We Were Burned Out So My Family Went To Plum Village

Instead of a cross-country road trip, this summer we took our kids to Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in southwest France founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Master. Faced with pandemic stress, we were on screens too much, taxed by relentless to-dos, and felt increasingly dissatisfied. Teetering on parental burn-out, we were craving peace, time away from devices, and strategies to handle increasingly uncertain times.

Transcript

Hello,

Everybody.

It's good to be back season three of Your Life in Process.

And over the past few weeks,

I've been on retreat and I wanted to share a bit about what I learned there to bring back to you because I think that some of the teachings of Plum Village fit so well into the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model,

The models of mindfulness and compassion that we've been talking about here on the show,

And really engagement with these practices in our daily lives.

A lot of folks go on cross-country road trips or to amusement parks or to visit family during the summer.

And this summer,

We felt that as a family,

We needed to do something different.

We were really feeling the impact of technology creeping into our lives,

The impact of busyness,

And lots of to-dos that felt like they'd lost their meaning,

Even though some of the to-dos had some meaning in the beginning,

We were just going through the motions of them.

And I could feel in my own body and being restlessness and dissatisfaction.

I've been doing what I can here to stay grounded and stay centered and it was feeling like it wasn't enough.

So we took this big leap to go to Plum Village Monastery,

Which is Ticnut Hunt's monastery in the south of France.

It's a place that is a practicing monastery.

So nuns and monks live there and practice the monastic lifestyle,

But they also welcome in families.

They welcome neuroscientists.

They welcome climate activists.

They welcome communities of color to come and train with them in Ticnut Hunt's teachings of engaged Buddhism and mindfulness practice with the hopes of really disseminating this approach worldwide.

Plum Village is a monastery developed by Zen master Ticnut Hunt,

Who was an author and peace activist over 40 years ago.

He was in exile from Vietnam because he spoke out against the Vietnam War.

He was a peace activist.

In 1967,

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr.

And I think many of us think about Buddhism as like you just sit on a cushion and meditate all day.

That's really not what Ticnut Hunt was about.

Yes,

Meditation is part of his teaching and his practice,

But he was about engaged Buddhism,

Which means taking this stance of mindful awareness and compassion and applying it to all aspects of living,

Starting with your daily activities,

But more broadly to the world,

Which is what Ticnut Hunt did for a number of years before he had a stroke in 2014.

He lost sensation and ability to move the right side of his body.

So this was the side of his body that he used to write poetry to create the beautiful calligraphy that you see.

We often will see things like a beautiful black brush stroke of a circle and written in the circle are things like no mud,

No lotus,

Or when you wash the dishes,

Wash the dishes.

So he lost the functioning of this hand that wrote poetry.

And he lost this body that he had walked mindfully across many,

Many,

Many different countries teaching mindfulness.

So he actually went back on his wishes to Vietnam and spent the last of his days there.

And the monastery has been functioning since then.

The monks and nuns really rose to the occasion to continue his teachings.

When we arrived at Plum Village,

The first lesson that we received is a lesson that I want to pass to you.

And I'm actually going to go through six lessons from Plum Village,

Share them with you,

And then talk about what it looks like to do this in your life.

Because not all of us can go to France and live in a monastery,

Although we'd like to.

We can't.

So the first lesson that we received was the lesson,

I have arrived,

I am home.

And that's actually agatha.

So agatha is a short phrase that Thich Nhat Hanh is well known for.

In Zen Buddhism,

They have a lot of them,

Which are just little mantras that you say to yourself while you're going about your daily life to kind of remind you of that principle.

And oftentimes,

Thich Nhat Hanh would teach the gathas in concert with your breath.

So he would say things like,

Breathing in,

I have arrived.

Breathing out,

I am home.

You could even say that to yourself right now and just notice its impact as you say it.

Breathing in,

I have arrived,

Arriving in the present moment.

Breathing out,

I am home,

At home in the present moment.

This mantra or gatha is really,

Really important and is one that I've held on to for many years of my life.

I first went to Palm Village when I was in my 20s,

It was actually in 2000 with my then partner and it was at a time when I was just about to leave for graduate school.

I was in recovery,

I was really motivated to go off and make change in the world and this felt like a perfect opportunity to go and learn directly from Thich Nhat Hanh,

Some of these mindfulness practices.

My parents had been going for years and my father was a follower of his and would go many summers to Plum Village.

And when you arrive at Plum Village in the upper hamlet,

There's a big sign that says,

I have arrived,

I am home.

So what does that really mean and why would we want to say that to ourselves?

I have found over the course of my life that there are so many things that pull me out of being present in my life and also pull me out of feeling at home in my body,

Feeling safe in my body,

Listening to my wise self within that I have felt and especially during the pandemic increasingly so,

A sense of being unsettled and not home.

When you practice this,

Breathing in,

I have arrived,

Breathing out,

I am home,

What you are practicing is finding safety within yourself right now.

In Buddhist teachings,

I talk about the island within.

So finding a place within you that is protected and centered that you can return to whenever you need it.

And the more you do this practice of breathing in,

I have arrived,

Breathing out,

I am home,

The more that you cultivate that return to yourself,

The easier it will be for you to draw upon it when you need it.

Because we need to feel that sense of home when we feel destabilized by the world around us,

When things kind of come crashing in on us.

I just spoke with Trudi Goodman and Jack Kornfield for a summit that I am going to be doing this fall with them and Trudi just came out of uterine cancer.

This was four weeks after she had had surgery removing her uterus.

And one of the things that she talked about were all the ways in which she took care of and tended to her body and how that helped her feel supported during this time.

In Plum Village,

There is a bell that rings and this bell rings every hour.

It also rings before every meditation practice,

Every sort of new activity,

Every meal,

Big bell.

And the nuns there,

We were staying in Lower Hamlet with the nuns because we're a family with young kids with other families.

And the nuns there taught my children how to appropriately ring a bell.

There was a whole teaching on bell ringing with them and the children,

My kids brought this back to us and brought it back to our home.

And what you do when you ring a bell,

Say you're ringing one of those small little bowls that you place on your palm,

Is you first pick it up and you gently tap the bell because you're waking the bell up.

You don't want to just come in and bang a bell.

That would be so jarring.

So you wake up the bell,

You give it a little loving tap and you wake up the bell also to wake up the listeners that we're about to ring this bell.

Because what happens in Plum Village when the bell rings is everybody stops,

Including the children.

If you are chewing food,

You stop chewing with the food in your mouth.

If you're mid conversation,

You stop what you were saying.

It doesn't matter how important it is what you just said.

If you are walking,

You stop walking.

If you're washing the dishes,

You stop washing the dishes and you breathe in,

Come back home to your body and land in the present.

So the little tap is that,

Okay,

This is coming folks,

We're going to have a big stop soon.

And that alerts you to the ring.

At first,

It was annoying to me.

I have been rushing so much that stopping at the sound of the bell is like stopping in my kitchen if my husband wants to tell me something.

God forbid,

When I'm in the middle of rushing from one thing to the next,

It's irritating.

Don't stop me.

I have a path.

I'm going somewhere.

And I really struggled with it.

I also really struggled with all of the stopping with my kids.

Because my kids were learning while I was learning how to listen to the bell.

And they were squirmy,

They'd say stuff,

They wouldn't stop,

They'd keep chewing,

They'd do all these things.

And I started to notice,

Oh my gosh,

I control my kids so much.

So I also had to stop doing that.

Because not only are you stopping what you're doing physically,

You're also stopping your mental activity.

And my mental activity,

Something that was exhausting me in my daily life at home that I didn't really realize it until I got to Plum Village,

Was how much mental activity I spend on trying to control other people,

Especially my kids.

So we wake up the bell,

And we ring the bell,

And we pause.

I've arrived.

I'm home.

Back in the present moment.

If you want to practice this in your life,

It can be really simple.

Choose something that's going to be your version of the bell for you.

We've chosen to go onto the Plum Village app,

And they actually have a bell that will ring throughout the day on your phone.

So now we have every 45 minutes in our household,

A bell rings from a device.

And no matter what we're doing,

We stop.

So we've chosen to keep at the bell because we just trained our minds to the bell,

And it's really soothing.

It's become a refuge for us.

But you could choose all sorts of things.

You could choose that you are stopping every time you enter into a new room,

Or every time you start a meeting,

Or if you're a therapist between clients,

Or if you're a parent dropping off your kids and picking up your kids,

Or if you are somebody that's a householder every time you wash a dish.

You choose one thing.

Just start with one that is your bell,

Your mindfulness bell to remind you to pause,

Find your breath,

Feel at home inside your body,

Let go of tension,

Notice the tension,

Let it go.

And then just as you entered the moment,

You with awareness,

You exit the moment of the pause with awareness.

So you take that presence with you into whatever you were doing.

So for me,

When the bell rings and I'm mid-sentence,

I can continue my sentence,

But I'm going to continue my sentence with awareness.

Okay,

So that's your first practice.

I have arrived,

I am home.

And you'll be able to see if you go to my Instagram,

I have pictures of Plum Village,

So you can see,

I think I posted one maybe somewhere of me sitting next to you,

That sign.

The second lesson that I want to share with you is happiness is here and now.

So I'm an Acceptance of Commitment Therapist,

An ACT therapist.

And in ACT,

We spend a lot of time teaching people how to accept and allow for a life suffering,

Being able to open up to the painful things,

Move towards what's uncomfortable,

Be willing to do the hard thing,

Practicing awareness of pain in your body,

Pandemic,

Racial trauma,

Climate change,

Don't turn away from it,

Turn towards it.

And there's a lot of material to work with in terms of this First Noble Truth of life is suffering.

In ACT,

A lot of our work is around that,

Acceptance,

Allowing and opening up.

One thing that I have been neglecting over the past few years has been cultivating joy.

There was a part of me that was turning away from toxic positivity and some of the positive affirmation kind of movement that just didn't kind of felt a little saccharine during times when people are having a hard time.

It's like you never know what someone else is going through.

When you're feeling good,

Someone else may be suffering and you don't want to be like Pollyanna about it.

But what I learned at Plum Village is that we actually need to cultivate joy in order to have the capacity to be with the suffering.

And the bigger the suffering,

The more we need to cultivate joy.

The monks and nuns there are so playful and delightful.

So between our meditation sessions and our work service,

You would find the nuns out playing volleyball with my kids on lazy day,

Which is a day when there's no rules.

We don't wake up at five to meditate and everyone gets the day off.

The nuns organized a soccer match of kids versus nuns.

And two of the nuns would wheel a wheelbarrow in to be the ambulance if kids got hurt and then load the kids on the wheelbarrow and wheel them out.

They were so delightful,

So youthful,

And reminded me of all the joy that is present right here and right now that I had forgotten to see just the joy in my children's faces.

So much of my effort has been around controlling things and being with suffering that I'd forgot to cultivate joy.

We had a sister that was part of our smaller group.

So there's about 700 people that participated in these family weeks at Plum Village and were separated into these three hamlets.

We were in the lower hamlet.

And then within our lower hamlet,

There's smaller groups.

Our small group was called Breathe and Smile.

And we would meet the small group for discussion and at mealtimes.

And my sister,

The sister that led us,

Was named Sister Joyful Effort.

And she gave us the homework on the very second day to look for moments of joy and that we were to report back to the group what the moments of joy were.

And as I know and you know from being a behavioral psychologist,

As soon as you turn your mind towards something and you're looking for something,

It's likely that thing will grow.

This is sort of some of the problems with bias in research,

Right?

So I started to be on the lookout.

This was my job,

To be on the lookout for joy.

And I noticed all these subtle things like when you're walking and it's really hot and then you walk underneath a tree,

How pleasant it feels to be in the shade.

I also noticed during my meditation how joyful it was to hear little kids giggling,

Actually enjoying the giggle as opposed to wanting to silence it,

Right?

And then there was one moment where I just held my husband's hand.

Taking time to just hold his hand was so joyful.

So for you,

Start to cultivate joy.

And it's not about toxic positivity.

It's about growing this as a resource.

I kind of think if the monks and nuns are doing it and they spend a lot of time meditating on people's suffering,

Then maybe we could learn a little something from them.

There's a wonderful movie,

If you haven't seen it,

About joy with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.

I highly recommend it.

I'll put it in the show notes as well as the Book of Joy,

Which is fantastic by Doug Abrams.

Go ahead and watch that or start reading that if you want to learn more about joy.

But you can just do this in your day.

The practice is to look for small moments of happiness or ease to savor your full body experience of joy.

You'll notice your mind pulling away from it and just return again to the practice of being in joy.

And then to hold the moments lightly and with delight because it's like weather.

It's going to go away.

It's going to shift.

So you don't want to attach too strongly to it.

You just hold on to it,

Sort of like opening your palms to receive a gift or a butterfly to land in.

You don't close it off.

You just leave them open to receive.

So that's the second lesson for you to practice and cultivate joy.

The third lesson was probably the one that I resonated most with early on and that I really saw the benefits of pretty quickly,

Which is there is no need to hurry.

So when I left on retreat,

The couple of days before we left,

It was my husband's 50th birthday.

It was us leaving for an international trip with two kids.

I was wrapping up season two of this podcast and wrapping up my work,

My clinical work,

And putting in a proposal for a book.

I was doing too much.

And it's sort of like if you're an athlete that's training too much and you go and you say,

My knees hurt,

The first intervention that your doctor will say is stop running.

Let your knees heal.

Worrying is causing a lot of problems for us as a culture.

It's causing a disconnect in our relationships because we're forgetting to be present with each other.

It's causing unhappiness because we're moving quickly through things that are joyful and wonderful.

We don't get to be in them.

It's also leading to us being less sensitive to the suffering and the impact of our actions because if you're running through it,

You don't feel it.

And the hurrying and the speed at which our lives have picked up is not only impacting us individually and impacting our families and our organizations,

It's impacting our planet.

We're speeding through the sounds of birds that are stopping singing because there's no trees for them.

So our daily schedule at Plum Village consisted of morning meditation.

We had silent breakfast,

So there was something called noble silence that we were quiet through.

The monastics would then teach.

We'd have a Dharma talk that the children would sit up at the front and they'd speak to the children first.

That's something that Ty always did was always speak to the children first.

He said that the children need less time than their parents to learn these,

So they would get like 15 minutes and then we would get 45 after that.

And then after the Dharma talk,

We would go on an hour walking meditation through the aspen trees and the plum orchards and around the lotus pond and through the happy farm.

It was a walk that had no end point.

There was nowhere to get to on this walk.

And it would be 700 people walking together like a stream.

It kind of reminded me if you've ever been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium when all the sardines swim together and they look like one big organism.

It was like that,

Silent.

So even the children were silent.

And there were moments where it was so incredibly slow that you were barely moving and then moments where it flowed.

And you could feel the ripple effect,

Right?

So if we're going up a hill,

The slowness would start way back beyond that at the bottom of the hill because the people are moving slowly up.

So you could see the impact of each organism on another.

The gatha that we were taught to use while walking was to step with one step saying yes,

The next step saying yes,

The right foot saying thank you,

The left foot saying thank you,

Yes,

Yes,

Thank you,

Thank you.

And we were saying yes to the present moment and saying thank you,

Thank you to the earth,

Thank you to our body,

Thank you for being here,

Just goodness,

Thank you for this opportunity.

So we walked mindfully every day.

And we also then participated in a working meditation,

Family sharing and a mindful dinner with our sangha family.

With mindful eating at dinner,

We would all gather and wait,

We get our plate of food through this line.

And what the nuns taught us is that your mindfulness begins as soon as you start thinking about eating,

As soon as you start contemplating,

Huh,

I'm hungry,

I'm going to get something to eat.

That's where you start to be mindful and aware.

And you're mindful and aware all through the line of taking the food and going and sitting down and sometimes it would be sit for 10 minutes waiting for our whole group to get there because everyone's at a different pace of things.

You have little toddlers that people are having to fill their plates up with and then someone drops their plate and you have to go back and get another plate and you know,

These are families.

So things go slow.

And we'd all gather in the circle and read the five contemplations of eating before we started.

So the five contemplations of eating have to do with being grateful and aware of where your food comes from.

So not just I'm,

You know,

Thankful for my mom making this but also the sun and the rain and the soil,

The farmers,

The truck drivers,

The grocery store clerk,

The cooks,

All of the things that went into eating this meal.

And when you have that kind of consciousness,

It really changes your relationship with the food because you're like,

Oh my gosh,

This bite is so precious.

Can you think about everything that went into this,

You know,

Noodle that I'm about to eat?

It's a lot.

The contemplations also have an awareness of the suffering caused by our consumption and a real commitment to eat in a way that minimizes that suffering and enjoys the beauty of eating.

I'll put a link to the five contemplations in the show notes if you want to read them for yourself or with your family.

And that's something that we've continued our practice of at home is reading those once a week.

But we'd begin with the five contemplations and then the nun would ring the bell and the first 15 minutes of our meal were in silence.

Now I think my memory of this is that when it's not family week,

It's the whole meal that's in silence.

But when you have little ones,

15 minutes is plenty to be silent for.

It was challenging at first,

But it was so,

I cannot say how hard it was at first,

But how wonderful it was over time to just be able to sit and eat.

And we were instructed to try and chew our food at least 30 times.

I think the nuns chew their food 50 times because my son counted.

He was like,

I think they do it 50,

But we're like beginners.

So we do it 30.

30 times chewing each bite of food.

By the time you get to 15 minutes,

Your plate is like half done.

Usually when I'm eating,

It's a good five minutes or so of eating and then I'm done.

I don't even know if I eat.

Back to the episode that I did with Judd Brewer on mindful eating,

This took mindful eating to a whole nother level.

And then we would share,

We'd have this experience with our food and really getting into our bodies and paying attention to the experience and honoring it.

And then having time just to share with people from all over the world.

It was so cool to have this global community doing this together.

So we met people from Columbia,

From Germany,

From Thailand,

From Belgium,

From India,

From the UK,

From Pakistan,

From all over the world.

Actually the United States was one of the smaller representations there,

Which was quite lovely to not always be dominating as the United States.

And here,

The similarity in our challenges globally,

And then also the differences,

But also just the similarity of the parents that were struggling and just the challenges that we have faced as parents in particular during the pandemic,

Because we were there with families and the couples that were struggling.

And it was a beautiful time.

The end of our day,

We would close with a mindful silence and at 9.

30,

It was silent until after breakfast the following morning.

The practice of noble silence and not hurrying in the evening and being quiet during those hours was also something that was really hard for our family at first.

And I think something that many people dread when they think about going to Plum Village,

Like,

How am I going to be quiet for all that time?

But what was interesting is I followed a recommendation from one of the monks to keep a tab to write notes on,

Like a notebook to write notes on between us,

Because we may have a hard time at first just being quiet.

And I just kept one rolling piece of paper that we kind of did both sides of.

And what I noticed was when I would go back and read what we wrote to each other during that noble silence,

Most of it was just not necessary.

It was things like,

Do you know where the sunscreen is?

I can't find the sunscreen.

This is us getting ready to go in the morning.

Anyone know where the sunscreen is?

Oh,

I found it.

Sometimes it was us speaking to ourselves and never really even having an engagement with another.

So noble silence was another part.

The teaching,

There's no need to hurry.

Is the teaching for you when you bring that into your life is to choose an activity such as eating or walking or even going to bed or waking up in the morning and make that activity a meditation practice.

Carry it out in silence with your full attention and remind yourself that there's nowhere to go,

Nothing to do,

But to be here in this task,

Savor it.

We started to sing this song as a family,

Which is a gatha as well.

And the song goes,

Happiness is here and now.

I have dropped my worries.

Nowhere to go,

Nothing to do.

There's no need to hurry.

The fourth lesson of Plum Village is to ask yourself,

Are you sure?

When I arrived at Plum Village,

My mind was a bit of a mess.

I had on it lots of emails that I hadn't returned.

I was worried about what was going to come next.

It's this real habit of constantly planning,

Planning,

Planning,

Planning.

And that's,

I think,

Part of being in our world today is we have to do a lot of planning for tomorrow.

There's so much,

If we don't plan,

How are we going to stay organized?

But my planning was seeping into all parts of my activities,

Not just planning time.

My emails were seeping into thinking about them when I was at Trader Joe's,

Not just when I was at my computer.

And then I had this low-grade self-criticism going on in my mind,

Just this little critic that would make comments from here and there,

Comments about me,

And rehearse things that I said,

And rehearse stuff that I did on the podcast,

And tell me how I could have done them better.

So the practice of Plum Village,

Of asking,

Are you sure,

Is a practice of being aware of your mind and its tricks.

In ACT,

We call this cognitive diffusion.

And it's a separating of you from what your mind is saying,

And really not taking it at its face value.

So we were told,

Instructed to just,

In that pause,

In the mindful pause that we were doing throughout the day,

To just check in and say,

Are you sure?

To catch our thinking when it was traveling off into the future or making judgments and just say,

Are you sure?

And the more that you just question it,

You don't even have to come up with an answer,

But just question,

Are you sure?

The more freedom that you'll get from your automatic thinking patterns,

And you get to see how much your mind is a storytelling machine,

How much is just constantly going through those well-worn tracks.

Are you sure develops another track.

In some ways,

It's like a fork in the road,

Where your mind could just keep on doing what it's doing.

But when you get to the fork,

You actually have to ask yourself,

Am I going in the right direction here?

Am I on track?

And that,

Are you sure,

Is a way to respond.

My mind would say things like,

My kids are annoying people.

I need them to be quiet.

And then I would respond,

Are you sure?

My mind would say,

It's easier just to do this myself.

And then I would respond,

Are you sure?

There's a lightness that comes when you realize that your thoughts are not always true.

So this is how you can practice this type of insight.

Become an observer of your mind,

Your rules,

Your judgments,

Your chatter,

And frequently ask yourself,

Are you sure?

Be open to different perspectives.

The fifth lesson from Palm Village is one that really hit me deeply in a way of rejuvenating me.

And that is to let your work be a gift of service.

So Plum Village is a working monastery.

It's not a spa vacation.

The dwellings are campsites,

Very simple buildings.

Bathrooms are a step up from outhouses and you do your own dishes.

Everyone participates in a working meditation.

Some families are designed to care for the garden.

Some families are designated to care for the garden.

Others chop vegetables.

Some families were on the toilet cleaning committee,

Which we were lucky to not get on that one.

And deep respect,

Deep respect for the families that cleaned our toilets and took out the trash cans during COVID.

Our family was assigned for kitchen cleanup.

And after dinner,

What we would do is we would sanitize all the plates and bowls for the hundreds of residents that were there.

We would take out the smelly compost,

The bin.

We take out these bins of water that they preserved to water the plants and their garden.

Plum Village is very committed to environmentalism and to having the least amount of impact as possible.

And then we would mop the floors.

And the floor mopping exercise was always an interesting one because you're mopping the floors in this busy dining hall,

Which people are constantly walking over.

So it was a wonderful example of impermanence,

Sort of like as you're doing your emails more are coming in,

That there's never perfection in any of this.

And we were instructed to see this work as our meditation.

Like all of our other practices,

The process of cleaning the floor,

We would consider the people who were enjoying a clean floor to walk across.

When we're cleaning the bowls for the next day,

We're thinking about this is a gift to the children who get to eat oatmeal from this clean bowl.

And how we felt this sense of community and working together because while we were cleaning someone's bowl,

Someone else was cleaning our toilet bowl.

And according to the Buddhist sutras,

Which are the teachings of the Buddha that were written down years after he passed,

There's something called the four nutriments that Thay Thich Nhat Hanh would teach.

And the nutriments are the nourishments,

The things that give us energy and nourishment.

The first nutriment is the food that we eat,

Right?

So we get energy from the plums,

From the tree and the soup that we ate.

The second nutriment is our senses.

Paying attention to our five senses.

We get energy from looking at a beautiful flower or from smelling a delicious smell or from hearing the sound of music or the voice of somebody that's soothing,

Right?

Those are nutrients for us,

Our senses.

The third nutriment is our service,

Our motivation.

The third nutriment is our motivation.

The thing that inspires us,

Our aspiration,

Our values are actually energizing for us.

And what's interesting about this nutriment of motivation and the reason why we do something as being energizing is that it's an endless resource.

So as a parent,

You know this,

Right,

When you are at your limit and so stressed out and your child comes and says,

Can you read me a story?

And if you can tap into like,

Oh my gosh,

My little sweet baby,

All of a sudden you have the energy to do something you would feel like you never had the energy to do,

Right?

So with this nutriment of being of service,

We used our working meditation as a means to cultivate that,

Our aspiration to be helpful,

Really.

The fourth nutriment has to do with our consciousness of where we are settling in our mind and our being.

Are we in a consciousness of loving kindness?

Are we in a consciousness of compassion?

Are we in consciousness of expansive spaciousness?

And those levels,

Those types of consciousness are really nourishing for us as well.

So with my working meditation,

I started to see,

Okay,

This is something I can do at home.

And I think I had lost a little bit of my motivation behind my work.

I know it,

Like I knew it rationally,

But I wasn't feeling it.

And when I got back in contact with like,

Oh,

Wait a minute,

I chose this work for a reason.

I'm doing this for a reason.

It changed everything for me because one of the things that can easily happen in the West is that our work becomes about outcome.

It becomes about finances,

How much money we're making,

Or if you're working to grow a platform,

How many numbers of people that you have on your email list,

Or if you're working to clean your house,

How clean it gets at the end.

And we forget,

Oh,

Wait a minute,

I'm doing this for a reason.

I'm cleaning my house to care for my home,

To care for my family,

To care for me.

I'm being of service.

And no matter what type of work we do,

We could be of service.

Every work action can have a volition behind it that has meaning and purpose.

And when you tap into that,

Oh my gosh,

Then all of a sudden you have energy again.

At the end of our service job,

We would sing that song,

The happiness is here and now song,

But we would sing it together differently.

We'd sing,

Happiness is here and now,

I have dropped my worries,

Something to do,

Somewhere to go.

There's still no need to hurry.

So if you want to practice working meditation before starting your work,

Choose an aspiration or an intention to focus on.

Write it down in your journal at the beginning of the day,

Put on a post-it note on your computer,

Write it in your phone.

This is the why.

This is why I'm showing up to this work.

And when you are working,

Offer your full effort and your attention.

One hundred percent is what Thich Nhat Hanh would say.

Put in one hundred percent of your mindfulness and focus on the process over the outcome.

Your life and process is the reason why we call it this,

But focus on the process.

I really enjoyed singing and humming while I was working,

Which we know humming activates that vagus nerve and is really good for you.

So if you have a song or a tune that motivates you,

Sing it while you work.

Alrighty,

So we're at the last lesson,

Which is your future is today.

Thich Nhat Hanh died in Vietnam in 2021,

Not that long ago.

And when he died,

His ashes,

You could,

You know,

My watching his funeral on you can watch it on TV,

Right?

Watching his funeral online,

You watch them cremate and put his ashes in these little urns.

And these urns were sent back to Plum Village.

We didn't know this,

But the weeks that we were there were culminating with the spreading of Thich Nhat Hanh's ashes across Plum Village.

And on the day that we spread his ashes,

They showed a montage of slides during the Dhamma talk of him and how Thich used to always walk with the children in his hands.

The children were always put at the front,

The front of the Dhamma talk,

The front of the walk.

The children are our future,

Right?

And so he'd want them up close and up at the front.

And when we went to spread his ashes,

Sister Deer Park,

Who is a nun who worked with my children there,

Grabbed my two kids and said,

We're going to go up to the front,

Which they asked them to do.

So here are my little nine and 12-year-old boys up at the front of this procession of 700 plus people walking through Plum Village to receive Thich Nhat Hanh's ashes in their hands and then to deliver those ashes to the plum trees and the lotus pond and aspen trees as a reminder that as Thich Nhat Hanh went into the earth,

He would then really be absorbed by the plum trees and become the plum of next summer that a child may eat,

But also as a reminder of impermanence and of no birth and no death that he continues on,

Right,

In these children's and his experience and with the actions that children take.

And so I was kind of far behind them on this journey.

And when I got to the end of receiving the ashes in my hands and placing them down in an aspen tree and saying my prayer for him,

I went back and I found my youngest son crying with one of the nuns.

And I went up to him and asked them,

Well,

You know,

What's happening?

Are you okay?

And I knew that this was a profound experience.

And of course,

He's crying.

But my son said,

I feel like I don't deserve this.

I don't deserve to be at the front.

And what the nun said that was really powerful was that he was given this gift.

This gift was transmitted from his grandparents to his parents,

His parents to him.

And it's the gift of these teachings.

And it's an opportunity now for him to share this gift with others.

I think that sometimes we get so caught up in whether or not we deserve to be somewhere or do something or we get so caught up on what things look like and how they're going to come out that we forget that we all have this gift,

An incredible gift.

And the gift is our actions.

Our gift is our presence with one another.

Our gift is the gift that that nun gave me by caring for my son while I was doing this ceremony.

And now my son has this gift in him,

Right?

So the concept of your future is today is the reality that your actions today are creating your future tomorrow.

There is a teaching on climate change on our last day where the nun who led it said,

It is likely like many other civilizations that our civilization is coming to an end.

And people say,

Oh,

We don't know when,

But we do know when based on our actions today.

How we live has an impact.

And we also sit in today,

Our current present moment is the result of all of our actions before this moment.

So our past,

The ways in which we tended to our relationships or our bodies or neglected important things or spread harm or spread kindness show up in our current experience.

Our experience of racism is our actions,

Our collective actions of harm in the past.

So we have a lot of power in the present moment,

And it's actually the present moment where we only have power to cultivate a different future for our kids and for each other.

So you can practice the future right now.

And the way that you do that is through cultivating habits that will grow the future that you want.

Some of the habits that I talked about that I shared with you,

Being present,

Not hurrying,

Letting your work be of service,

Being present,

Cultivating happiness,

Not hurrying through life,

Asking yourself,

Are you sure,

And letting your work be of service.

Those lessons that we just went through,

When you do that,

They will create a different future for you.

And water the seeds that you want to grow.

Seeds need watering,

Plants need watering,

Frequent watering.

You don't just plant them and expect them to grow on their own.

They need nurturing.

So nurture the things in yourself and nurture the things in others that you care most about.

And acknowledge the history,

Your ancestors,

Your teachers,

Your parents that live inside of you right now.

Some of that history you may want to transform,

Some of that history you may want to care more for because it needs a little more love.

But honoring it and seeing how your past is in your present.

So those are the six teachings of Plum Village I wanted to share with you.

Thanks for sticking with me through this.

And I will say that the true test of these teachings is how I and you will apply them in our lives at home.

And I'll tell you that we left France on a very busy day.

Apparently everyone in Paris goes on vacation at the same time,

Like on the same weekend.

And that was the weekend we were traveling back.

And we were in the busiest security line I have ever been in my life.

Thousand people,

700 people walking together very slowly.

And I just breathed in and said,

Yes,

Yes,

Thank you,

Thank you.

And then I would get irritated and I would notice my worry,

I'm going to miss my flight.

All of that crept back in pretty quickly.

And my husband helped me come back to the present and just let go and be with this is it.

If we miss our flight,

Then that's it.

It's not,

You know,

No harm.

Nobody's going to die in the airport in Paris.

So we need each other as reminders.

Sometimes we'll lose our own mindfulness and we need the practices,

The repetition of them for them to become more automatic for us.

I believe a different future is possible for us,

But only if we tend very carefully and with intention to the present moment that we have.

Thanks for listening.

And we will be back season three with some amazing guests.

I'm really excited to share them with you.

I'm also really excited about this upcoming summit from striving to thriving 2.

0 second round second year of doing it.

The lineup is incredible.

Jack Kornfield,

Trudy Goodman,

Rick Hansen,

Dan Siegel,

Jennifer Payne,

Lissa Epple,

Alexandra Crosswell,

Kimberly Wilson,

Anna Lemke,

People that have changed and inspired me over the past year that I think will make a big difference in your life and helping you live with more intention and more presence.

Happy blessings and I'll see you next week.

Reviews

I be heard of Plum Village but had no idea where or what it was. Sounds like a wonderful place to be refreshed, rested and restored spiritually mind and body. Lovely that children and families are welcome too. 🩷