I imagine, I visualize that every psychotherapist is a leader of a retreat, a retreat in which people have the time to stop in the present moment, to enjoy the blue sky, to make peaceful steps, to smile at each other. I mean each therapist should be able to animate, to nourish, to help a community of joyful people, a sangha, a joyful sangha consisting of healthy people mentally, in order to... it's like growing flowers. Psychotherapists have to grow flowers. Because when you have a person who needs to heal and to grow, the best thing and the easiest

[01:06]

thing is to bring him or her to that convention. And even you don't have to make a lot of effort, the healing will come naturally. This is my experience. You know, refugees who came from Southeast Asia, they have a lot of pain within themselves. Many have lost their father, their mother, their children. You can imagine the blocks of pain in themselves, but once they come to Plum Village, they don't show any of this. They are advised to practice breathing, smiling, looking at children, trying to make the children happy. Because in Plum Village, we put the children at the center and we tell other people to participate in making the children happy. And by doing so, the people get happy, get happiness. And we do not stress much on what is wrong.

[02:20]

We do, but very discreetly. Because people who are deeply disturbed will be noticed by our workers. And they arrange so that people can come and see me or see other friends who are good enough to help them. And we deal with them in sessions of consultations, advices and help. But the majority would not see these things going on. The majority participate in a joyful life, a mindful life every day. So we organize a lot of festivals for children for adults. Every time there is a full moon, we organize a full moon festival. And we organize a rose festival. We organize a lot of festivals. They have the capacity of healing and planting good seeds.

[03:25]

And many people, many families come home completely well, completely transformed. And there are many broken families who rely on Plum Village to continue. Because every time they meet with difficulties, they always refer to Plum Village to seek advice and help. And their children always come to Plum Village during the summer in order to get the seeds for the rest of the year. Last year there was a young lady, 60, who came from England. She is a very good-looking girl. And when she came, we did not know that she was mentally disturbed. She had come to England without parents. She has got some illness during the past as a child.

[04:35]

Her mother left her at a very early age. And her father also remarried. So she didn't like, she didn't love her mother and father. And she came, we didn't know that she had seen a therapist three years, three years already, during three years before she came. But she was put among other young people and lived like that, without any special care. After one month, she went back to England. She was staying with other non-accompanied children, taken care of by British social workers. And they saw her completely transformed. Not only she did not show any sign of maladaptation, but she could also help other children around her. And we just received a request from that organization in England to send 40 children

[05:43]

to Plum Village this summer. Now we know that we are not capable of handling 40, at the same time. Because the principle of Plum Village is that we should have healthy, happy children as the majority. We can only have the disturbed children just as a small minority in order to be effective. Otherwise, the opposite may occur. So the existence of healthy, joyful communities are very important. Many of you have written to me and asked me to talk about this. I believe that psychotherapists in our time have to do like that. They have to take the lead.

[06:51]

They have to organize the communities of joyful living, joyful, mindful living, beautiful communities, healthy communities. The first thing is that the therapist herself would profit from that community. You would like to go there, to be nourished. You take care of the flowers. And as you have a lot of flowers, your work will become much easier. Imagine that your community only has disturbed people. It's very difficult. And if we reorganize the therapeutic communities where we only gather the people who are not healthy, that would be very difficult. Maybe we have to do the other way, organizing good,

[07:52]

healthy, joyful communities and put a number of people who need help into that. And very soon, members of the communities become helpers. First, they help without knowing that they are helping. That's the best kind of help. Secondly, you select a number of people, you know that that one needs special care. Suddenly, and then the person who needs care doesn't know that that person is going to help him or her. That's what the way we do it in Plum Village. So the patient does not have the feeling that someone is helping him or her. But suddenly she found that that person is so sweet and put so much time in taking care of her. And that is very good.

[08:57]

And that is something I think deeply rooted in the Buddhist tradition, I take refuge in the Sangha. Because the Buddha is important, because he's the teacher. The Dharma is the way shown by the Buddha, but without the Sangha, it's very difficult to practice. So applying the principle, I take refuge in the Sangha, into psychotherapy, I think that is something you can do. That Sangha might be a Catholic Sangha, might be a Jewish Sangha, but it must be a mindful, happy, joyful Sangha. You don't need to be a Buddhist in order to do that. And if you are a Buddhist, try not to be a Buddhist in the outdoors, because that will turn people off. Like the other day I said, when you practice walking meditation in a park,

[10:05]

try not to show that you are practicing walking meditation. Do it like as if you don't practice. Practicing the non-practice is the highest kind of practice. When you practice mindful living, transforming yourself, making yourself happy, peaceful, you can transmit all these experiences to your clients without saying that this I take from Buddhism. You don't have to. And you don't need Buddhist terms either. Because I myself, I have written many books for young people without using a single Buddhist term. And if you examine them deeply, you see it comes from a Buddhist experience. Like in 1964, I wrote a book Talking with the 20-year-old People. And I wrote 12 chapters

[11:15]

about school, about parents, about love, marriage, religion. And I did not use Buddhist terms. And they don't know that I was using my insight, my Buddhist insight, in order to help. So many people wrote to me, many young people wrote to me, thanking me. That book was very popular in Vietnam. And it was a book deeply Buddhist in the content, but no Buddhist term at all. So you can do that if you find that in the practice of Buddhism you got a lot of good things, positive things. You are free to prospect these things. Don't think that the practice of Buddhism is the practice of sitting.

[12:21]

No. Sitting is only one way of practicing. You can practice by cooking dinner. You can practice by changing diapers for your baby. You can practice by going to the toilet. Yes. And then if you think that the patient would not be able to sit in a lotus position, invent the chrysanthemum position for them. When I first came to this country, I met a Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist, who talked to me with enthusiasm about the lotus position of sitting. I asked him whether he knew the chrysanthemum position. He said no.

[13:24]

And he was very, very curious. He kept asking me about it. I said, you go home tomorrow, you come and I tell you. So I think that if you are a therapist, you have prospected from the Buddhist practice, you should invent the chrysanthemum position for your patients. So the practice of mindful living, the practice of Buddhist meditation, as you see in these basic texts, is not the practice of sitting alone. Sitting is only a small part of it. You have to

[14:31]

practice 10 hours a day. You observe your body, your feelings, your mind at all times. And you use the breathing in order to focus your attention on your work. If you are a surgeon, you can practice breathing while doing the surgery work. If you are a gardener, you practice breathing while gardening. And that is the practice I talked about, not sitting, because many people sit just because they want to avoid confrontation with life. They want to hide themselves like a rabbit in his hole. So don't practice like that. We practice like people punching their pillow. There are people who are disturbed and who come to a Buddhist center,

[15:33]

and some teachers seem having some insight about him or her, ask him or her to sit a lot, day and night, or to make 1080 prostrations each morning. And it helps. It helps because the energy of that person is translated into that kind of hardship movement, hard movement, so the person feels better. But that is not, that is only temporary relief, just like punching the pillow. And many people get very, very hurt in their muscles while sitting, but their teacher says, keep sitting, keep sitting. And they have to make a lot before they suffer bodily, that is why they suffer less mentally. Bad teaching, I do not want to say bad things about it because it has helped a number of people.

[16:42]

I only want to say that Buddhist practice is not only that. When you sit for hours, well, that is the kind of refuge you seek in order not to confront life again. You are afraid. So don't just sit like that. Sit like you sit on a lotus flower, happy. Don't sit like in a dark cave. And that is not my saying, that is saying of a Zen master in the past. If the art is painted the Buddha sitting on a lotus flower, it means he is sitting beautifully, happily, joyfully, lightly like on a flower. And in our daily life we sit like on a burning charcoal. And in the meditation hall, if we sit not properly, we sit in a dark cave like that Zen master said. It is not pleasant to sit in a dark cave, even if you can avoid life at that moment.

[17:50]

So I would like to invite you to deepen your study of Buddhism, the Buddhist practice, the practice I call the practice of joy, because as I see it, the base of our practice is non-duality. Please remember flower and garbage. They make each other. And even if we see garbage in ourselves, we are not afraid of it. We accept it on an equal footing with the flower. And that is the starting point of the Buddhist practice of meditation. You are not afraid of the garbage.

[18:57]

And in the practice, you find no enemy at all. No enemy. If there is one enemy, that enemy is the forgetful living, living in forgetfulness. And we just practice mindful living in order to get out of that mindlessness. Mindlessness is ignorance, is delusion. And speaking of mindfulness, living a mindful life, happy life, well, the only enemy, if you can call it enemy, is illusion, mindlessness. So if your base of practice is non-duality, I think I would like to invite a psychotherapist to contemplate the non-dualistic practice of psychotherapy.

[20:15]

It's nothing to throw out. Everything we can accept, everything we can transform, there's no enemy. And even suffering can help, can educate us to be happy. The non-food egg, if we can enjoy it, because we have had a food egg. And then if the practice is based on non-duality, and then the practice should be non-violent. So we practice non-violence vis-a-vis our feelings, vis-a-vis our body. You should not do violence to your body. You should not tie it out, you should not punish it for the sake of the well-being of your feelings. When you have pain in your muscles, your body is trying to tell you something.

[21:25]

That is the language of your body. If you have pain on your shoulders, your body is speaking to you and practicing meditation is to be aware of what is going on. If your body is speaking to you and if you don't listen to it, you are not practicing meditation. So tend to it, take care of it. Change the position of your leg, of your foot, your feet. Do it gently following the breathing in and out. You don't lose your time meditating, you are meditating while changing the position of your feet. If you feel that you want to scratch here, and if you resist, well, the good sound comes stronger. It wants to tell you something. So why don't you be kind

[22:27]

to your body? Breathing in, I'm going to scratch it. Breathing out, I'm scratching it. Breathing in, it's okay now. That is meditation. And trying to stick stiffly like this resisting is the opposite of meditation. And when you are angry, be kind to your anger because you know that anger is yourself at the moment. Take good care of your anger like you take good care of your baby sister. Take good care of your anger like you take care of your baby. That is the teaching, the Buddhist teaching. You should not fight your anger. To meditate is not to transform oneself

[23:30]

into a battlefield, a good fighting evil. No, that is the opposite. That might be true in some other traditions, but totally wrong in Buddhism. To practice meditation is to accept both flowers and garbage. Because you know that the two are interconnected. One make the other. The flower is on her way to the garbage, and the garbage on her way to the flowers. And you can still have peace, happiness, having both. And the Buddhist saying, samsara is nirvana, is about that. And therefore, you can handle suffering with care, with kindness, because suffering is important. The only thing is that most of our suffering is useless.

[24:33]

Because of our illusion, our delusion, we create unnecessary suffering, the unnecessary kind of garbage. And if your practice is non-violent, it can only be joyful. So your practice is a joyful practice. And if we follow this principle of practice, we will be transformed, and we will be a source of happiness, of joy to other people. And I believe that if therapists organize a sangha, 20 people, 30 people, practicing, walking, drinking tea, having a meal, have a 10-minute sitting, either in a lotus position or in the present moment position.

[25:35]

Do not imitate other people. You are free to invent the kind of practice that are fit to your environment. You don't have to call it the Buddhist-inspired practice. I think that you can draw many good things from the Jewish and Christian traditions to the practice. Remember that Buddhism is made only of non-Buddhist elements. So if you belong to the Christian or Jewish tradition, go back and find out the wonderful elements in there for your practice. And if you have that community with you, the sangha with you, your work of helping the suffering people will be much easier. And I say this not out of a sutra but out of my practice

[26:43]

in Vietnam as well as in Europe. And if the practice is like that, there will be no distinction between the secular world and the spiritual world. Because in Australia, a Catholic priest told me that he was surprised to see me describing spiritual things in terms of drinking a cup of tea in mindfulness. That is very spiritual to us. Eating our breakfast in mindfulness, that is very spiritual. So living mindfully, happily, peacefully like that is already a very high spiritual life. And you see everything as spiritual. You go to the toilet, you do pee-pee, that's very spiritual. If you are mindful of what you are doing,

[27:47]

you throw garbage into the garbage can, you are mindful of it, that is very spiritual. And I just said that therapists should be engaged in the work of of peace. And his or her community, sangha, should also engage, be engaged in the work of making our society saner and making our planet a safer place to live for us and for our children. I don't think that we can do otherwise. We have to reserve some of our time participating in

[28:53]

this kind of work. I learned that in Bronx, New York, there is a society that tried to collect the newspapers thrown out in the streets of New York City and recycle them. And they reported that each six months they can save something like 45,000 trees. And the amount of trees in the Central Park in New York City is only 25,000. So actions like that are manifesting mindfulness. And actions like that are taken a little bit everywhere. And we psychotherapists, we have to be aware of what is going on in that domain, flowers, and we should lend a helping hand to that kind of work.

[29:57]

But we know that nuclear waste now is a threat for many people, for the American people, because 40 states in America are being contaminated by that kind of garbage. And if we are not mindful about it, we will not try to do anything about it. And our well-being depends on that kind of work. And the well-being of our patients, our clients also depend on that. So we should not only direct all our energy and attention to one direction. So

[31:14]

We live in a house surrounded by trees, and it's so pleasant to sit among the trees and play among other children with our grandfather, our grandmother, our uncle, because the family at that time was big. And now most of us live in cities where we find ourselves in a box, very high, very close to the sky, and we don't have trees up there. We are surrounded by concrete walls, and we get sick very easily because we are too alienated from our mother earth. In old times, with our fingers, we touched the earth, the soil, we plant our vegetables, we play with the soil, now children don't play with the soil. And they are not in touch with trees, rivers, and that is why we become easily sick mentally.

[33:17]

There are cities where you cannot find many trees. And one day I visualized that a city without trees, only one tree left in the middle of the city, in the village. You know that in the past seven years we have been destroyed by acid rain, more than five times. We are not going to survive. When you are lost, you can't get any food in your stomach, so you have to go to different

[35:07]

places to find food, and you have to look around for food to eat, and you might have any food you have to eat, and you don't always know where you can go. And I think many of the people in the city have the same kind of belief, but it's very difficult to find food. I remember in the early morning, I saw people from different parts of the city with a huge line, a long, long line of people. And you and I were walking through a building, and we could see that long line of people sitting in the middle of this big building, and it just looked like this. And people were looking at us, looking at us, looking at us, looking at us.

[36:12]

And they were talking in English. And they wanted to contact me, the politician, to make a resolution. They tried to help me. I think the resolution is very close. And we know that Guam is very hard to find. Guam is very difficult. We have to make a decision. We have to organize our life differently. We have to find a way to contact our mother, and we have to find a way to help her. And then the resolution, we all have a need for peace. And that needs to happen.

[37:18]

Maybe I have a brother or sister. But in all times, if my own baby has some problem, I have always wanted to have a brother or a sister. So I wanted to make my best friend. I can only hope for peace. I can only pray for peace. But now, in this time of crisis, the time of crisis, what makes you so nervous? And I am talking about the people in Guam. I am talking about the people in Guam. Our therapist should help us to go back to our big family.

[38:32]

In my tradition in Vietnam, the deepest hope, the deepest joy that the aged people have is to be able to hold their grandchild in their arms. When your children have grown up, the only thing you wish is that you have the opportunity to hold the baby in yourself. You become parents again, grandparents. And the people in Vietnam, they know that. The deepest aspiration of the people, of the old people. That is why they leave their children to the care of their fathers and mothers. When you grow old, you have wrinkles on your skin and your body grows cold. It is so nice to hold a warm and tender baby in your arms.

[39:36]

And that is the deepest joy of the old people. Everyone in my country, when they grow old, if you don't have that joy, they will suffer very much. So some of them, when they come to the West, they see the old people put into an asylum where they have to live separately from their children and grandchildren. That is a very big shock for people of my country. They say that this is to make the aged people suffer a lot. And in our culture, we respect the aged people very much. But if they continue to live in the West, they will have to do the same thing. And they don't want to do it.

[40:37]

And I told them that maybe they should try to keep that beautiful tradition in the West in order to share it with their Western friends. Try to show that the very young can be very happy with the very old. In our country, it is the grandpa or the grandma that tells the fairy tales to the children, not the father and the mother. And they are very attached to each other. Sometimes the parents say that you spoil them a little bit too much, but that's not so serious. That you don't give internal formation to them.

[41:40]

If you do, then they want to live away from you. If parents practice joy and peace and take care of their children, they become very happy. They become a source of comfort and support for their children.

[41:59]

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