image from Plum Village
Monday, November 18, we will meet in person.
Go to calendar for our schedule
Address for OHMC meditation space:
3812 Northampton St. NW, Washington DC 20015
Please arrive a few minutes early so we can invite the bell on time. You may also arrive 15 minutes early to practice working meditation by helping us set up cushions.
Dear friends,
This week, we will meet Monday evening, Nov. 18, from 7-8:30PM EST in person at our meditation space (3812 Northampton Street NW); Wednesday morning, Nov. 20, from 7-8AM EST online; and Friday, Nov. 22, from 12-1PM EST in person.
On Monday night, Annie will facilitate.
Whatever your political views are, if you are in the U.S., these past weeks and months may have felt like a rocky road of division fueled by the media and often based on anger, hatred, and delusion. It can be difficult to keep our stability and continue to find understanding and love during times like these. Sangha can really be helpful.
In our Plum Village tradition of practice, we have many courageous and nonviolent ancestors we can look to as examples of groundedness during difficult times.
I met a nun at New Hamlet during my recent stay who was part of the Bat Nha temple in Vietnam that was raided by the government and violently attacked in 2009. She told me how she was able to sit calmly in meditation during the violence. (See letter to the Bat Nhat monastics by Thay below.)
Another nun told me about a time before ordaining when she was part of protests of government crackdowns in Asia (specifics withheld for her safety). She was part of a group nonviolently protecting the lives of other students.
And, of course, our teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), who practiced and taught during the war in Vietnam. He had a grenade thrown into his temple while he was inside. He lost beloved students and friends, murdered during the war. One of his students immolated herself. Rather than giving up on his practice, this period of time deepened Thay’s understanding and led to new ways of sharing the practice that supports healing during challenging times.
These words of Thay’s, from his poem Recommendation (and the song Alone Again) come to me whenever I feel I am facing the darkness inside of myself or in others:
The only thing worth of you is compassion – invincible, limitless, unconditional. Hatred will never let you face the beast in man. One day when you meet the beast alone with your courage intact, your eyes kind, untroubled (even as no one sees them), out of your smile will bloom a flower.
I hear this as not turning away from conflicts and always taking the position of greater understanding and love.
How can we learn to sit peacefully while bombs (literal or figurative) are falling around us? To do that, we need first to be able to sit still while the bombs of our thoughts and emotions are falling around us. Only then can we find our awakened nature of love and freedom and have the capacity to hold space for the darkness and suffering inside all of us. It all starts with mindfulness of our breathing and letting go of our limited concepts.
This week we will come together to sit, breathe, walk, and share as we always do. We will keep our practice alive and stay grounded in order to become a source of peace for ourselves, each other, and all beings.
We can share whatever is in our hearts and be heard in a space held by loving kindness and compassion.
I look forward to being together.
With love,
annie.
Excerpt from The Indestructible Seed of Awakening by Thay about the violence at Bat Nha Temple (full article here)
During the entire time of his struggle for India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi lived in this spirit. He ate vegetarian food, he slept on the ground, and he observed chastity – a lifestyle just exactly like that of a monastic practitioner. The people in that movement had great faith in their path and they also learned to live that ascetic and purifying life. The struggle movement was called Satyagraha, which means holding fast to the truth. It is to keep your mind clear, not using any method that is against ethics, always respecting the truth. The opponents may trick, lie, go back on their words, resort to lowly methods, but on the side of the passive resisters, morality and truth have to be the essence and the foundation for all behaviors and actions. Non-violence is not only the outward form, but it is the essential content of the ideal inwardly. We must cultivate compassion, loving kindness, and non-hatred, and we must have the capacity to endure violence without fighting back, true to “The Four Ways of Meeting with Certain Situations” that the Buddha advised the fully ordained monks [bhikshu] and nuns [bhikshuni] to practice and to recite every two weeks:
A bhikshu/bhikshuni who is insulted by someone, shall not insult that person in return.
A bhikshu/bhikshuni whom someone is angry with shall not be angry with that person in return.
A bhikshu/bhikshuni who is belittled by someone, shall not belittle that person in return.
A bhikshu/bhikshuni who is beaten by someone, shall not beat that person in return.
You were able to carry out these four ways of meeting with certain situations during the days that you were attacked by the mobs. As a result, you had the opportunity to touch so many people, waking them up and helping them to transform. Brothers Phap Hoi, Phap Sy and Phap Tu were dragged, throttled, suffocated and thrown into cars as if they were trashcans. Their faces were bruised, their necks and shoulders bled. Brother Phap Vinh was kicked and his body rolled down the stairs; thankfully, he did not break his leg. Brother Dong Tinh and young aspirant Binh Minh (now a novice in the Pink Lotus family) were beaten until they fainted, but never once fought back. Some people got their hands cut by the broken glass while they were destroying the monastery properties, and their wounds were cleaned and dressed by the sisters. Many of these images were recorded in video, and they touched many people deeply.
If the people want democracy and human rights, they have to know how to struggle for it, and the struggle may have to go on for many centuries. We are monastic practitioners, so we are not present in the political struggle movements, but only in the areas of culture and ethics. Back then, Siddhartha [the young prince who later became the Buddha] refused the political path in order to go on the spiritual moral path. Siddhartha also met difficulties. We practice in order to enliven a healthy culture, a way of life that has the quality of morality, loving kindness and compassion, and the best way we strive for this is to practice and share the teachings and practices with others. The society nowadays is full of social evils: corruption, power abuse, drug addiction, violence, prostitution, broken families, suicide, and reckless sexual activities. We practice and organize retreats for others to practice in order to address, prevent and cleanse those social evils, and that is the way we love our country and our people. We are citizens of an independent country, with constitution and proper laws, and we have the right to carry out this work. No one can strip off these rights from us.