The Miracle of Mindfulness

I spend most Thursday evenings practicing Mindfulness with my “Sangha”, a Buddhist term for a community of fellow practitioners.

We usually start with a meditation followed by a teaching, finishing with mindful sharing and listening. We are part of the Order of Interbeing, which was founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1966.

In our last session we remembered and honoured our teacher as it was a year since he passed.

After our meditation which was guided by Thich Nhat Hanh through a recording, we watched a documentary about his amazing life. Surprisingly I felt very emotional watching the video and considering I’ve never met Thay as he is often referred to by his followers, I felt a real sense of loss.

I first picked up his book “Zen Keys” in 1982 ten years after it was originally published. At that time my parents had just gone through a divorce that threw our family into very uncharted waters and I was feeling very lost. What drew me to the book was the feeling that maybe it would help me deal with the anxiety I was experiencing at the time, as I had moved out on my own and had no idea what I was doing with my life.

This is how I was first introduced to Mindfulness. At the time it was something most of us had never heard of so it was a revelation to me.

Thich Nhat Hanh was exiled from his home Vietnam due to speaking out against the war and his support of peace. And this is how he found himself in the US, meeting Martin Luther King who nominated Thay for the Nobel Peace Prize.

You can watch the full documentary about his life below, it covers a very interesting historical period.

What I realised last week is that sometimes the people that have a huge impact on us are not always directly in our life. Quite often we are inspired and deeply touched by teachers from the otherside of the world, this is certainly true for me.

What I was looking for back in 1982 was a way to live with the chaos and uncertainty that was my life at the time. And when I picked up Zen Keys I found myself totally immersed in the teaching of something completely new and it stayed with me for the rest of my life.

Most importantly it wasn’t that I had found a religion because I’ve always been quite opposed to religious dogma but what I found was a new way to view life and one that seemed to sit well with me.

When I think of Buddhism I don’t consider it a religion, it is very much how Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, Mindfulness. This is how he describes Mindfulness in his book “The Miracle of Mindfulness”

“People usually consider walking on water or in the air as a miracle.

But the real miracle is not to walk on water or in the air, but to walk on earth.

Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we do not recognise -

a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black curious eyes of a child, our own two eyes.

All is a miracle”.

If we think about life and how distracted we are from moment to moment, I wonder how often we actually pay attention to the blue sky and white clouds.

Mindfulness and Work

Thay goes on to say that although we must work and be busy in life, the way to practise Mindfulness whilst getting on with our daily life, is to be fully engaged with whatever we are doing at the time. So when we are at work, we should focus on our work and when we notice our mind going off on to thinking about the argument we had with someone yesterday or fall into worry about something that we think may happen.

And this is the miracle of mindfulness as it was originally taught. Simply learning to focus on what is present, rather than being lost in stories about the past or future. When we develop that sort of awareness life becomes much more peaceful. That is the challenge.