Thich Nhat Hanh on The Practice of Mindfulness

“Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.” It is such a simple practice, but it can transform your life. The great meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches five mindfulness exercises to help you live with happiness and joy.

Our true home is not in the past. Our true home is not in the future. Our true home is in the here and the now. Life is available only in the here and the now, and it is our true home.

Mindfulness is the energy that helps us recognize the conditions of happiness that are already present in our lives. You don’t have to wait ten years to experience this happiness. It is present in every moment of your daily life. There are those of us who are alive but don’t know it. But when you breathe in, and you are aware of your in-breath, you touch the miracle of being alive. That is why mindfulness is a source of happiness and joy.

Most people are forgetful; they are not really there a lot of the time. Their mind is caught in their worries, their fears, their anger, and their regrets, and they are not mindful of being there. That state of being is called forgetfulness—you are there but you are not there. You are caught in the past or in the future. You are not there in the present moment, living your life deeply. That is forgetfulness.

Excerpted from the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

The Meaning of the Dalai Lama for Today

By Robert Thurman 


Lately when I have attended His Holiness the Dalai Lama giving Buddhist teachings to large assemblies, I have had an odd sensation: it feels as if I have entered a time warp, and am actually witnessing Shakyamuni Buddha himself in all his glory as a teacher. As the Noble Vimalakirti Sutra puts it, "Dominating all the multitudes, just as Sumeru, the king of mountains, looms high over the oceans, the Lord Buddha shone, radiated and glittered as he sat upon his magnificent lion-throne.

Over many years, I had attended His Holiness' teachings and found them informative and inspiring, but I had always felt that it was the Dalai Lama I knew sitting there before me. Buddha was often mentioned as a remote founding figure, far back in ancient history. Sure, this new sense I have is just subjective, my going "dotty," like a typical devotee. Maybe so; but it also gives me a clue about what the Dalai Lama has come to mean for the world.

I think the Dalai Lama has grown so close to Shakyamuni Buddha that their manifestations have become indistinguishable; the Dalai Lama has become a living proof of the Mahayana vision of Buddha’s inexhaustible compassionate presence. I think people sense that fact, each one according to their level of insight, as constrained by preconceptions, experience and understanding.

This does not mean that the Dalai Lama is a "God-king" or a "living God," as is sometimes written in the press. For Buddha is not "God," who, if He did exist as conceived by Western monotheists, would be absolutely unimaginable, forever trans-human. Buddha, though also inconceivable ultimately, on the relative level is a being who was thoroughly human at one time, like you or me, and then through many lives evolved into something more than human and more than any God. He is a wise and compassionate, omnipresent but not omnipotent, universal awareness and powerful energy called "Realized One" (Tathagata), "Blissful One" (Sugata), "Teacher of Humans and Gods" (Devamanushyanam Shasta) and many other names. He/she is everywhere embodied/disembodied as reality, manifesting as seeming individuals in sensitive response to the needs of beings. Any particular manifestation of Buddha is thus a kind of living doorway to each individual's own happiness, a mirror, to that individual, of the reality that must be understood for that individual to realize their own wisdom, freedom from suffering, immortality and supreme happiness.

It is natural that this might all seem merely hypothetical and unrealistic, the high-flown, challengingly optimistic philosophy (or Buddhology) of the Mahayana Buddhist sutras. It becomes concrete only in the live encounter with such a Buddha-manifestation. It takes a living personification of the Buddha-qualities to make our own freedom and enlightenment seem really possible, a live exemplar of the Buddha-happiness to make our own mouths water for the taste of our own real happiness. This is the real meaning of the Dalai Lama’s presence. It is felt by all who meet him, through whatever medium, consciously or unconsciously.

It is not merely that the Dalai Lama represents “Buddhism,” thought to be a distinct “religious system.” He is much more than a nominal leader of an organization. He does not seek to convert anyone to “Buddhism.” “Buddhism” is not a world organization, competing with other organized world religions, seeking strength in numbers. It is an age-old movement seeking to educate the heart and mind of any being for freedom and happiness, no matter what their ideology. It is a teaching of the reality of selflessness and relationality. The Dalai Lama is a simple monk, an adept mind scientist, a thorough scholar, a spiritual teacher, a diplomat, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, an apostle of nonviolence, an advocate of intelligence and universal responsibility, and the living exemplar of what he calls "our common human religion of kindness."

We live in an era of extreme contrasts: Technology informs us more than ever and yet makes us feel weaker and more frightened than ever. The art of caring for the sick seems more sophisticated than ever, and yet the food-chain is poisoned, the environment polluted and good advice on how to live well is harder than ever to find. Pluralism on all levels seems more essential than ever, yet the cruelty of fanatics rages more violently than ever. Knowledge and technology have infinite potential to transform our world, potentially for the better, yet all around us devastation proceeds inexorably.

In this climate of manifold desperations, both quiet and shrill, the Dalai Lama seems to emerge from another civilization, to descend from a higher altitude, as if from another dimension, a living example of calm in emergency, patience in injury, cheerful intelligence in confusion, and dauntless optimism in the face of apparent doom. Inspired by Jesus, Gandhiji and Martin Luther King, Jr., he carries on that tradition under the extreme duress of the half-century-long agony of Tibet.

Especially since the emergency call of 9/11, the world seems headed into a tailspin. Instead of a post-cold-war century free of war, endless war is declared from several sides. Instead of increasing prosperity and joyful, optimistic sharing, the gulf between rich and poor grows cataclysmic, and the world economy seems heading for collapse. Instead of a scientifically sound era of healthy living, new plagues rear their terrifying heads. Hopelessness and fear send everyone rushing for an exit, diving into an isolated personal shelter. The West's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding wild upon the range.

In the midst of this, the Dalai Lama remains undaunted, even cheerful. He doesn't give up the responsibility for his own people, a nation of six million very close to succumbing to systematic genocide with no one in official power to protect them. He doesn't revile the harmful leaders as "evil"; he calls for dialogue and reconciliation, still, after more than fifty years of violence and oppression. He insists on the message that intelligence and kindness together can solve any situation. He sees that all is possible, even the good, the true and the beautiful, and people therefore feel a huge weight lifted from them when they meet him. Though he is a simple monk, what the Zen people call a "true man of no rank," without any powerful organization, recognized nation, institutionalized religion or rich industry or foundation, he still stands out as a natural leader of the plain people, a living symbol of nonviolence. He looms head and shoulders over the crowd of political leaders who tend to parade themselves as masters of violence.

What does the Dalai Lama mean? He is a living prince of peace, a teacher of intelligence, an inspirer of goodness of heart, a reincarnation of the Buddha of universal compassion. He comes to join us in our world today, offering us hope and help in our stressed-out lives and calling upon us to take up our own wild joy of universal responsibility.


Robert Thurman is a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, and President of Tibet House U.S. © 2003 by Robert Thurman The Meaning of the Dalai Lama for Today, Robert Thurman, Shambhala Sun   FREE TIBET

Toward a Mindful Society

As creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn has brought the benefits of meditation practice to hundreds of thousands of people and inspired a movement that is changing our society in many ways. In this exclusive interview with the Sun’s Barry Boyce, he discusses the philosophy, goals, and promise of the mindfulness movement.

by Barry Boyce, Shambala Sun    

Barry Boyce: Does mindfulness go beyond simply cultivating our attentiveness? Jon Kabat-Zinn: The ultimate promise of mindfulness is much larger than that, more profound. It helps us understand that our conventional view of ourselves and even what we mean by “self” is incomplete in some very important ways. Mindfulness helps us recognize how and why we mistake the actuality of things for some story we create, and then makes it possible to chart a path toward greater sanity, well-being, and purpose.

Based on that understanding, how would you describe the central mission of your work? The central mission of my work and that of my colleagues at the Center for Mindfulness has been to bring universal dharma into the mainstream of human activity for the benefit of as many people as possible. That’s a very broad calling, so I chose very consciously from the beginning to anchor it in medicine and healthcare. I thought that would be the most fertile ground for introducing meditation and the wisdom and compassion of the dharma in its universal aspect to a wider world, hopefully in an authentic and meaningful way.

Why do you think a scientific approach is important in spreading the practice of mindfulness? I am not really interested in “spreading” mindfulness, so much as I am interested in igniting passion in people for what is deepest and best within all of us, but which is usually hidden and rarely accessible. Science is a particular way of understanding the world that allows some people to approach what they would otherwise shun, and so can be used as a skillful means for opening people’s minds. By bringing science together with meditation, we're beginning to find new ways, in language people can understand, to show the benefits of training oneself to become intimate with the workings of one’s own mind in a way that generates greater insight and clarity.

The science is also showing interesting and important health benefits of such mind–body training and practices, and is now beginning to elucidate the various pathways though which mindfulness may be exerting its effects on the brain (emotion regulation, working memory, cognitive control, attention, activation in specific somatic maps of the body, cortical thickening in specific regions) and the body (symptom reduction, greater physical well-being, immune function enhancement, epigenetic up and down regulation of activity in large numbers and classes of genes). It is also showing that meditation can bring a sense of meaning and purpose to life, based on understanding the nonseparation of self and other. Given the condition we find ourselves in these days on this planet, understanding our interconnectedness is not a spiritual luxury; it’s a societal imperative.

What are some of the new frontiers that mindfulness has entered in recent years? The mindfulness work is spilling into areas way beyond medicine and healthcare and also beyond psychology and neuroscience. It’s moving into programs on childbirth and parenting, education, business, athletics and professional sports, the legal profession, criminal justice, even politics. For instance, Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, has become a major advocate of greater support for mindfulness research and program implementation in both healthcare and education, based on his own experiences with ongoing practice.

Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality. This is not easy or painless, by any means, but it is both an embodiment of and a path toward wisdom and peace.

What’s required to teach mindfulness other than a good human heart?

If we are teaching mindfulness in one setting or another, it really needs to be grounded in our own first-person experience. It needs to be grounded in humility and not-knowing, an openness to possibility but also a deep seeing into self and other. Since it’s available to all of us, it’s not really such a big deal or a special private possession.

One of the big responsibilities of those of us who are doing this work is to nurture and mentor the younger people and those who are coming to it for the first time. We can remind them, or clarify for them, that it is not just a fad or merely a smart career move at the moment to become a mindfulness teacher or exponent. The value of mindfulness is both profound and unique. It calls us to take a deep look into the nature of experience itself, and the nature of our own minds and hearts. All of this work hinges on appreciating how awareness can balance thought. There's nothing wrong with thinking. So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most.  From the March 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.