Mindfulness as a Foundation for Wellness: Part 4
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Source in the public domain of this video is HERE
Here is the continuation of the transcription of Thich Nhat Hanh’s talk at Google Headquarters of September 2011. This is what the great Zen teacher wanted most to convey to folks working at one of the world’s most dynamic and innovative tech companies. We can say, therefore, that it is Thich Nhat Hanh’s heartfelt message to us who live in a busy, hectic, and constantly changing world driven by the ubiquitous advanced technology that plays a crucial role in everything today. Special thanks to my research assistant Christine Atchison for helping me out in this
How to incorporate short mindful moments into your daily routine
Eating
When you eat your breakfast, you have a chance to practice [the] mindfulness [of] eating. You don’t have to think about your projects, your work. Every moment of breakfast is an opportunity for us to get in touch with the wonders of life. Today we will have a chance to share a meal together in mindfulness. Holding a piece of bread, you might like to stop your thinking and look deeply into the piece of bread.
Mindfully, you breath in and might get in touch with the fact that the piece of bread that you are holding contains the whole universe. There is the sunshine that helped the wheat to grow; there is the cloud that provided rain for the wheat to grow; the earth is in there—time, space, and everything in the cosmos has come together in order to produce that piece of bread. And that insight you can get in just a few seconds of looking mindfully at that piece of bread.
If you keep thinking about the past, or the future, or your projects, you miss the bread. You miss the Kingdom of God that the bread is bringing to you. And when you put the piece of bread you might like to enjoy just chewing the bread—getting in touch with the wonders of life instead of chewing your projects, your worries, your fear. You stop all your thinking. You just enjoy eating your breakfast. And that is practice. You don’t need to set aside time for practicing. [49:54]
Taking a Shower,
Brushing Our Teeth
When you take a shower, that is time for practic[ing] mindfulness. You might enjoy your mindful breathing and become aware of the water, of your body, and you can create joy and happiness while taking a shower. The essential [thing] is to stop thinking. The thinking will carry you away and [will not] allow you to live that moment of life.
René Descartes said ‘I think therefore I am’. I’m not very sure of that because if you think so much you will go around your thinking. Your thinking might not be productive at all. It will carry you to many realms and make you worry more and angrier and so on. So, if you are carried away by your thinking, you are not there. That’s why: [perhaps it’s better to say] I think therefore I am not there. It’s better to stop the thinking in order to be there.
When we brush our teeth, we might choose to brush our teeth in such a way that makes freedom and joy and happiness possible during the time of brushing our teeth. It may take two minutes or three minutes. The essential is to stop your thinking, even if you have a lot of things to do. Stop your thinking and enjoy brushing your teeth. When I brush my teeth, I usually touch on the fact that I am over 80 and still have some teeth to brush and it is enough to make me happy.
Brush your teeth in such a way that freedom is possible. Joy and happiness are possible during the time of toothbrush. That is a challenge and I know you can do it. Do not think about your work, your projects. Just enjoy being there and brushing your teeth. That moment … you can live it deeply also because you can always touch the wonders of life, the Kingdom of God in the here and the now.
We used to distinguish between time for work and free time. Buddha has changed our way of thinking. Suppose you have free time, some free time. And if you do not know how to make use of your free time your time is not really free. If you keep thinking and worrying, that time does not make you happy. That time is not for working, of course, but you continue to think about it; you continue to worry about it. And that thinking is not productive. (54:13).
On the importance of learning to be fully in the moment (54:13)
It’s very important to learn how to release and to be fully in the moment. And, watering the vegetable garden in the backyard, you might like to be fully present with that. Cooking breakfast, you might like to make breakfast-cooking into a session of meditation. You can enjoy every minute of breakfast making. You don’t have to do it quickly in order to have breakfast. Or doing the dishes, you can enjoy deeply every second of doing dishes. You don’t have to try to finish quickly in order to do other things. We have the tendency to rush, to finish quickly what we are doing. It has become a habit. And with mindfulness, or breathing, you can recognize that habit and it helps you to stop being carried away by that kind of attitude.
Suppose you are washing dishes and you want to finish in order to sit down and enjoy a cup of tea. With the practice of mindfulness, you can make the time of dishwashing a beautiful time also, a joyful time when you are fully alive. And if you are not capable of doing so, when you finish washing dishes and sit down and hold the cup of tea you will think of other things, you will not be able to enjoy the tea. You are always carried away. You are not capable of living your life in the present moment. And mindfulness helps us to live deeply every moment of our daily life. And we need some training in order to do so. And if you have a chance to live with a community of practice and then we get that habit of living deeply each moment of our daily life.
On “Store Consciousness” in Buddhism (57:01)
In Buddhist meditation we know that insight is the factor that can help us transform afflictions like anger, fear, despair. Insight is the kind of energy that can liberate us. And we know that insight is not an outcome of thinking. We have the thinking mind, but our consciousness is more than the thinking mind. In Buddhism we speak of “Store” consciousness. And that is something much bigger than our thinking mind. Imagine an iceberg in the ocean: the part that we see above the water is very small, but the part [under] the water is huge. Store consciousness is like that: our mind consciousness is very small. In neuroscience people like to speak [about] that part of consciousness that is background consciousness. Sometimes we call it group consciousness. At other times we call it appropriating consciousness. We call it store consciousness.
That part of consciousness is always with the body. It has the capacity to receive information. It has the capacity to process information, and it has the capacity to preserve, to conserve, to preserve information. And mind-consciousness is the upper-level of consciousness. Mind-consciousness can sometimes stop operating. Like in the case, you sleep without dreams, your mind-consciousness stop[s] completely if you do not have [a] dream in your sleep. There is a kind of meditation concentration “no past” (?) perception mediation. And when the practitioner go[es] into that meditation, his mind-consciousness stops operating also.
(1:00:19)
And we talk about
[a] realm of life where there is no mind-consciousness, there is only store consciousness.
Suppose we look at a tree. We know that somehow there is consciousness in the
tree because the tree knows how to love information, to process information, to
get the nourishment, to react, to survive. Consciousness is in the tree. But
the tree does not seem to have [been] doing a lot of thinking. There is a
Vietnamese poet who says that next life I would like to be a pine tree so that
I don’t have to think. To think makes me suffer too much.
In the Zen tradition mind-consciousness is the gardener and store consciousness is the garden. The gardener can prepare the land, plant the seed, water the seed. But it is store-consciousness; it is the land that can produce the flower and the fruit of enlightenment. So, practicing meditation we don’t count mind consciousness alone. We count mostly store-consciousness. Mind-consciousness has to play the role of the gardener, it has to work the land and plant the seed well and cover up and water, that’s all. But inside, the discovery—what we find out—is not the work of mind-consciousness; it is the work of store-consciousness. And many scientific discoveries have been done in that, not by the thinking mind but by the unconscious mind. So, it is possible for us to entrust the task to our deeper consciousness. We have to pose the question, to ask the question correctly. In Zen Buddhism, we call it kōan. Suppose the dictionary give you the kōan, everything come home to that one . . . where that one will go, have to go. What is the sound of one hand? All these devices, these kinds of questions that we entrust to star consciousness—the important thing is to ask the right question very clearly and entrust the question to star-consciousness. And after having done that the gardener may like to do other things. (1:04:44).
On how ‘not thinking all the time’ can be the secret to success
There is a
Buddhist scholar in America, one time I told him that I enjoy gardening; I
enjoy planting lettuce and things like that. And I say that when the lettuce
does not do well, does not grow well, you do not blame the lettuce but you feel
that if the lettuce grows well or not well it is the gardener who is
responsible. And he said Thay, you should not spend your time growing lettuces,
because you can use your time to write poems (because he liked my poetry). I
told him, dear friend, if I do not grow lettuce I cannot write these poems. It
is because I am capable of growing lettuce that is why I can produce a poem
like that.
So, washing your dishes—enjoying washing dishes, stop the thinking and get the pleasure in washing the dishes—is a way to support store-consciousness to bring about insight. Brushing your teeth mindfully and enjoying brushing your teeth. Do not thing about your project; do not try to find the solution with your thinking mind—and that is the practice. Non-thinking, it is the secret of the success. And that is why the time when we are not working -- that time can be very productive if you know how to focus on the moment and enjoy every moment of our daily life. And if you know how to do that we will not be [a] victim of stress, anxiety, depression, and so on. That is one aspect of the problem. The other aspect of the problem is that the time called “work time” – we can handle it in such a way that we can enjoy, that it can bring us pleasure. There is a way not to be under pressure. There is a way in order to enjoy freely what you are doing as work. (1:07:50).
How these practices can improve your daily work life
We, in Plum Village, we do a lot of things. We want to succeed in our … in what we do. We offer many retreats of mindfulness everywhere, in many countries—Europe, Asia, America, Australia. We organize days of mindfulness, sessions of practice. We organize retreats for health professionals, schoolteachers, young people, and so on. We want to succeed in our work also. But we learn how to do the work in such a way that we will not be victims of pressure and stress. Many monks and nuns, who are excellent Dharma teachers, they enjoy cooking, they enjoy cleaning, they enjoy gardening, and they consider these things as important as the other kind of work. We learn how to enjoy rearranging the cushions in the meditation hall. We enjoy growing vegetables. And everything we do we put all our heart and mind in it and we try to do it in such a way that freedom and joy and brotherhood and sisterhood become possible.
There are times when we sit together in a meeting, but we don’t talk about work. We have a weekly meeting called meeting of happiness, and in the meeting, you just remind each other that we have so many conditions of happiness available. It may take two hours, three hours, just with one cup of tea, and we nourish each other with the practice of mindfulness. We remind each other that we are very lucky people, that we have so many conditions of happiness available right in the here and the now, we don’t need to go and look for more conditions of happiness—and that’s very nourishing. And I think that in a corporation this is possible also. And any of the practices in a practice centre can be used in the life of a corporation.
Every time we organize a retreat, six days or seven days, we see many people transformed. The practice is simple enough for everyone to do. The practice of mindful breathing, mindful sitting and walking, releasing the tension in the body, everyone can do. And when you are able to reduce the tension in your body, to release the tension in your body you also can reduce the amount of pain in your body—including chronic pain because pain and tension, they go together. If you can release tension you can reduce the pain. And the basic practice of mindful breathing—to be aware of your body and to release the tension in your body, you can do it several times a day. Many of our brothers and sisters have programmed a bell of mindfulness in their computer and every fifteen minutes the bell reminds us to stop and to enjoy breathing in and breathing out—the bell of mindfulness. (1:12:49).
[*** then a gong is hit and there is silence until 1:13:16].
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