“Let the Buddha breathe, I don’t need to breathe”.

Can we take refuge in our Buddha nature when times are hard? If we can manage to find some peace within, we become a solid refuge for ourselves, our loved ones and the world.

this Dharma Talk was recorded on 11th May 2023 in the Upper Hamlet, Plum Village France.

“Compassion is the intention and the capacity to relieve suffering in the world.”

This dharma talk was given on Thursday, 8 June in Upper Hamlet, Plum Village, during a retreat for young people who have grown up away from home.

Br. Thien Duc with music by Srs. Hien Tam & Hieu Duc

This guided meditation was offered in Upper Hamlet, Plum Village (France) during the Climate Retreat in autumn 2023.

Any place where you find yourself listening to this, can be your meditation hall :)

Where is our true home? Is it a particular place with particular people within a particular culture? What if we had to leave our “home”? Or lost the people we held most dear? Or grew up in a culture vastly different to that of our parents’?

In this deeply moving talk, Sister Dinh Nghiem (“Adornment with Concentration”) shares her experience as a child of a refugee family, the death of her father, finding Thay as her teacher and touching peace in the practice of dwelling truly in the present moment.

The talk was given as part of a themed retreat for young people of Asian heritage who were born or grew up in the west.
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this talk was recorded in Lower Hamlet, Plum Village France on 4th June 2023.

By becoming mindful of our emotions we can respond appropriately instead of reacting to a challenging situation. This is the art of mindfulness that we can cultivate in our daily life, to be the change we want to see in the world.

Freedom is possible with our mindful breathing and mindful walking.

Breathe in and focus your attention on your in-breath. Your in-breath becomes the only object of your mind, you are concentrated on your in-breath, you are mindful of your in-breath. You release the past, the future and your worries and you become a free person. If you want to keep that freedom, you can breathe out mindfully. Breathing out, you focus your concentration on your out-breath.

One breath can bring you home to ther here and the now. One step can also bring you home to the here and the now. From the parking lot to the office, you may like to walk in such a way that every step release the tension in your body. Every step bring you home to the here and the now so you can touch the wonders of life available in you and around you.

The seventh exercise of mindful breathing is to recognize the painful feeling in us. Breathing in, I am aware of the painful feeling in me. Breathing out, I smile to the painful feeling in me. The eighth exercise is to calm down the painful feeling. Mindfulness is like a mother holding the child of suffering. The first thing you do is to use the energy of mindfulness to recognize the painful feeling. The second thing is to use mindfulness to embrace the painful feeling tenderly.

Exercise five is to generate a feeling of joy. Exercise six is to generate happiness. A good practitioner can always generate a feeling of joy and happiness whenever he or she wants.

Help us caption & translate this video!

https://amara.org/v/DqWy/

on the 14th of June 2022, we had a wonderful music and poetry concert to celebrate 40 years of the Plum Village tradition.

The concert was part of a two-week long mindfulness practice retreat, with the theme “Now We Have a Path, We Have Nothing to Fear”, held in Plum Village, France.

In the Sutra on the Eight Realizations of Great Beings, we read “the mind is always looking outside of itself and never feels fulfilled”. How can we overcome this constant running and come back to our true home?

The obstacle to our peace of mind is our inability to dwell in the present moment. In this Dharma Talk, Sister True Virtue shares how we can practice the 4 establishments of mindfulness as well as the 16 exercises of mindful breathing in order to get out of the state of dispersion of our mind. Rather than trying to attain something, we can experience each breathing exercise with ease. If we give ourselves a chance to recognise and accept a painful feeling, we can be at peace.

We also have the example of Ancestral Teachers who practiced being fulfilled in the present moment. Master Tang Hoi, King Tran Thai Thong, King Tran Nhan Thong, and Master Nhat Dinh, are all real examples of applied and engaged Buddhism. In the midst of a busy life, they were able to be at peace and share the practice with countless people.

Please enjoy the first Dharma Talk of the Plum Village Online New Year’s Retreat.

Find out more about Sister True Dedication : https://plumvillage.org/people/dharma-teachers/sister-hien-nghiem/

Thich Nhat Hanh offers this dharma talk at Deer Park Monastery during the Colors of Compassion Retreat on March 25, 2004.