Have I Got a True Home?

Thich Nhat Hanh — Winter Retreat 2013–2014 (Christmas Eve public talk, in English) Stillwater Meditation Hall, Upper Hamlet, Plum Village · 24 December 2013 · talk 12 of 24

Illuminates: the true home in the here-and-now (“I have arrived, I am home”) · the body as first home · the third–eighth exercises of mindful breathing (aware of body · calm the body · generate joy · generate happiness · recognize & calm painful feeling) · running away vs. going home · the collective energy of the Sangha (mother holding her baby) · the Sangha as true home / Sangha-building (the “beloved community”) · the food of volition / “what is your dream?”

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[Opening.] Today is the 24th of December, 2013, and we are in the Stillwater Meditation Hall of the Upper Hamlet.

Home — the Buddha and the Christ

Christmas is always an opportunity to meditate on the topic of home. Who has a home? The Buddha did not have a home when he was young. Although he was born a prince, with many material comforts, and knew he would become a king, he did not feel at home; he was unhappy with all these conditions, and he left the palace to find a true home. And Jesus Christ was born a refugee and was also seeking his home. In the Gospel, Jesus says that foxes have their holes and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head — he did not have a home. But both the Buddha and the Christ practiced, and they found their true home — and you are their continuation. You are a continuation of the Buddha; you are a continuation of Jesus Christ. You have to follow their teaching and practice in order to find the true home.

Have I got a true home? A true home is a place where you feel comfortable, at ease — you don’t want to go anywhere anymore, because you feel so at home. Have you found such a place? Many of us have been looking and have not yet found it. When you come to Plum Village, you are offered a practice that helps you find a home — and the practice is very concrete. Your home is not located in space or time; everywhere you go, you can find your true home. That is why in Plum Village we say “I have arrived, I am home” as the first fruit of the practice. If you practice well, you can arrive home with every breath and every step. If you have practiced walking meditation or mindful breathing and have not yet touched your true home, it is because it has not been done properly — for in principle every breath can bring you home, and every step can bring you home, right in the here and the now.

The body as first home — the exercises of mindful breathing

When you practice mindful breathing, you focus attention on your in-breath and bring your mind home to your body. Your body is the first home. Are you in conflict with your body? Do you hate it? Have you made its acquaintance? Can you feel at home with it? Our body is a wonder of life, like the flower in front of us — and each of us is a flower in the garden of humanity. But many of us do not know how to take care of our flower, and we have lost much of our freshness and beauty. So the first thing is to go home and recognize that you have a body. When you spend two hours with your computer, you forget entirely that you have a body; and when the mind is not with the body, you are not really there, alive. In the teaching of the Buddha, you are truly alive only when your mind is with your body — the embodied mind. How to bring body and mind together? Just breathe in mindfully — it takes only two or three seconds, and there you are, body and mind united; the fruit is called the oneness of body and mind, realized in a single in-breath. Then, suddenly, you are fully present in the here and the now — where there are so many wonders of life: your body, the air you breathe, the rain, the flower, everything around us. When we go home to our body, we have a chance to recognize all these wonders, and all of that becomes your true home.

In Plum Village our brothers and sisters program a bell of mindfulness into their computer; every quarter-hour the bell sounds, and they stop, go back to their in-breath and out-breath, come home to the body, and enjoy mindful breathing at least three times, smiling, before continuing. You can do the same — download the bell from the website to remind you to go home to your body. Life is short.

When you come home to your body, you may notice much tension and stress there: you have been working hard, letting pain accumulate, not being kind enough to your body. So you would like to release that tension. The Buddha gave us exercises for this. The third exercise of mindful breathing is: Breathing in, I am aware of my body; breathing out, I smile to my body. That is an act of reconciliation — “I’m sorry, my body; I have neglected you and let stress accumulate.” Breathing in, you come home to the body and recognize it as a wonder; breathing out, you smile to it — and the smile brings relaxation, because smiling is an act of love. On the face there are hundreds of muscles; when you are angry or worried, they are tense, but when you smile, you release the tension in them, and you look much better. Sitting in a car while someone else drives, you can look in a little mirror, breathe, relax, smile, and enjoy the hills and trees through the window — you don’t need a meditation hall. And before brushing your teeth, look in the mirror and smile to yourself — that moment can be a happy one. This is the virtue of mindfulness: it creates moments of peace, joy, relaxation, and happiness.

The fourth exercise is: Breathing in, I allow my body to release the tension; breathing out, I release the tension in my body. Even sitting like this you can do it. In sitting meditation you must be relaxed — you don’t fight or struggle; you allow the body to rest and recover, to heal itself. Don’t rely on medication alone: the body has the power to heal itself if you allow it to rest and release tension — as when you cut your finger, you only wash it and the body knows how to heal. We have to believe in the body’s power of healing and authorize it to heal. An animal in the forest, deeply wounded, knows what to do: it stops running and hunting — a wisdom passed down through generations of ancestors — and just lies down, doing nothing, because it knows that is the best way to heal, having no doctor or pharmacy; after two, three, four days it heals, and only then gets up to find food. We humans used to have this wisdom, but in the modern age we have forgotten it — we don’t know how to rest, and rely entirely on medication. So this exercise is very helpful for our time: recognize the body, smile to it, and release its tension to help it heal.

Holding our feelings — and generating joy

There are reasons we abandon our body: in it there may be unpleasant feelings and emotions — loneliness, despair, anger, fear — that we don’t know how to handle, so we seek to cover them up, pretending they are not there. To forget them we look for something to eat even when not hungry (becoming addicted to food as a way to cover suffering), or turn on the television and the web, hoping films, entertainment, and music will cover the suffering so we can survive. This is the main characteristic of our civilization: we don’t know how to handle the suffering inside, so we cover it with consumption — and the market provides every kind of item to help us run away from ourselves. Electronic devices are sold to help us run away — from ourselves, our families, and nature, which has the power to nourish and heal us. For if we cannot take care of and love ourselves, how can we take care of and love the people in our family?

The practice of mindfulness reverses this tendency — it helps you go home to yourself and take care of yourself. If you know how to take care of your body, your feelings, and your emotions, you feel more comfortable, and you are in the process of creating a true home for yourself. You are no longer afraid of a painful feeling, because you know how to handle it.

The fifth exercise is to generate a feeling of joy. Everyone can do this for their own nourishment. Breathe in mindfully, bring the mind home to the body, establish yourself in the here and now, and recognize that you are very lucky — you already have so many conditions of happiness. Your eyes are still in good condition: you need only open them to touch the paradise of forms and colors. There are oysters living in the depths of the sea with no eyes — they have never seen the blue sky, the stars, the ocean — and you have eyes, yet don’t enjoy what you see; they have no ears, but you can hear the wind and the songs of the birds, and don’t enjoy them. So mindfulness helps us go home to the here and now and recognize the wonders of life and the conditions of happiness we already have. We don’t need more conditions; we are lucky enough — lungs good enough to enjoy the fresh air, a heart that functions, strong feet to walk. So generating joy and happiness is always possible for a practitioner of mindfulness (the fifth and sixth exercises). Joy and happiness is a practice; with mindful breathing and walking you can create them whenever and wherever you want. That is the art of happiness taught by the Buddha — and each of us should be an artist capable of creating joy for ourselves and the people we love.

Then, with the seventh exercise, the Buddha advises us to recognize a painful feeling or emotion as it arises — not to run from it, but to be there and take care of it. That is the art of suffering. We learn the art of happiness and the art of suffering — and if you know how to suffer, you suffer much less than those who do not. With enough energy of mindfulness, we can go home to ourselves without fear, not risking being overwhelmed. We recognize the feeling and smile to it: Hello, my pain, my sorrow, my fear — I will take care of you. I’m not running away anymore. That is the voice of mindfulness. With that energy we embrace the fear or anger like a big brother holding his young brother, without any violence — and I had to learn to do this.

If you are still weak in the practice, you can borrow the collective energy of mindfulness of your community: sit among us, practice mindful breathing, and ask the Sangha, “Dear brothers and sisters, here is my pain, my sorrow, my despair — please help recognize and hold it for me.” Making good use of the community’s collective energy, you suffer less after a few minutes — like a mother holding her child: the baby suffers, but the mother picks it up and holds it tenderly, and the energy of her tenderness penetrates the baby’s body, and the baby suffers less. The energy of mindfulness penetrates the zone of pain, releases the tension, and calms it. So the seventh and eighth exercises are to recognize and to calm the painful feeling — and we should learn how to do it, and may ask our brothers and sisters to lend us their mindfulness. That is why practicing with a Sangha is always easier. It is possible to survive a strong emotion just by mindful breathing and walking; and with the exercises that follow, you can radically transform the pain. So we build our true home slowly, with the help of our brothers and sisters in the practice.

The Sangha is the true home

The best thing you find at Plum Village is not a meditation hall or a kitchen or the bell tower, but the energy of the Sangha — because many of us live and practice here together and create the collective energy of brotherhood, sisterhood, joy, and mindfulness. That is the best thing we can offer you. Most of us here — monks and nuns — are still very young, and we build a true home together. None of us has a private bank account, house, or car. You might wonder how we survive — but in fact brotherhood, sisterhood, and joy are possible through the practice of mindfulness. We share the same future, live together, support and listen to each other, help each other transform, and have time to sit, eat, walk, and work together as a community — and that community is our true home. Jesus found his community, and the Buddha also found his Sangha.

Everyone has a dream. Like Martin Luther King, who said, “I have a dream.” In the teaching of the Buddha there is a kind of nutriment called volition (the food of vision) — everyone should have that food, a deep, deep desire: What do I want to do with my life? Sit down, breathe, and find out. The Buddha had a deep desire — to practice, to liberate himself, and to help others suffer less — and he realized it. He knew that alone he could not do much, so he decided to build a community, a Sangha: a Buddha without a Sangha cannot do much. Jesus had the same insight, building a community — not as large as the Buddha’s, but the beginning of Christianity as a community of twelve or thirteen. The Buddha began with five friends and built a Sangha of several thousand monks, nuns, and lay people — accepting everyone, king or minister or scavenger, with no discrimination of race. He spent much of his time building the Sangha; and after he passed away, his Sangha continued his work of helping people suffer less.

When I first met Martin Luther King in Chicago in 1966, we discussed the Sangha; we met again in Geneva and agreed that without a Sangha we cannot go very far. By then he was using the term the “beloved community” — a community where brotherhood, sisterhood, joy, mindfulness, and peace nourish everyone. That is the best thing we offer to those who come to us — and we organize Days of Mindfulness and retreats everywhere we have monastic communities: in America (Blue Cliff, Deer Park, Magnolia Grove), in France, in Thailand (the International Plum Village), in Australia, in Hong Kong, and so on. So our Sangha — our home — is everywhere. And dear friends, you are our Sangha too: in every country, in every big city, there are groups practicing mindfulness. Without a Sangha we cannot easily continue or keep the practice strong for long, which is why Sangha-building is a very important part of the practice. If you are a friend and continuation of the Buddha and of Jesus, you have to build a Sangha wherever you are.

Martin Luther King was assassinated not long after our last meeting, but I was able to continue Sangha-building in the West. I left my country in 1966, thinking I would visit Europe and America for only three months to call for an end to the war in Vietnam — but afterward I was not allowed to return, and I spent forty years in exile. I had no home; all my friends and work were in Vietnam. Knowing I had left my home there, I began to build a home here in Europe and America. So Sangha-building is something all of us take to heart.

What do I want to do with my life?

What have I done with my life? — many ask this when they grow old. So we should have a strong aspiration, a strong desire — for if you have it, you have a great deal of energy; you want to realize something with your life, and with that powerful source of energy you are not afraid of the difficulties before you. You need that energy, called volition / aspiration.

The year is ending. Ask yourself: What is the thing I want to do with my life? As a couple, sit together and ask each other, “Darling, what is your dream? What is the deepest desire of your life? May I share it? May I support you?” — because what we want is not just material and emotional comforts; we want to do something really good with our life. If we don’t communicate like this, we will not understand each other, and our happiness will not be strong enough. And a young person, with some time, may sit with his father: “Daddy, when you were young, did you have a dream? Were you able to realize it? Can I help you? Can I continue your dream?” That kind of talk connects you — it is not about daily concerns but about ultimate concern. Each of us should meditate on our ultimate concern: what I really want to do with my life. If a father has not been able to realize his dream, his son may help realize it for him, and there will be a good connection between them. So from now to the new year, we might write or call the other person and discuss this — the ultimate concern, not just the daily one. That is something to reflect and meditate on this Christmas day.

When we organize retreats in England, Germany, Canada, India, we see so many people transform and heal, because the practice we offer is very practical: how to release the tension in the body, reduce its pain, generate joy and happiness, calm a painful feeling, listen with compassion, and speak so as to restore communication — mindful deep listening and loving speech, the practices that always restore communication and reconcile. A six-day retreat may have 800, 1,000, 1,400 people; to conduct it, one teacher is not enough — we need a Sangha, with many groups for dharma discussion and sharing, enough people to listen to others’ suffering and offer a way out. Some are not comfortable on the first or second day, but relax by the third and are so happy by the fifth — able to transform, reconnect with themselves, and restore communication with another person even if that person is not at the retreat (using the telephone to practice loving speech and deep listening). The miracle of transformation and reconciliation always happens in our retreats, and we as a community are nourished by it, which encourages us to continue, knowing we continue the work of the Buddha and of Jesus Christ. Though we live simply, with no private bank account, house, or car, our happiness is enough to nourish us, and we really feel we have a home — wherever we go, the Sangha is with us. (When you go away for a week or two, you long to go back to your Sangha, because the Sangha is your home.)

So practice in such a way that your family becomes a Sangha, your community becomes a Sangha — whether that community is a corporation, a school, or a hospital. If doctors and nurses know how to practice mindfulness, they can transform their hospital into a practice center: with the capacity to relax, smile, listen deeply, and use loving speech, they help patients heal much more quickly — working not just for a salary, but to help people suffer less.

Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, we come together on this Christmas day to look deeply again at our life and to have a clearer idea of our home. We should know what we really want, and devote our time and energy to building our home — for without our home, we cannot realize our dream. Merry Christmas.