Meet my morning meal verse that I recite each day when I eat breakfast (above).
I regard connecting with and strengthening – on-goingly and on the daily – the quality of gratitude in my life as a top priority, and a fundamental element of staying well-balanced and well-rooted in what matters most.
I shorthand the above verse before I eat lunch and dinner to simply:
This food is the gift of the whole universe, the earth, the sky, and much hard work.
This morning, I joined a monthly Zoom recitation of the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing, rooted in the Plum Village Tradition led by Thich Nhat Hanh, organized by a Dharma teacher on the West Coast. Each time I read or listen to the trainings, different parts and lines resonate for me.
Here are the short lines from each of the trainings that spoke to me today:
(To read the full set of trainings, click here)
1. We will train ourselves to look at everything with openness and the insight of interbeing.
2. We are committed to learning and practicing nonattachment to views and being open to others’ insights and experiences in order to benefit from the collective wisdom.
3. We are committed to respecting the right of others to be different, to choose what to believe and how to decide.
4. We will do our best not to run away from our suffering or cover it up through consumption, but practice conscious breathing and walking to look deeply into the roots of our suffering.
5. We will practice looking deeply into how we nourish our body and mind with edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness.
6. We will practice Right Diligence in order to nourish our capacity of understanding, love, joy and inclusiveness, gradually transforming our anger, violence and fear, and helping others do the same.
7. We are aware that real happiness depends primarily on our mental attitude and not on external conditions and that we can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that we already have more than enough conditions to be happy.
If you’re like me, you appreciate having concrete ways in which to bring the practice of mindfulness and the teachings of the dharma to life in your daily activities. For example, if I encounter teachings about impermanence or compassion or gratitude or true happiness and I don’t have ways – or develop ways – in which to actually practice impermanence, compassion, gratitude, and true happiness, then I situate myself at the great risk of having the teachings just be ideas that sound good but never launch off the page to truly inform my everyday thoughts, speech, and actions.
Interbeing is another example of something that sounds good. And if I don’t delve more into it; become curious about what it really means and how to put it into play; ask myself questions; form a relationship with it, I’m side-stepping the real wisdom and possibility for insight that exists within it. If I’m like: yeah yeah, interbeing, I get it, we’re all connected, blah blah blah, then I’ve clearly missed the mark.
Here are some musings that have stirred up for me recently on the dharmic thread of the insight of interbeing:
As an ordained member of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing (OI), rooted in the Plum Village tradition, I know that my teacher has given us OI members the important task of sangha building as our highest priority as spiritual practitioners and leaders. Sangha meaning: spiritual community in Buddhism.
Inspired by a dialog I had the other day with an OI aspirant I am helping to mentor, I’d like to share some of my thoughts around what sangha building means to me and especially how it’s taking new forms in the wake of covid.
I’ve been reflecting recently on how many regular annual sangha gatherings and events I’ve not had – or will not have – the delight in organizing this year: our local spring mindfulness retreat; my home sangha’s summer campout; potlucks at my house; Mindful Community Conversations; Friendsgiving in November; open mic nights at our local mindfulness center; our White Elephant Gift Exchange in December. And the cancellation of all of these events and programs has resulted in feelings of sorrow and disappointment and also feelings of relief and spaciousness.
My weekly home sangha, Be Here Now, has been meeting on Zoom now since March. In transferring to the Zoom platform, coupled with the cancellation of all the things that would normally bring us all together and help strengthen our collective group and individual relationships, I’ve often been referring to a teaching shared during a class series I took back in January centered around Nonviolent Communication (or NVC as it’s commonly referred to as) by our instructor: Be fierce about your needs and creative about your strategies.
To me, sangha building is more than organizing chances and opportunities for folks in our spiritual practice to gather together as a group, it involves showing up for people, offering support, reaching out, checking in, touching base, remembering & honoring birthdays, and getting involved in the lives of active sangha members with heartfelt interest. It involves me stepping into my own discomfort and being vulnerable. It involves me not putting on an act or a front or pretending I have all the answers. It involves me bringing my full sometimes confused, sometimes messy self to the table.
Prompted by a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh that I’ve been reading and reflecting on this week (see pic below), centered around asking ourselves as mindfulness practitioners Are You Sure?, I made this creation (see pic above) from some recently purchased Modge Podge and a package of scrap cardstock.
from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Everyday Peace Cards” set
It’s easy for me to hold this teaching in the abstract and just sorta hang out and linger in a place of theory and rhetoric with it. Oh yes, my perceptions are usually not accurate. I get it. Makes sense. Okay. Moving on.
As so often is the case for me, I need ways of unpacking Dharma teachings and Buddha-inspired wisdom offerings, in order to embody them in my practice in such a way that brings them to life in an experience-based way. Otherwise, I situate myself at risk of spiritual bypassing, thinking I have something in particular “down” or “figured out,” when in reality I have little to no actual understanding that penetrates down through my intellect and into the heart of my practice.
from Everyday Peace Cards, 108 Mindfulness Meditations by Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t you just love when things line up sometimes? For the past few days, I’ve been percolating on crafting a blog post on the power/importance/wisdom/practice/art of resting and this morning, I drew this card at random from my deck of Everyday Peace Cards to read and reflect on this week.
In case you’re not well-versed in the topics I routinely gravitate towards, I write fairly often about the art of resting. Two of my other regular writing threads center around cultivating joy and practicing gratitude – and all three are investments of time I place high on my list of priorities, as someone who is deeply called in the direction of spiritual living.
So this is me, putting out yet another plug for resting as a vital component of well-being.
My experience -both personally and from what I’ve seen in my friends & family – aligns with what TNH is saying in the card shown above: most of us do not know how to rest.
On Friday, I attended a rally centered around the death of George Floyd here in Missoula, Montana, organized by the UM Black Student Union. Despite it being a quickly put together event, there was a good attendance and in large part a collective adherence to covid protocols (ie: mask wearing & social distancing).
Each time I am alerted to an organized gathering centered around a particular issue or matter in our lovely mountain town – this liberal oasis in an otherwise beet red state – I try my best to ascertain whether it will be a rally or a protest before I commit myself to attending. Similar to the Mother Teresa quote above, I myself am all for events that are pro/for-something but I am not likely to attend if it’s more of an against-something sort of event. A yes-event vs. a no-event, if you will.
I don’t consider myself an activist. I would never use that word to describe myself nor do I think it’s an apt descriptor to use should someone else try to pin that label on me. But please don’t get me wrong, I think activists are an important demographic of our population and I am glad there are many who gravitate in this direction. We all have our different callings – and thank goodness for that. There are a lot of worthy directions to travel in and each of us only has so much time and energy to devote in any given day.
Here is the verse my local paramita practice group has been reading & reflecting on daily this past week – which is the last one in our 6-week series – which I took and pieced together from the section focusing on the Sixth Paramita (understanding) from Thay’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings:
The highest kind of understanding is to be free from all knowledge, concepts, ideas, and views. If we can offer understanding to someone, that is true love. The one who receives our understanding will bloom like a flower, and we will be rewarded at the same time. Understanding is a fruit of the practice. Looking deeply means to be there, to be mindful, to be concentrated. The teaching of the Buddha is to help us understand reality deeply. A wave is a wave, it has a beginning and an end. But a wave is, at the same time, water. Water is the ground of being of the wave. It is important that a wave knows that she is water, and not just a wave. We, too, live our life as an individual. We believe that we have a beginning and an end, that we are separate from other living beings. That is why the Buddha advised us to look more deeply in order to touch the ground of our being.
WEEK FIVE: MEDITATION
(taken and pieced together from Thay’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching)Verse to read & reflect on daily:
Meditation consists of two aspects: stopping and looking deeply. We run our whole life chasing after one idea or happiness or another. Stopping is to stop our running, our forgetfulness, our being caught in the past or the future. We come home to the present moment, where life is available. Stopping is the practice of calming our body and emotions through the practice of mindful breathing, mindful walking, and mindful sitting; it is also the practice of concentrating, so we can live deeply each moment of our life. Looking deeply is to see the true nature of things. You look deeply into the person you love and find out what kinds of suffering or difficulty she has within herself and what aspirations she holds.
Unlike with the other paramitas thus far, this one brought up very little for me. The other ones spurred a lot of reflection for me but this past week very little has bubbled up for me around meditation and the daily verse.
The emphasis on looking deeply resonates for me and I appreciate how simply Thay broke meditation down to stopping & looking deeply. I think sometimes it can be easy to think meditation is just about stopping – but for me, if I practice stopping without also adding in the practice of deep looking, then I’m not so sure really much can change or transform; I’m not sure I can do much growing.
Deep looking is a necessary component of transformation, growth work, and skill building. In late March, I watched a Dharma talk online by Brother Phap Dung and I took notes during it (as I always do) and I jotted down something he shared: “ Deep looking is not analyzing, it means deep listening.” This really spoke to me. As soon as I heard him say that it made so much sense. So I’ve been keeping this teaching close to me: deep looking means deep listening. And I would add for myself: deep looking means being curious and asking questions.
Here is the verse our local paramita practice group has been reading & reflecting on daily this past week, which I took and pieced together from the section focusing on the Fourth Paramita (diligence) from Thay’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings:
The Buddha said that in the depth of our store consciousness, there are all kinds of positive and negative seeds (anger, delusion, understanding, forgiveness…). Many of these seeds have been transmitted to us by our ancestors. We should learn to recognize every one of these seeds in us in order to practice diligence. The practice is to:
– refrain from watering the negative seeds in us and in the people we love. We also try to recognize the positive seeds that are in us and to live our daily life in a way that we can touch them and help them manifest in the upper level of our consciousness.
– “change the peg”; if you have a mental formation arising that you consider to be unwholesome, invite another mental formation to replace it.
– invite only pleasant seeds to come up and sit in the living room of your consciousness. Never invite a guest who brings your sorrow and affliction.
– keep a wholesome seed as long as possible once it has manifested.If mindfulness is maintained for 15-minutes, the seed of mindfulness will be strengthened, and the next time you need the energy of mindfulness, it will be easier to bring up.
Gosh, I’ve really been enjoying this paramita reflection group. If you didn’t read the first post in this paramita series, I am part of a small group of 6 people and we’ve been a group now for 4-weeks, with 2 more left to go, centered around the Six Paramitas.
On Monday of each week we start with a different paramita and read a verse each day for the week associated with it. Then on Sunday, each member of our group offers a short check-in about their reflections and practice with the paramita on a shared Google doc. Originally, our group was slated to meet once in person at the end of our 6-weeks, however, we will likely now be meeting on Zoom instead.
For me, the benefit of knowing I have a group of friends I’m practicing with and holding myself accountable to while also having it be largely self-propelled and online works really well as a format. It’s just enough structure without too much structure and leaves a lot of open room for creativity and personalization.
going outwords & inwords 