5 things I learned at a Buddhist monastery

Hello friend,

This month it’s 20 years since Tim and I went on our first date to the cinema. I don’t remember much about it apart from that I really wanted to spend more time together. And so, happily, we have. To celebrate the milestone, we went to a retreat at Plum Village, a Zen Buddhist monastery in the south of France set up by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.

At Plum Village, retreatants and monastics follow the same schedule. We wake at 5am for morning meditation at 6am. We eat together in silence. We take walking meditations. We listen to talks about mindfulness. We practice Zen calligraphy, peel vegetables, rake leaves, nap on benches under trees, and talk about our experiences. The slow pace allows a transformation to happen, for small every-day joys to appear big, for ignored worries to process and leave us, for judgements to dissolve, and for space to open up in the heart.

It is a magical and grounding experience that I recommend to everyone. Every year, thousands of people visit Plum Village, from all over the world, from young children to elders, to experience heaven on Earth.

We were lucky to have a Q&A session with Sister Hội Nghiêm (meaning “Adornment with Understanding”), the Abbess of Lower Hamlet, one of the nunneries of Plum Village. I wanted to share five things I took from her wonderful answers.

Mindfulness is not done in the mind

“Mindfulness” is perhaps a misleading term. It could suggest that you look around, think, and label: ah, a tree. And this? A bird. But Sister Hội Nghiêm told us no, you can’t understand or practice mindfulness by using your intellect or your thoughts. Mindfulness is done with daily practice, in the body. Our bodies are our most authentic path to the present moment. The body cannot lie (or does so very badly). If we’re worried, we get butterflies in our stomachs, when we’re tired our eyelids are heavy, when we’re stressed our heads hurt. The problem is we disconnect the mind from the body and ignore the signals. Listening deeply to the body every day, multiple times a day, allows us to see what is happening, be with the feelings we carry in our bodies, and make space to process and release them. If we ignore them, they stay stuck in our tight shoulders or painful stomachs until we listen. At this point, the body is like a child having a tantrum – you can’t talk to it rationally and explain Monday morning is not the time for chocolate biscuits, you just have to hold it and say: I am here for you. Eventually, with your calm presence, it will calm down too.

Do things with joy and happiness

We sing a lot of songs at Plum Village. They are very cheesy and sweet, with lyrics about breathing, or loving animals, or being happy. Sister Hội Nghiêm told us: the most important thing you can do is carry out your daily life with joy and happiness. Sometimes, you will feel pain or sadness or anger, and it will be harder to do things with joy and happiness. The practice isn’t about ignoring that suffering – you can’t just “live laugh love” your way through loss or fear. Rather, if you create time to 1) sit with your suffering like the child having a tantrum, and 2) the rest of the time practice in happiness, you strengthen your ability to default to joy. The cheesy songs remind us that happiness is there, even if suffering is there too. Buddhist psychology talks about potential emotions as “seeds of consciousness”, and likens the mind to a garden. If you, every day, ignore the potential for gratitude and happiness in small moments (A shower! A cup of coffee! A nice dog on the street!), you miss out on nourishing your “seeds” of happiness. Then when something angers or scares you, there is more space for the “seeds” of suffering to grow.

Sister Hội Nghiêm became Abbess of Lower Hamlet in 2014

Don’t wait until you’re angry to practice

The old Zen saying goes: “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” Daily practice is important because our mind is set up for survival. Our ancestors developed a keen sense of anxiety and a combative sense of self-protection in order to survive. This means today, we still have a tendency to overeat, to worry about small things, or say, to buy a lot of toilet paper during a global pandemic. This is our default operating system, and it’s very difficult to manually override. Which is why, when we are stressed or anxious we fall into habits that we know aren’t good for us – not exercising, drinking too much, eating an extra cookie, scrolling through social media. Sister Hội Nghiêm said “if you’re angry, it’s too late”. If you’re angry, it’s not a bad time to start a meditation practice, but a better time is when you have space to get used to listening to yourself. When we are patient and calm, we have a better opportunity to strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and the brain stem. When we listen to ourselves in meditation, we can realise that we are very annoying, and very distracted! But like riding a bike, it’s worth practicing little and often to start, to fall off a lot, because then we can enjoy the feeling of freedom later on. Then, when we’re angry or upset, all the muscles of mindfulness are strong, so we can trust ourselves to make good decisions. 

Suffering opens the door for happiness

We tend to create a binary between suffering and happiness – either you’re one or the other, and never the twain shall meet. We think we must “get over” or “move past” our suffering so that we can return to happiness. But what we miss when we tend to think this way is that it is not despite, but because of suffering that we can be happy. That suffering actually broadens our capacity to be happy. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass said it like this: “suffering is the sandpaper that wakes up the grace of the soul”. And anyone who has been through a life-changing experience or a difficult passage of life, and found their way through it, will likely tell you the same: I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m glad it happened to me, because I grew from it. Sometimes people who suffer the most are the people who are able to be most enlightened. Thich Nhat Hanh himself saw the horror of the Vietnam War first hand, and still found the world beautiful and perfect, saying: “people talk about entering nirvana, but we are already there.” The sister told us: “sometimes we have to suffer deeply but we will love ourselves in the end.”

Love starts within ourselves

“Don’t become the victim of other people,” the sister told us, “don’t wait for others to resolve your pain. Do you feel that you suffered enough? Then do not make yourself suffer more.” Pure joy, which contains a sense of freedom, is not dependent on external factors. We have millions of conditions for happiness, but we don’t need all of them to be happy. Sitting still in meditation means we can’t distract ourselves with sensory pleasures, and that we have to meet our irritations or our discomfort head-on, with love. You can’t strong-arm yourself into meditation, eventually, you have to relax into the nothingness. And what we find is that patience can strengthen, the influence of outside factors on us lessens, and a very pure feeling of love and deep peace can grow in the whole body, and carry on through the whole day.

Until next time,

May you be well, happy, whole, and free.

T & B

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