I have lived in a community for almost 22 years now.
And what I find,
what enables us to live in harmony
with each other.
It's our practice of The Mindfulness Trainings.
In our community,
there are monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen we call the fourfold Sangha, or the multifold Sangha .
And The Five Mindfulness Trainings serve as
a mirror in which we can see ourselves and each other.
They help us to
see our thoughts,
and work with our thoughts.
To see our speech,
and train ourselves to speak in the spirit of love
and kindness.
We call loving speech and deep listening.
And we also.
The trainings help us to walk with our behaviors, our bodily actions.
So they help us to train
the three aspects of our actions of thoughts, speech and bodily actions in a very concrete way.
And you can find these five mindfulness trainings online.
If you'll just type in the search bar.
Plum Village
dot org.
And then search for The Five Mindfulness Trainings.
They should be there for you.
Every mindfulness training starts with
Aware of the suffering caused by
something.
Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life.
I'm committed to cultivate in compassion and learn ways to protect the life of people, animals, plants and minerals.
I am determined not to kill, not to let alone kill, and not to support any of killing in this world.
In my thinking and in my way of life.
Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing and oppression.
I am committed to practicing generosity in my thinking, speaking and acting.
So this is a practice of being aware of the suffering.
And because we
are aware of it.
We want to find a way out.
We want to transform the suffering.
And the training helps us to see very specific ways that we can
prevent causing the suffering or healing that habit,
that causes the suffering.
I knew a teenager and I took care of her since she was 12 years old.
And she had a lot of problems before she graduated from high school.
She contacted me.
She wanted to come to the monastery to spend a week here before she joined the
the Marine.
And she shared with me from the age of 12 to 15.
She had been in a gang.
She had been raped.
She had used drugs.
So thankfully, because she took The Five Mindfulness Trainings at the age of 15,
she said many times she would take out her
Iphone
and she would read The Five Mindfulness Trainings again and again
to help her clear her mind, clear her confusion so that she could try to do the right thing.
And finally she was able to leave the gang to join ROTC
and finish
high school, and she wanted to become a doctor.
So The Five Mindfulness Trainings can help us see a way out
concretely when we may not ourselves see the way out,
when we are so confused and mired in our despair or desperation.
The trainings are there to help us
see the situation more clearly and know how to exit that situation.
For example, the first training is about:
Reverence for life.
Reverence for lives of people, animals, plants and minerals.
I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill,
and not to support any act of killing in this world.
In my thinking and in my way of life.
In the practice,
I've learned to have reverence for my own life.
Growing up, I had many suicidal thoughts.
That it became a habit for me to think of
suicide.
Whenever I had
a big difficulty in school, in relationships.
And so when I began to practice this first training.
I realized that I need to have reverence for my own life.
Not to think of harsh, lethal thoughts toward my own body.
And instead I practiced loving speech and deep listening to my own body
to heal that wounded child in me.
The Second Mindfulness Training is about true happiness.
I will practice looking deeply to see that the happiness and suffering of others
are not separate from my own happiness and suffering.
That true happiness is not possible without understanding and compassion,
and that running after wealth, fame, power and sensual pleasures can bring much suffering and despair.
Again in my own life experience, I thought if I got a really high education.
A good career.
A loving partner.
It would compensate for all the losses in my life.
But I think most of us realize that true happiness comes from something deep within,
that we are able to be there for ourselves, to take care of our
strong emotions,
to take care of our loved ones.
That's bring true happiness.
The Third Mindfulness Training is about true love.
This mindfulness training is called true love,
but I think the word sex is actually mentioned more often.
We mistake sex for love and those of us who feel insecure,
uncertain, wounded in ourselves.
We seek for approval
from others, especially through relationships and sex.
But that only bring,
It brings more injury,
more pain to our body and our mind, more abuse to ourselves.
So the practice of true love is to come back to care for our body and mind, to be our own soulmate.
To remember, to know, and to take good care of ourselves.
That's the definition of a soulmate in Vietnamese.
And in this training, we also learn to protect children from sexual abuse.
Many parents when they suffered from sexual abuse,
or domestic violence when they grow up.
The cycle repeats.
If we have a know how to heal that pain in our own lives.
We may feel so overwhelmed by the suffering,
or we
feel numb to lives.
That
inadvertently
in our relationships.
The abuse is repeated.
And then our children, we expose our children to violence and abuse
without knowing it, without recognizing it;
or even if we see it, we're not able to confront that.
And so the cycle of suffering is repeated.
So in our practice of mindfulness, we learn to heal our own old wounds.
So that we can truly be alive, truly be present for ourselves and for our loved ones, especially the children.
So that they don't have to go through the pain and the abuse that we had gone through.
The fourth Mindfulness Training is about loving speech and deep listening.
And it was a lesson that while I was trying to listen deeply outside, I wasn't listening deeply inside.
We need to practice that with ourselves in sitting meditation.
We practice deep listening.
First of all, it's to our breathing, because our breathing reflects our state of mind.
We breathe differently when we're angry versus when we're sad.
versus when we feel safe and secured.
We listen deeply to our body and we say lovingly to the body.
Hello, body.
I know there's pain.
It's okay.
And we breathe and relax that pain.
And we find ways to take care of that pain, of that symptom.
So we learned to speak.
Lovingly.
To listen deeply, first and foremost, to ourselves.
So that we can also
do that for our loved ones.
Otherwise, our speech is too harsh, too unkind, or too bitter.
That drives
our loved ones away.
It causes more pain and suffering in ourselves and in our loved ones.
So loving speech and deep listening can re-establish communication with ourselves and our loved ones.
The fifth Mindfulness Training is about nourishment and healing.
We all say and think that we want to be happy.
We don't want to suffer.
But if we look deeply and be honest with ourselves.
In our daily life,
we consume a lot of suffering.
Consuming through my eyes and consuming through my ears.
Through movies, music, conversations, thoughts, actions.
We bring in toxins to our bodies and our minds.
So the fifth Mindfulness Training helps reminded us to bring in only the positive thoughts, speech and actions.
To be aware when the message is not positive and not to bring it into our own consciousness.
When you see a billboard,
that are not beneficial.
A song or a conversation that are not nourishing.
You can breathe.
Relax your body.
And you can walk away.
Don't expose yourself to it.
If you know it's not beneficial, not nourishing.
So through awareness of the foods, the nutriment that we bring into our eyes, our ears, our nose,
our mouth, our body through touch, through our thoughts.
We only nourish ourselves
with positive, nourishing nutriment input, because the input will affect the output.
The output will affect the input.
The output reflects the input.
These Mindfulness Trainings.
They are like the North Star.
They gave us the direction.
So when we veer, we go astray from them.
We can smile.
And come back to
to the path.
We don't expect ourselves to be perfect at practicing these trainings.
But like that young girl who suffered so much.
But she took refuge in these trainings to help herself.
To take better care of herself.
And now she's a nurse.
Now she has a family and her life is much more stable.
She has more peace in herself, more reconciliation with her wounded child.
Because she has taken refuge in the practice.
So I hope you also find refuge.
And guidance in these Mindfulness Trainings.
Bless you.
Singing in background: Please call me by my true name.
so that I can wake up.
And the door
of my heart
can be left open, the door of compassion.