Latest update on Thay's condition from Plum Village 13/12/2014

Official Announcement

Plum Village
December 13, 2014

To all Plum Village Practice Centers,
To all Practice Centers and Sanghas World Wide,
To our Dear Beloved Friends,

Thay continues to surprise the doctors with his strong vital signs and steady, peaceful breathing. They are still amazed that Thay has been able to survive and even to show small signs of progress.

A few days ago, one of the doctors shared that “Thay is an enigma”, and another said they were “witnessing a miracle.” When a top neurosurgeon from the US visited last week, he was deeply impressed by the medical team’s commitment to giving Thay every possible chance of recovery.

In recent days Thay has been showing some indications of wakefulness, but he continues to remain in a coma. There have been times when Thay had his eyes open for more than two hours, and is responsive, but he is not yet showing clear signs of communication. The doctors remind us that it may be weeks or months before we can understand the damage caused by the hemorrhage and discover the extent of healing that may be possible.

The medical team has started to stimulate Thay to have more wakefulness. Every day the nurses help Thay sit in a chair, and in addition to acupuncture and massage from the attendants, physiotherapists come to activate Thay’s body. We sing to Thay, and we also let Thay listen to Sangha chants and beautiful sounds of nature.

We are very grateful to the EIAB and Maison de L’Inspir’ sanghas and all the Venerables from Vietnam and elsewhere, who came to offer their support and presence in Plum Village, as well to all the many lay practitioners who have offered your presence, or sent energy, letters and drawings of love and support. We can feel the Sangha body, as an extension of Thay’s body, finding nourishment and healing. Here in Plum Village the Sangha continues with our Winter Retreat, offering Days of Mindfulness, monastic days, dharma talks, dharma circle sharings and classes, deepening and strengthening Thay’s sangha body.

On December 18th there will be a Monastic Ordination Ceremony for new novices, as Thay would have wished. The monastic community will ordain 31 new monks and nuns in Thailand, nine in Plum Village, and one new novice monk in Deer Park Monastery, California. This group of new monastics will belong to the “Red Oak Family”. This event is momentous for our Plum Village community as we continue the work and love of our Teacher. There truly is only continuation.

During the holiday season, please take some time off to take care of yourself, your loved ones, and friends. Find time to be with nature, to enjoy the stars, and the white clouds and to truly come home and be at home within ourselves, as Thay always encourages us to do. You may like to write love letters instead of spending money and consuming more. The New Year is a wonderful opportunity to begin anew with ourselves and let go of resentments and regret.

We will release another update about Thay’s health in the New Year.

Until then, may you and your family touch true peace and happiness.

May you be able to enjoy your true home.

“Eternity can be touched in the present moment,

and the cosmos in the palm of your hand.”

TNH, 18 March 2012

With trust and love,

The Monks and Nuns of Plum Village

Future reports on Thay’s condition will be posted officially at plumvillage.org, langmai.org, villagedespruniers.org, and www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh.

An update on Thay's Condition 30/11/2014

Official Announcement

Plum Village
November 30, 2014

To all Plum Village Practice Centers,
To all Practice Centers and Sanghas World Wide,
To our Dear Beloved Friends,

As the Winter Retreat continues to unfold in all our practice centers in Europe and America, Thay’s condition in the hospital remains stable.

Thay continues to rest peacefully with the ticking clock on his pillow, and we sense that he is relying on his deep awareness of breathing, rooted in Store Consciousness, to guide his healing process. Even the doctors have been surprised at the consistent level of oxygen in his blood. Thay is truly the best breather in the world, inspiring us to deepen our full awareness of the breath. Thay continues to remind us that each day we are alive is a miracle, and that simply to breathe is a gift.

The latest scan shows that Thay’s hemorrhage has slightly reduced in size. The edema is still present, but has not worsened. The doctors have met to re-evaluate their approach and review how to nourish Thay’s body more as we enter medium-term treatment. Thay continues to receive 24-hour care from his monastic attendants as well as hospital nurses. We are very grateful for the commitment of the hospital neurologists who are maintaining Thay’s healing process with open hearts and minds.

Earlier this year, Thay accepted an invitation from Pope Francis to go to the Vatican on December 1 & 2 to support a global initiative to end modern slavery. A delegation of 22 monks and nuns, including Sister Chan Khong and Thay Phap An (Director of our European Institute of Applied Buddhism in Germany) are now in Rome to realise Thay’s wish.

We continue to be grateful for your messages of support and the energy of mindfulness and compassion being generated for Thay. Wherever we are, we know that our practice of nourishing and healing ourselves is the best way we can all take care of Thay, and take care of the present moment.

Because suffering is impermanent, that is why we can transform it.
Because happiness is impermanent, that is why we have to nourish it.

-TNH, 10th June 2014

With trust and love,

The Monks and Nuns of Plum Village

Future reports on Thay’s condition will be posted officially at plumvillage.org, langmai.org,villagedespruniers.org, and www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh.

The Invitation by Istvan Sky and Pablo Arellano

The Invitation

It does not interest me what you do for a living,

I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your hearts longing.

It does not interest me how old you are.

I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow,

If you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,

Without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own;

If you can dance with the wilderness and let ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful,

Be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to your self.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day.

And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It does not interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,

And if you truly like to the company you keep in the empty moments.

Istvan Sky and Pablo Arellano

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

An Update on Thay's Condition

Official Announcement

Re: Thay’s current condition

Plum Village, 22 November, 2014

To all Plum Village Practice Centers,

To all Practice Centers and Sanghas World Wide,

To our Dear Beloved Friends,

The doctors have expressed surprise at Thay’s resilience and stability over the last week, as the intensive treatment continues. Thay’s blood pressure and pulse are stable, he is still breathing on his own, and he is becoming increasingly peaceful. However, in recent days Thay has been sleeping more deeply and communicating less.

The monks and nuns attend our teacher continuously at his bedside, breathing with him, embracing him with their love, praying that the millions of healthy cells in Thay’s body may become millions of bodhisattvas, helping his brain to heal. As Thay’s condition remains critical, please intensify your practice of generating the energy of Great Compassion of Avalokita for Thay.

Let us support Thay by sustaining our practice of mindfulness throughout the day, wherever we are, keeping Thay alive within us and within our community. With deep conscious breaths and mindful steps, let us allow Thay’s teachings to ripen within us, helping us see Thay’s continuation body and Thay’s sangha body.

May we let go of resentments against those who have hurt us, and release our fear and sorrow, by coming back to the calm and gentle breathing that Thay has transmitted to us. This is the best way we can support Thay and be his beautiful continuation.

With trust and love,

The Monks and Nuns of Plum Village

Future reports on Thay’s condition will be posted officially at plumvillage.org, langmai.org, villagedespruniers.org, and www.facebook.com/thichnhathanh.

The Importance of Touching Stillness.

The Importance of Touching Stillness.

Touching Stillness and bringing peace and tranquility to our inner being is not a luxury but an out right necessity, not just for our survival, our sanity and our personal wellbeing. But for the survival, sanity and wellbeing of everyone we come in contact with and therefor for all of mankind and all sentient beings.

Nurturing stillness, peace and tranquility in our body and mind makes a difference to our health and wellbeing. In our every day life we become much happier and one’s own inner happiness and inner calmness creates a peaceful atmosphere that radiates outward to become a benefit not just for us but also for everyone around us. We are all inter-connected. Each and every one of us, and even the briefest contact, a smile from a stranger on a train, or kind word from someone on a bus, can have a lasting effect, lift our spirits and foster that which Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard” – Love and compassion.

It has been estimated that we each have between 50,000 and 70,000 thoughts per day. The constant mind-less chatter created by a life permanently multitasking in our own mind made stress bubble reduces the ability to find peace and happiness. With such a troubled mind it may seem impossible to find peace and tranquility and the concept of “Touching Stillness” an enigma. But when we are able to touch stillness we are able to nurture the seeds of love, compassion, peace and happiness in our own heart.

Most, if not all of our troubled thoughts are mind made and like the concrete blocks in a wall, they appear one on top of the other, tightly packed together with no gaps between them, no light and no space. In his book “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”, Sogyl Rimpoche says:

“In the ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will always find a gap in which the Rigpa, the nature of mind, is revealed. So the work of meditation is to allow thoughts to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent”.

In effect all we need to do is to create the right conditions, and stillness will manifest. Stillness has no boundaries, no borders, and no conditions. Like the air we breathe stillness is all around us, a huge reservoir from which we can draw freely. Create the right conditions and stillness finds you, when stillness manifests we feel peace and tranquility. You do not have to sit for months in a cave at the top of a remote mountain, or fly to a guru on a tropical island to find stillness, peace and tranquility. You can find stillness in the "here and now", in a cup of tea, you can find stillness peace and tranquility by just sitting and breathing.

Leon Edwards

© The Stillness Project

The Beauty of Stillness In Relationships.

There Are 50,000 Thoughts Standing Between You and Your Partner Every Day! 

Posted by Bruce Davis Phd: (Huffpost - Healthy Living 05/23/2013)

I recently read online that each day the average person has about 50,000 thoughts. Some researchers put that number at 70,000 thoughts per day. Is it any wonder with this amount of inner traffic we lose touch with our self? Is it any surprise that with over 100,000 thoughts between us and our partner each day, we have difficulty finding and making contact with each other? 

With all the thinking go on, what chance does our heart have to breathe, feel, and experience life, no less make contact with our significant others? The crowded mind makes for an overcrowded heart with little room for ourselves and less room for anyone else. When we live such a congested life, how open, available, and loving can we be?

The overwhelming load of thought people routinely carry makes it common that couples find themselves living together as two strangers. In the noise and confusion most people live with, it is a wonder that relationships last for months, no less many years. It is beautiful that we can be as caring and giving as we are with all the busyness.

Reclaiming ourselves and our partnership can be a major challenge. Calming the thoughts and slowing down the inner traffic are the important beginning. Peace and quiet and enjoying silence can be a life-changing event, bringing us back to basics, the simplicity of just being -- including being together.

Many people complain there is already too much silence in their relationship. They are waiting for the wall of silence to somehow go away. They are hoping for their partner to open up and share. The truth is that it is not too much silence, but all the thought and feeling behind the silence that is closing down the contact. On the other side of the wall is everything but stillness. There is the backlog of complaints, concerns, worries, difficult feelings, lots and lots of thought, everything but peace and quiet.

The answer is finding time for simply being, being in silence together. This can be an evening stroll, a visit to the ocean, making a retreat. Healing begins in any activity that is without the expectation of talking, with no demands to finish the unfinished conversation. When there are no expectations, we can enjoy the peace and quiet. The heart is free to soften and open. A quiet mind makes for an available heart. When one is not so overwhelmed with one's self, there is room for some one else.

Partnership is more than the activities, more than what we do together. It is more than what is said. Partnership is the presence of the relationship itself, which nourishes the heart and gives the treasure of love and friendship. A relationship has a foundation of shared silence. In the moments between our words and our activities, our relationship ripens in the richness of being, being together. When we are not busy with the crowd of our own thought, we have room to receive and enjoy the other. Shared silence is what binds us with everything that is good in ourselves, everything that is good in the other.

Disconnected personalities find healing and renewal in the intimacy of silence. Taking a walk in a green forest, watching a sunset, laying next to each other in bed, intimacy is found in the quietude of these moments. The silence holds everything the relationship ever was, everything that it is, and can be. Out of the great silence, out of all realms, countries, towns, and cities two souls at one time found each other. No matter how close or distant we are now, when the stillness of our heart is present, so is the possibility of the original magic. When the 50,000 thoughts are turned off or slowed down, the wonder and joy of meeting can meet again.

When we make time for silence, this is much more than not talking. It is enjoying the solitude, including the joy of solitude together. Each person in our life has a unique quality of stillness, a unique presence of love. This is the part of us that is more than our thoughts, more than our words. It is our essence, our being, the abundance of life that radiates from us. The silent presence in each person is totally unique. This silent presence is what attracted us to one another in the first place. In shared silence, our heart breathes. When we feel our hearts, all the problems our mind found just moments ago are seen differently. Life is not so overwhelming and neither is our partner. As the heart feels safe, it opens and wants to share again.

Many people think when they go into silence, all their difficult feelings will come forward. What they do not realize is that as the busy mind surrenders to the stillness of the heart, simple peace is present. The wisdom of the heart grows as the fear of the mind diminishes. Our complaints, worries, and difficulties become smaller as our awareness of our heart expands. When we find inner stillness, today's problems become yesterday's memories.

When we are not so full of thought, other parts of us now surface. We find more laughter, generosity, and gratitude. When our awareness is not so crowded, instead of anger there is gentleness, instead of pain more understanding, instead of loneliness more oneness. When our awareness is not covered in the details of life, we feel more of the heart of life, including the heart of one another. Here we discover and open the many gifts of our relationship.

When we have between 50,000-70,000 thoughts per day, this means between 35 and 48 thoughts per minute per person. The steady flow of thinking is a thick filter between our thoughts and feelings, our head and heart. The constant mental traffic prevents us from seeing clearly, listening deeply, and feeling our well of being. Taking time to nurture the silence of our heart and new life is growing. We begin to be very present, including present with one another. In the presence of our loved one, there is no limit to the wonder, appreciation, life's simple being. Silence and the stars are seen once again.

The small moments are rediscovered as the important moments of grace and beauty.

For more by Bruce Davis, Ph.D., click here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-davis-phd/healthy-relationships_b_3307916.html

Touching the Stillness in Suffering

When the dark clouds of suffering cover our skies and we experience fear, happiness, anxiety, anger, love.... ask yourself how many emotions can we experience in one day, in one hour, in one minute? Our emotional roller coaster is a fundamental part of who we are. And yet, for so many of us, dealing with our feelings is nothing short of staring in our own personal Greek tragedy! 

But if we can just step back and take a seagulls eye view of our suffering we would see that our pain and suffering is a gateway to deep understanding. We are not our emotions, we are not our anger. So when it’s time to suffer, let your self suffer; when it’s time to cry, let your self cry. Cry completely. Cry until you can cry no more tears, and then recognise in your exhaustion that you’re alive. The sun still rises and sets, seasons come and go, absolutely nothing remains the same and that includes our suffering. When the suffering ends wisdom begins to find the right answers. 

If we consider our emotions..... happiness, anxiety, anger, love, stress, fear, to be seeds that germinate in the garden of our consciousness, then we can learn to nurture the seeds of love and compassion, and not hold on to the seeds that cause our suffering, we can let them rise to the surface and then wither away.

Following the path of a Bodhisattva.

The realisation life that flows through each and every one of us and that we are intimately connected to everything else in the universe came as quite a shock. The fragile looking monk had said “when you drink your tea think of the clouds”, it was some time later that the penny dropped and I realised he had described the entire water cycle in one sentence, and that me, being 70% water was also part of that same system. One day my 70kg of water would also become a cloud. Consider the relationship between man and the natural environment – when we breathe out – the trees breathe in and vice versa, and yet we cut down the trees that supply our oxygen. We breed cattle for our burgers but 14% of the methane in our atmosphere comes from cows. We are not separate from our natural environment we are totally dependent on it. Why do we destroy it?

I like everyone else was born into this world and have spent a lifetime responding and reacting to earthly desires. In the Christian world I have been “reaping that what I have sown”, and as a result have suffered from its Karmic Consequence, the law of cause and effect. The seeds I sow today will become the crops I harvest tomorrow. 

Some times it takes a life changing event to change our perception, a light comes on and we are presented with a brilliant “ah ahh” moment and a little spark of enlightenment. For the most part we are just like the person who listens but does not hear what is being said, we wonder through life acting the part but not actually doing the practice. Learning from what went wrong is just as important as knowing what is right and so we learn from our mistakes, sometime we need a guide, a teacher someone to show us the way. To undertake the Bodhisattva vows, is to undertake and follow a set of precepts that help and guide us along the path to becoming a Bodhisattva in our daily lives, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

I bow deeply with hands in Gassho…….

The Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts

The Three Refuges (Three Treasures)

I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma.
I take refuge in the Sangha.

The Three Pure Precepts
I vow not to commit evil.
I vow to cultivate goodness.
I vow to help others.

The Ten Grave Precepts
I vow not to kill, but to cherish all life.
I vow not to steal, but to respect that which belongs to others.
I vow not to misuse sexual energy, but to be honest and respectful.
I vow not to lie, but to speak the truth.
I vow not to misuse drugs or alcohol, but to keep the mind clear.
I vow not to gossip about others’ faults, but to be understanding and sympathetic.
I vow not to praise myself by criticizing others, but to overcome my own shortcomings.
I vow not to withhold spiritual or material aid, but to give freely when needed.
I vow not to unleash anger, but to seek its source.
I vow not to speak ill of the Three Treasures, but to cherish and uphold them.

(The Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts by courtesy of The Great Vow Monastery).

Beginning Qigong Practice

A lesson on Qigong by Master Mingtong Gu of The Chi Center. more information can be found at:
The Chi Center

Smile to your Buddha Nature

Finding Peace in a Troubled World.

The brutality of war has many faces. When I first joined the Devon Ambulance service in 1975 I had the honor of carrying veterans from both World Wars and survivors from other conflicts including Burma, Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland. I have worked with men who fought in N Ireland, the Falkland’s, Serbia and Iraq. My school friend Philip Stentiford was killed by a landmine whilst on foot patrol in County Armagh on 21st January 1972 aged 18….. the same age as me and I could not understand why.

After Philip’s funeral I made a promise to myself that I would never take up arms, but in the event of war I would drive an ambulance and tend to the wounded from both sides but never fire a gun in anger. In peacetime I drove an ambulance and tended to the sick and injured or 20 years. I have never fired a gun.

It was H. G. Wells who published articles in London newspapers and later published them in book form, who described World War 1 as “The war to end all wars”, but around 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians had their lives taken away from them. Today the term is used disparagingly because there has not been a decade free of conflict since WW1.

Twenty years after WW1, the Second World War (1939 and 1945), directly involved an estimated 100 million people from 30 different countries and claimed an estimated 50 to 85 million fatalities. The weapons became more powerful, sophisticated and technical, and more people died, culminating in the first use of atomic bombs on August 6^th and August 9^th 1945. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki an estimated 150,000 and 246,000 people died from the acute effects of the atomic bombs within the first four months, (approximately half this number killed on the first day). And still we do not learn.

War, Terrorism and Conflict continues. In the intervening years ten’s of thousands of combatants and civilians have had their lives taken away from them. In recent months conflicts in the Ukraine, Syria, Gaza/Israel have peppered every news item. Around the world aircraft have been brought down, ships capsized, and earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have torn communities apart. Some have lived with conflict for so long they do not know what peace is and for some peace may look as though it has abandoned humankind. 

Peace has not abandoned us, peace is still here, but we may have to look deeply for it. We have to penetrate the brambles, stinging nettles of anger, negative thoughts and our judgmental mind to find the beautiful flowers of love, peace and happiness.

Peace starts with you and me and our friends, our friends, friend’s and their friends, and their friends, friends and so on. We each have to sow and nurture the seeds of peace. Peace can grow out of a smile, find peace in our hearts and we can find peace in the world, cultivate peace and the beautiful flowers of love, compassion and forgiveness will grow. But the moment we adopt an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth attitude we can never have peace, as long as we have anger in our hearts there can be no room for stillness, love, peace and compassion.

In November The Stillness Project plans to hold a day long meditation session on the theme of "Finding Peace in a Troubled World", The first of a series of "Peace Meditation sessions" leading up too the 70th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sessions will be held at the Woodlands Community College, Minstead Avenue, Harefield, Southampton, SO185FW. The Date and finer details are still to be announced. 

"Peace In the world starts with peace in our hearts"