergency window was fully locked. And I think by the end of the train ride, you had convinced her to come. So sister, thank you for agreeing, for volunteering to come and join us this evening. How are you to be here? Is this your greatest wish?

00:12:38

No, I’m very happy to be in London. I’m happy to be with you all. I’m happy to be in community. So thank you for the uncomfortable position of being up here rather than being down there. But I’m happy to be in conversation and also I’ve already said to you both to be learning from the two of you this evening.

00:12:57

Well, we would say the opposite, that when Sister TD is here, we can relax, we can just sit down, she will tell you everything you need to know, we’ll just add little bits and pieces to it. And Brother Phap Huu, how are you feeling? You’ve been a few days in London, how has that been?

00:13:11

I feel very grateful to be here. This is our third podcast live in a row. So London is a special place for the podcast The Way Out Is In because it has only been live in London.

00:13:27

So today, so when we came up with the title, we came up with, oh, it’s gone now, you’re already the person you want to become. And the reason I love that title is because it’s quite provocative, because we spend so much of our lives believing we need to be somebody else. Feeling that we’re not good enough in our looks, in our behavior, in our thinking, in our emotions. And so, of course, the podcast is dubbed, The Way Out Is In, because most of the time, we’re looking for the way out is out. And we’re look for answers to issues, suffering, pain within our lives. And yet, it’s very difficult to find things outside of ourselves. And The Way Out Is In is because actually, if we truly were already the people we want to become, then it would allow us to relax, to take life a little bit more gently, to build our confidence, to build our sense of ease in the world. And I know, as a child, if I had been told this, because I thought nothing about me was OK, and if I’d genuinely been told by people, you are already OK as you are, you’re already the person you want to become, I would have found that so helpful. So Sister True Dedication, I’m going to come to you first, because we are ourselve, we live in this body, we live this mind, why is it that we find ourselves with such a level of discomfort that actually we don’t feel at home with ourselves a lot of the time. We feel that we’re looking outside of ourselves. What is going on? I thought I’d start with the easy question.

00:15:24

I have to confess that when I accepted to do the podcast, I didn’t know what the topic was. And I’ve been feeling really uncomfortable about the topic because I am a real beginner, I feel, in this practice. But as all of us, students of Thay, this is one of his lines from his teachings and so I am studying it as a koan for myself as well. And I do ask myself this question: Why do I not feel? Why is it so hard to feel that I am what I want to become? Why am I… ? And when I ask that question, I often frame it in terms of I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve yet, right? I haven’t realized or understood what I want to realize or understand. But over the last few days, I was thinking about it more deeply and I realized that given everything happening in the world, the person I’d like to become is like this impossible person. A person who can find an answer to heal and stop all of the suffering, all of the injustice, all of the violence. And so I think for many of us, we know that the pain we feel, the discomfort we feel in ourselves is not a personal, individual discomfort only. We’re feeling the pain of the world, that’s reflected in our bodies, in our feelings. And so when we can’t accept ourselves or we think when not enough, it’s also because we’re not enough in the face of all of this. How could we be? So sometimes I feel in like the well-being industry when you say you’re already beautiful, how can that have ethics in it? Because if there’s ethics all of us have a role to play in acting to relieve the suffering of the world. So I think there’s a real grain of that in why I find it so hard to accept that I am enough. But what’s so interesting about this is not only do we have all of the suffering of the world reflected in us, and I mean this in a really concrete way, we watch something on the screen, this screen or that screen, and we have a bodily response. We feel the anxiety, we feel the tension, we fell the heat in the heat wave last week. And that’s doing something to us at an emotional level. There’s a kind of existential fear that is triggered. So that suffering is really visceral in us. But what’s really interesting, I have learned, what’s very interesting is that there’s also the other side of this, which is that if the suffering of the world is reflected in our bodies and in us, the beauty of the word is also there in us. The sheer wonder of this human body. It’s just incredible through how much time has this body traveled to be here now. I used to ask myself the question, the warmth of my body, how old is it? If the body had got cold at any point, the chain of life transmission would have disappeared. So this body we have is so extraordinary. It’s completely ancient. It’s like, it’s a transmission through millennia and millions of years. And it is a wonder of life that we can do all the things we talk about. That we can breathe, that we walk, that we can enjoy a cup of tea with a loved one, that we can laugh, that we can cry and sing. These are the wonders. So my practice is I understand how hard it is to feel that I’m not enough in the face of what I would like to do or need to do to respond to the world. And at the same time, all of the goodness of the world is also, in each one of us, is refracted and expressed in such a unique way in each one of us. And for me, that’s the key to unlock the door to be able to accept myself. And it’s a bit of a cop-out because I can then accept myself because I’m not exactly me. You see?

00:20:15

So… I remember. We are not ourselves alone. I remember when I was at The Guardian, I was coaching a deputy headteacher of a very big public school. And he was going through a lot of suffering. And I asked him to write down with me all his positive qualities. And he was unable to write down a single positive quality. He had a very responsible job. He was well-liked. He, you know, but he could literally could not get himself to write down something. So I said well, why don’t we write down what your students say about you, what your teachers say about you, what your own kids say about you, what your wife says about you. And he wrote down three large sheets of paper, but she was unable to do it for himself. So Brother Phap Huu, what is it about us that Sister True Dedication says that is easier for us to look at the problems of the world, easier for us to look at our suffering and pain than to look at what’s working. And there was a talk by one of the senior monastics in Plum Village and he says, when he asked people to name a moment of joy and happiness, they sort of think hard and try and think up something. Then he says, okay, can you name a moments of suffering and pain? And they say, oh yes, I have… And they have so many to name. What is it do you think about us, as Sister True Dedication says, that makes it difficult to actually acknowledge our positive qualities, to say, actually, I deserve to be alive, I deserve to present, and I am worth something?

00:22:09

I think this is a question for all of us to reflect and ask ourselves, are we able to, on a daily basis, actually name things that we see are doing well for us? And the word worth that you mentioned becomes a lie for me. Sometimes we feel, or I feel, like I don’t have the right to be happy. I don’t have the right to be joyful. And sometimes it’s because of the reflection of society and the trauma that we’re also in collectively, the… We are holding so much pain and suffering in this very moment. And to be able to say that I’m happy sometimes can feel like a privilege. And I’ve learned that we can hold both the joy as well as the pain together and they don’t fight each other, actually they support one another. And as a child of immigrants, I grew up with the idea that if my parents have sacrificed so much for me, I need to also sacrifice. I have to work harder, I have to achieve more in order to be worthy of what they have given me. But I think their sacrifice was for me to have the right to say, I am loved, I am seen, I’m a part of this society, that my well-being, my joy, my happiness, it shall also reflect out. And so this has been a journey for myself of learning to embrace the pain, the suffering inside, and not pushing it away, because I was really good at that. I have a sickness of people pleasing, and a lot of us, we agree, and I think it’s because sometimes I feel that if I can make others happy, then I’m worthy. And I never have asked myself, am I happy enough? And recently I’ve been having some doubt coming up a lot in my own personal life. In the season, we just held a retreat in Plum Village where we held 900 people, all long-term practitioners. It was very powerful. But I’m in a position where I’ve been put on a… people are taking refuge in me. And I’m like, am I worthy of this? Am I good enough? And it’s bringing up all of my fear when I was a kid. And I was very afraid of elders. And so my whole journey was to not be an elder, to stay young all the time, to be, to be jolly all the time, to be lovable all the time. And I’ve been recently embracing more of who I am becoming. And it’s not a force, but it’s a natural presence that I am slowly embracing. And it is learning. I’m unlearning many things. I’m unlearning to be loved by everyone. I am learning to show up in my best capacity on days when I can offer my whole presence, I will. On days when in my heart I feel there’s toxicity, I’m gonna take care of that because that’s also taking care of everyone. So I think when we are asking to come inwards, which meditation is inviting us every minute, to be in touch with yourself, that means you have to embrace everything that is there. Both the mud and the lotuses. And sometimes we have to be very mindful of we want only the mud because we can also build an attachment to our own suffering. We can build an attachement to that identity that I am like that, so don’t expect me to change. And I’ve met myself there too, and I’ve meet my siblings there too. And in the becoming, it’s a verb that we’re always becoming. Because we don’t stop. You know, I think we have to look again at the word master. We call our teacher a Zen master, but that’s a mistranslation in the English language to the classical Vietnamese language. Thay, our teachers, are known as a meditation teacher. The idea that you arrive at masterhood, then you stop, and you don’t practice anymore, or Buddhahood even… The path of becoming is a continuous journey. It’s a continuous of our own evolution, of our understanding of ourselves, our understanding of our pain, our suffering, and embracing it with joy. I can now say that I embrace a lot of my suffering with joy, because it has given me empathy. It has allowed me to relate more to those that are outside of me, because we cannot be by ourselves. We are always interbeing with all of the conditions that are around us. So for me, just to shine that light when we look back at ourselves and we recognize an ill-being, something that is painful and suffering, and we’re not able to embrace it, just always remember that this is not ours alone. And when we’re able to embrace it, we’re embracing it for a whole lineage. Because when we embrace something that is difficult to embrace, we’re not only doing it for ourselves, and we’re doing it for the next generation also. I’m hosted by a family, and there’s three children in the house. And they’re very alive, and they remind me of the joy of life. And I’m very mindful every day when I’m interacting, because I’m engaging with them and I’m transmitting something to them in every moment that we’re eating breakfast or we are talking about football as we are all engaging in many levels. And sometimes we forget that these little interactions will carry threads for another person for their whole lives. So, coming home to oneself and embracing the pain and the suffering is the first act of mindfulness. When we speak about mindfulness, the Buddha said, mindfulness of suffering. And that is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if I’m Asian, if my sister is white. And so on, but we are, what equalizes us, it’s not about the status, it’s about we’re all gonna go through a journey of life and suffering, happiness and joy and pain and transformation. That is the great equalizer when we’re embracing that reality, that truth. And so for me, that journey of coming home all the time and to smile to my pain has been a gift because a lot of my ancestors didn’t have that opportunity to smile to their pain. And so now I can do it, and I do it in a way that I wanna transmit it also. Even on the tube. My journey on the tube, I’m usually really scared because whenever people look at me, they’re giving like, what the heck is this? And if you hear a kid go, mom, is that a Jedi? I would say, yeah. But this time around, this time around, I’m very confident. So when somebody looks at me and has this awkward look, I would turn and I would look right at that person. And I will offer kindness and a smile. And 98% of the people have all engaged back and go… And there’s a few like, oh… But it also shows that if we’re able to generate that energy out, people will receive it. And I think today we’re so afraid of our own pain, of our own suffering, and of our own capacity that we all don’t engage anymore. We’re all in our little worlds. And part of the journey of becoming, I don’t think of it as an individual matter. I think it’s about becoming as a whole society. How can we, as a collective, in our own pathways, how can we continuously become a deeper person to be alive, to be present, and see that we’re not alone on this path.

00:31:44

Thank you, brother. And you mentioned kindness a couple of times, and so we’re going to give a little example of that. So today at lunchtime, I was told that the new book I’ve written had not, the books had not arrived here at this venue, and so they wouldn’t be available to sell. And it’s just so interesting to see our reactions. So normally, you know, we’re so human and vulnerable. So I immediately fell into a bit of a pit of sort of, oh no, that’s such a shame. And I realized, you know, I had three responses. I could just get very angry. Like, why haven’t they been delivered? Why hasn’t it worked out? I could be very critical of myself, which is saying, you know, I’m coming to talk tonight about being present, and yet I’m sort of upset and unable to deal with it. But actually, I chose the third path, which is just say just to be kind to myself. It’s very human, you know, I’ve written a book, I wanted to be available. It’s okay to feel that. And just to calm myself. And I realize, and sister, I want to ask you about this, that every day, and I’ve been experimenting with this the last couple of days, which is saying, actually, how equanimous am I? You know, how much do I want something to be the way it is? How much do I want something to be different? Why do I get upset about this? And just realizing that most of the time, I’m actually not very equanimous. There’s something I want more of, something I want less of. And I’m not very kind to myself a lot of the time. So if we want to be the person we want to be, kindness is a really important part of that, to actually just say, actually I do have issues. I’ve had issues since I was a kid. I have ways of working that I’m not happy with, but not to self-flagellate myself, not to beat myself up, but just to be kind to myself. And a lot of people I coach, they’re so unkind to themselves. They just won’t accept their way they are. They just want it to be different and they just keep attacking themselves. How do we start to work with that? I can sit back and relax now.

00:34:12

Well, I think we have to recognize, like, in each culture or country wherever we find ourselves, like Brother Phap Huu was saying, there’s a society consciousness, there’s a collective consciousness going on that is acting on us all the time, and is telling us all of these things, that we’re not good enough, that we need to work harder, work smarter, work more efficiently, the kind of sickness of optimizing. Like we really live in an era of optimizing and we just need to pause for a moment and really recognize how many parts of our lives, all of us in this room, we’re trying to optimize them. You know? And I feel we’ve, like this… I think that may be one of these sicknesses of our kind of generation, this era. We can’t allow things to be as they are. So with all the mess that’s going on in the world, the injustice and the violence and the inequality, we pick up these habits from the kind of capitalist grind. But if we could just optimize, then everything would be better. But we’re not really offering a different energy. And it’s interesting that both of you have really picked up on this word kindness because it is about how we could have a different way of being in a situation. You haven’t done anything yet, but the mindset or the heart set is, I will be kind. I will, my first response will be, well, to breathe in and out, to recollect myself. And yeah, to bring some love and kindness into any moment. And I think that’s already part of the resistance to reclaim a way of being where we are showing up differently and choosing to respond to a lot of toxic energies around us, the hustle, the grind, the doing more, being better, being different by saying in this moment I can choose completely freely to be kind, no matter what the outcome is of whatever’s going on. Now, I’m someone who finds it easier to be kind that way first, and then second to be kind to myself. But there is a feedback loop, there is progress with our energy of mindfulness. Because whether you’re in a shop, whether you are on the tube, whether you are at work or you’re on a Zoom call, when something happens, and if we know a default response to come back to our in-breath and out-breath, and really just take care of our nervous system, and really arrive back into ourselves, in fact, that’s already an act of kindness. We’re rescuing ourselves. We are giving ourselves a breather, literally. And all of us have these seeds of kindness, of compassion, of patience. And we also have the seed of wisdom that things don’t always have to be different and optimized and better and more efficient. And I think Thay was really busy with this, although he didn’t have any of these kind of words to talk about it. But I think Thay was very clear that what our society needs and what we all need is a different kind of way of being and a different quality of being. And he spoke about the preciousness of time. And time is not money, you know, time is not success, or time is not work, you know? Time is life. And those of us with children, we know how short this time is that we have with our children, with our loved ones, the time we have is so short and so precious. So how are we being in time? Buddhist reference. How are we being in time, and how are we allowing like the fullness of any moment to like reveal itself, whether we’ve just had bad news or whether we just had a strong emotion, we can be with that in a certain way. And that is already action, that is already a response, and that’s already patterning something different, like into society.

00:39:15

Brother, just picking up on that. So a lot of people say I don’t have the time, you know, and people’s lives are genuinely very busy. And sometimes you, Thay, Sister True Dedication would say, but you have enough time just to breathe three times. You have enough times to take one minute just to slow down, to stop. So I want to focus on time a bit. So a lot of people think they have to meditate for half an hour now, or they have to take two days off to recover. Can you talk about just moments of time? And I want to be very practical here because how do we use moments to come back to ourselves rather than say I don’t have the time, because we all have a moment here, moment there. How can we start to use time differently?

00:40:11

I would actually say that in our era, right now, it’s important to actually set aside time to learn to be still, to learn be off our phones, because that’s also a resistance to where we are at right now. And being with our children, we want them to be freer from their devices, because the device has a headlock on all of us. Even the monastics, we see it entering into the monastery. And it takes a real effort to resist from these forces. And I think that just as we need to brush our teeth in the morning, in the evening, we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, we need to drink water to stay healthy, we need to check in with our well-being, I encourage us, it’s not, for me, I would dare to say, it is not an option anymore. It’s important to find ways, skillful ways if we have the time to actually set aside 20 minutes every morning. We just lock in and we say, this is a time for me. Me, my breath, me, my feelings, me, my morning. It’s a commitment. It is a way of shifting society. It’s away of shifting the system. We’ve been working a lot with climate activists and a lot of change makers, and the question is, how do we shift the system? And we are always looking at the tools. We’re looking at technologies out there. But on the spiritual side, there is a technology and that’s inwards. Because the way we’re engaging in the work field, at the front line, wherever we are, the way that we are showing up really matters. It is really creating a culture. And like Sister True has shared, the culture that we’re in is really hustle and do more. We don’t have time. I think that is an illusion, that’s an excuse, to be honest. But if you actually find yourself giving yourself permission every morning, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, if 30 minutes is available, you will see how the day will shift for you. It’s just like when we do yoga, we do therapy, we exercise, just a little bit, and we see the shift because it will affect the choices we make, what we eat, what we drink, how we’re engaging. Because for us, spirituality, when we say we sit on a cushion and we breathe, it’s not excluded from everything else in life. I’m able to be present on the tube is because I’m present on my cushion. I’m able to find that foundation of stillness is because I’ve been training that muscle inside of me. So that is for… my encouragement to everyone to reflect again about spirituality and meditation practices because I think that the West has really made it more like, like a specialty, like it’s kind of exclusive way or like it has become something that I feel like, dude, in Asia, we just do this. We just go and we sit. It’s a part of the culture. It’s a part of a way of being. And in Plum Village, we’ve been reflecting how can we continuously offer a spiritual dimension as a culture more than just a religion, because it’s gonna be a way of life. It’s not just you come for devotion or you come to be a Buddha. Why be a Buddha if you’re not part of life? So it’s a way of like re-examining also the question of meditation. Because when we speak about meditation in modern society, I feel it’s othered, it’s like, it’s something outside of daily life. But what we are saying that, no, it can be anywhere. So that when you’re on the tube, you’re driving, you’re at a red light, instead of being angry at the red light, you can actually smile and breathe at the red light. Don’t close your eyes, but you can really tune in, and you can really just be present. And wherever I go with my teacher, I had the greatest honor to travel with him around the world. Everywhere you sit, you can arrive. You can be at home. And it doesn’t mean you’re always slow. You’re always having to have this aura that you’re trying to be a meditator or anything like that. It’s just a way of being. It’s just someone who is so present that you are like, how do I sit like that? And that was my first experience in Plum Village as an eight-year-old child. My dad said, this is a great monk, but I don’t know if he’s a great monk or not, but I saw the way he walked. And I just saw that this man is walking with inner peace. And then I learned about his history. He’s gone through two wars. He’s been exiled. He’s being discriminated against. He’s been given so many labels, but he doesn’t let any of that change who he is because he has his path and there’s a commitment there. So for us, when you find a path that’s the same, then you have no fear, because the path is clear, you know how to move forward. But the question is, do we have the courage to take on that path. Because that path is going to confront us. It’s going to say, if I want to change, I have to look at my habit energies. I have make some drastic decisions. I will do this less in order to offer this more. So this is meditation. This is a deep-looking… We all want a better world. We all want a more just society. We all want to love our children more, our partner more, our community more. But those are all just wishful thinking. Insight for us is not enough. Insight has to go with action. And action takes a letting go. Because when we’re going to do something, that means we’re sacrificing something else. And this is the invitation for all of us when we reflect on our daily life, when we look at London as a city. Kindness for me is really real and it’s a force that can shift and change. I came and I was moved by the kindness that I felt at the monastery. Growing up in a household of boat people, there was so much fear. There was so much discrimination that they were caring that was directed towards them. And then that becomes feelings and emotions that become violence, verbally, physically. And as a child growing up in that environment, that’s the life you know. You are taught to be afraid, you are taught not to question, you’re taught to not dare to be happy even. But then when I came to the monastery for my first time, and people were genuinely kind, I was scared of that kindness. Because I asked myself, what is behind that kindness? I couldn’t trust that. And there’s a part in the retreat that you just have to accept that kindness is actually real. There are people on this planet who are walking this Earth, that kindness is like the light in front of the car that shows them the way forward. And that has made me why I wanted to be a monk, because I felt that kindness. If I can just offer a little bit more of kindness to my community, to my Asians who are growing up in the West, who are finding our own feats, to all the immigrants who have to call home in a different land, but still have that inner home and that kindness within us, I trust that. I trust that so much. And that for me has been a beacon and my resilience that I have become angry many times in the monastery. And I have to breathe, breathing is not a joke. Breathing is a life jacket. When those emotions really come, our teachers say you are more than one emotion. Come back and breathe. Don’t let that emotion take over your whole being because you’re so much more than just one emotion, you bring up another emotion to embrace it. And my father was very kind, and there are moments when we were angry and we were crying. My dad would say, ‘One, two, three, smile.’ And we would smile, but we hated it also. But he has transmitted that reminder that even in the midst of agony, that smile is your right.

00:50:39

Thank you, brother. And sister, I just want to come back to this point about suffering because I know in my own life that my generosity, my kindness, my thinking of others comes, has come through my suffering. It’s through the suffering that I recognize what’s important to me and then how I want other people, how I can be with other people. So because I’ve suffered and I have found a way through some of my suffering, all I want to do is help other people through their suffering. When I see someone feeling lonely, I want to be present for them, for example. So I want come back to just Buddhism 1.0 for a second, which is we all know that it’s only through our suffering that we learn and we are able to transform. And yet, we’re constantly avoiding our suffering, looking for the distractions of life. So I just want to come back to that core point of, what is it about us that finds suffering so difficult? And how do we meet it in a way that we intellectually may understand it, but when we look at it, we just want turn the other way?

00:52:10

Thank you, Jo. Yeah, because this is why we can’t, we feel we’re not the person we yet want to become, because we feel there’s so much mud and junk inside, right? I want to become someone who is not angry, jealous, stressed, anxious, whatever it might be. And so we can’t… So we’re just, my own experience has been that the first encounter with the breathing and the meditation was, I just didn’t want to encounter myself. I didn’t want to encounter the mud, because I had the sense that if I recognized it and named it and acknowledged it, it would make it more real. So it was much easier just to be in denial, right? And so I think a lot of us, that’s, the default state. And I think it’s something to do with some of our human tendencies. We just can’t bear it. And actually when I was first suggested by a friend that I should go on a retreat in this place called Plum Village, France, I was so scared. And I was like, I can’t, I, can’t, I can’t. And this person kept trying to make me agree to go, and they kept trying in different ways, and I said I’m afraid of what I would encounter there, in myself. And there are some people who sign up for retreats and at the last minute they cancel because they’re afraid of what they might encounter. And so I think the first, the Buddhist 101 of suffering is the message that we can overcome our fear of our own suffering. So that’s been my experience. I was very scared of my pain, especially of my despair. And I have learned that not only can I greet it and acknowledge it, but there’s a whole series of practices that I can train in, that I can apply, that I can do, that equip me to be with my pain and suffering in a, to use the modern language, in a safe way. So it was as though I had to learn all sorts of, what do you call them, like, orienteering skills for like my inner landscape. I had be able to do some abseiling, some climbing. I had to… that scary thing, potholing through all the caves, right. I felt I had learn all these sort of really visceral skills, how to breathe, how to be in my body, how feel the pain in my body, how to embrace the pain with kindness and compassion. And that’s what’s for me very interesting, especially about our tradition of mindfulness and meditation is that when we are breathing with a strong emotion that could be fear or anxiety or despair or sorrow, when we breathe with it, it’s not a kind of brutal scientific breathing, it’s a really gentle breathing. And I was really struck when I heard our teacher talk about, Hello, my dear little anger. I’m here and I will take care of you. Hello, my dear anger. This really stumped me. I don’t know, I’m a normal human being, right? I get angry with my anger. And… And I’m in a total feedback loop with my anger. And I just, and I just find it… And have found it really hard to unlock it. And then especially when I became a nun, it’s like, I’m not allowed to be angry, I shouldn’t be angry. I’m so angry that I’m angry. And it was terrible. It was really terrible. And I had to learn and hear just, yeah, the gentleness of the voice of our teacher saying this, hello, my dear little anger. And it took me a few years also to learn not to get, for example, lost in the story of the anger. I’m angry because of this injustice or this was unfair or this was wrong or unkind or mean. But to have this like inquiry with my anger and, at a certain point in our collective practice, I really came to realize that it’s not about the story of what happened, but it’s about what my anger has to say to me. Like, my anger is saying, I cared about that project, or I cared that this should have happened in that or that way. Why did I care? Because I have love and I have creativity, or when we think about global topics like war and injustice and what’s happening to the planet, if I’m feeling anger, that anger is coming from my real love, my real wish to protect, my real wish to save. And I started to realize that I’ve got my nice big block of anger that I’m trying to call my little anger, hello.

00:58:04

Is it more like…?

00:58:05

Well, yeah, it has its substantial vibration. And then sort of before it or sort of behind it are all these other things that I actually felt before the anger. And I discovered sometimes it can be feeling shock, feeling betrayed, you know, feeling hurt, or feeling care and love. And in the split second before the anger came up, these feelings came up. And so when we talk about, yeah, being with pain and allowing ourselves to be who we are in any given moment, that is with all the complexity of what it is to be human. We all have both the seed of awakening, the seed of mindfulness, of compassion and care. And we all also, any human being has the seed of anger. Any human being has the seed of fear and despair or regret and anxiety. They are all there, like in the garden of ourselves. And when we can learn how to be with them, we kind of create the biggest zone of agency. So my zone of agency around my anger has genuinely kind of grown. I mean, I still get angry. I really get angry, but yeah, the zone of agency around it is different and I have really interesting inquiry and exploration around how it has come up. I find it in my body, I calm it, and then I find my freedom and my kind of choice. Because in this conversation when we’re talking about are we who we want to become, right? The kind of qualities that in the heart of hearts most of us want to be is I want to be a free person. I want to be a person that really lives my life deeply, that lives so wholeheartedly whatever time I am given on this planet. And so the question then is like how do I have that freedom? How do I live wholeheartedly? How do I bring an energy of kindness, presence, and generosity into this world that is not being that way? Like that then becomes the kind of challenge and this practice of cultivating the energy of mindfulness through breathing, through sitting on the tube or a bus, through walking, like that is the key to unlock being who we want to be in any moment. And because we’re in London, and because many of you live here, I really want to say there are distances that we are all walking across the city. And we can choose some of these distances, 200 meters, 500 meters. And you say to yourself, I will walk from that lamppost to that zebra crossing and I will walk as a free person. And the extraordinary thing is, no one is stopping you. And so we get to choose to do it and what that might mean is we might take off our headphones or just switch them onto silent or ideally so that we can hear the birds that might be there, so we could hear the wind in the trees, so we can here the vibration of the city. And we, you know, I had this practice and I walked from a part of St Paul’s, one side of St. Paul’s to the zebra crossing on the other side when I used to walk to work. And I chose it because I always found it a very beautiful, it was the best part or one of the more beautiful parts of my walk to work. And I would say to myself, you know, I’m here, I’m here, this is my life. This is my live. And it’s something about waking up into the moment that we find ourselves in is the first step of freedom. Because a lot of the time, we’re so busy on the A to B, and the sense that we’ve got to rush, that we’re not yet at our destination, that we lose that 500 meters of our life thinking about something else. And I can’t tell you how many, I mean little insights but real insights, I got dozens, hundreds of little insights about my life on that stretch of London. I fell in love with the city there because I realized that this is my life and I love this city. I love the humans, I love the trees, I love this, the energy and the hope that’s there in these buildings, also the suffering that is there in these buildings, the exploitation, right? There is so much effort there, but it’s not without the injustice. We can stand in Trafalgar Square and you have Canada House, South Africa House, you got India House down the way. How can… In South America, in Africa, you don’t have these gigantic buildings, right? Why not? They’re made from something else. This has always been, well, for 500 years, such a metropolitan city. So many countries have always been represented here. So diversity is like built into the bones of the city, but also injustice is. And it’s possible to walk through London, and the stones under our feet can be really special. The buildings made with extraordinary craftsmanship that would never be possible to build in our time, it’d be just astronomically impossible. So we have this heritage and we can be in all parts of London and that makes us more alive. We’re more awake to actually where we are and like where we’re positioned in this stream of life. Now it’s our chance, how amazing. There is no more colonialism of that kind. But what are the kinds of injustice that we are a part of that we could shift in this moment? So being the person we want to become is also arriving exactly into this moment and all the possibilities of this moment to build a different and better kind of future, to show up differently, to ask new questions, to bring a new energy to our place of work, whether it’s the House of Commons, whether it’s a newsroom, whether it’s a business, a school, a hospital, wherever we are there’s something that’s possible in this moment that wasn’t possible for the generation before. And we can pattern new ways of being into it. And so to have these kind of practices, we walk and you really walk. You can take the hospital corridor or you can take their school corridor. And the way we walk down that corridor, we’re fully arriving into that moment. And when we’re arriving into that moment, we can, with not only being there with everything around us, but we’re really first of all there with our body and with our self, and with all the feelings that we’re carrying. And so when I would step into St. Paul’s churchyard, beautifully paved, and if I could feel that I was rushing, I did sometimes like pull myself up to a hard stop, which sometimes caused problems for the bankers behind me. But, you know, I was determined that I should feel free in each step, and I had seen Thay walk, and I’d seen that it was possible to walk in peace and freedom. And I just wanted that to be possible for myself in the heart of the city. And during the Iraq war, I would carry my peace umbrella. So I had a white umbrella in the city of London. And everyone still had black umbrellas 20 years ago. And I had my white umbrella that said peace on it. And so I’d be walking with that. And because I was walking in such freedom, sometimes people would comment and make questions and things, or agree. And so you can have action in a moment which is just as Brother Phap Huu…, it’s just a part of our life. We don’t need to set aside time to be more true to ourselves, to be more true to our values, to be more free, and to be more awake to what’s going on. We can simply do it on our way to work. And what’s life for if it’s not for that? To feel that freedom, to feel that agency, and just to arrive fully into the richness, the mud, and the beauty of this life that we have a chance to be in.