Bell
Dear community, we are August the 10th in the year 2023,
and we are celebrating, savoring the last day of our Wake Up retreat,
"Love in Action", here in the Upper Hamlet,
in the Still Water meditation hall.
I'm having an interesting moment sitting here.
When we first started creating youth retreats, about 15 years ago,
it was a real challenge to try and find enough young people
to have a retreat.
And first there was forty, then the next year there was like 65,
and then I remember the year we hit 100,
and we were so excited that we had 100 registrations!
And we went to report to Thay. This must have been around 2010.
Thay, there's a hundred young people in Europe
that want to learn about mindfulness.
Can you believe it?
And he was like - well done!
And then, we started to create the Wake Up movement.
And I said (to Thay) it's a little bit overwhelming!
And he said, and he lit up with sparkles,
excellent, it should feel overwhelming!
and then I'm sitting here and I don't know how many hundreds
of you there are, overwhelming so I guess Thay's smiling with
a sparkle in his eyes, be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.
I hope that's going to make it easier, but hey I think speaking in front of
spiritual friends, and
is both challenging and wonderful, because on the one hand
I feel I want to share my heart with you all,
and on the other, I have the same feeling that we all do.
of whether I can be enough in this moment.
But I will share from my, my joy my experience and my practice
and that is my best. We will see.
We had some little flowers here thank you, thank you.
Emotional support flowers, we also have an emotional
support cello, that we might need to call on.
I was 21 when I first came to Plum Village
and I was one of the people who as soon as there was
a chance to receive the five mindfulness trainings, I
wanted to do it. And I was here for three weeks that summer]
]and I was also one of the people who was like I am going to wait
until the last week.
So I know some have been here through the summer
and have received the five mindfulness trainings
this morning, and some of us are here for the first time
and we also made that commitment and I have to say, getting on the train
in some form, with the five mindfulness trainings in my pocket, in some form
in my back pack, my life was different. It just was!
I felt that I had a path. I felt that I knew what was important to me.
I felt that what the experience was I can't fall that far anymore.
It felt like the mindfulness trainings were a safety net or something.
Like, I'm held in their embrace that has been my experience.
And although I was sharing with my dharma sharing famiy
like the path of the five mindfulness trainings is not exactly
`like a straight highway,
its more like this, and thats definitely been my experience.
That it has been an adventure, an experiment, a work in progress
a challenge and also a training, like really a training.
And as many of us know whatever kind of training we do, we learn
by making mistakes.
And by trying things out,
and by realizing ... oops, that was not in alignment or
I have strayed far off my path at this point
But it was wonderful and has been wonderful to feel that they are part of my life
and I don't know if your facilitators shared with you
but the dharma name we get with our five mindfulness trainings
is the dharma name for your life.
So even if you become monastcs your monastic name is not as important
as your five mindfulness trainings name.
because we are kind of born into our spiritual path with this practice
and with this training.
And so this morning, definitely more than a hundred of us,
maybe more than a hundred and fifty possibly closer to two hundred of us
across the different hamlets.
made apassionate, wholehearted commitment to take the insight
and practises of the five mindfulness trainings
into our lives
and so when we get on the train tomorrow, car or however we'r getting
home.
these mindfulness trainings will be with
and even if we didn't make a formal commitment to receive them
please take the piece of paper with you.
They can penetrate our life because in a way they
encapsulate everything we have been experiencing
together in this retreat.
And,
these trainings are, I guess, the kind of Plum Village blueprint for
changing the world.
They are nothing less than our full vision for the kind of
loving action that can transform society and the future.
Someone asked me in the earth retreat earlier in this year
I find the Plum Village teachings on the earth and climate so
fascinating, but do you have some kind of manifesto?
or something.
I said yeh - we have the five mindfulness trainings.
And the person was like, no I didn't meet that.
And I was like, oh I mean that.
Because they are applied, they live they are kind of mult-dimensional.
Each one of them is about bringing the energy of awakening and love
directly into the heart of our daily lives, our relationship and our society.
And so, as we take the practice home, maybe you go home and
somebody comes up to you and says, how was your retreat?
And you say ... brilliant, great wonderful.
I'm going to practice meditation every day.
And we may have a tendency to think that
the most easily applicable thing we can take from this retreat
is ten minutes sitting every day.
And we may think, that's going to be my aspiration, my intention
my volition, I'm going to put it all into that.
and that is good,
but I feel we can be more ambitious then that, and I say that because
if we only do 10 minutes of sitting meditation a day, and then the
rest of our life is the same,
the transformation will not be very radical.
But what we can see in each one of these amazingly challenging
and inspiring trainings in the five mindfulness trainings is
that they're about far more than sitting meditation.
In fact, as a relatively active person,
when I left Plum Village I, found it really hard to do sitting meditation
I think it was very rare that I made time.
was able to make time to do sitting meditation in my daily life.
But, my life was utterly transformed.
by the five mindfulness trainings.
One thing I learned, I used to sit on public transport and
be present for the people around me, and present for
my feelings.
And honestly, I think I got more kind of shift in my
perspective and way of living in the way I sat on buses in
central london then I would have done by sitting on my cushion.
because I lived like many of us a very
active and hyperstimulated life.
I was juggling a job in journalism and a masters degree.
Like too much input, so if I sat on a cushion all I
heard or saw was just all the inputs
but when I was in relation with the world,
following my breathing and being in contact with my body
it's like I opened up a whole new way of experiencing life
and that was really transformative for me.
So as we think about what we might want to take away from
this retreat, i'm gonna sort of reflect back to some of the
things that we've been experiencing
and we can see for ourselves which of these elements
do I want to incorporate in my daily life.
One of the things, perhaps the most important thing
we've been doing on this retreat is resting.
relaxing
and spending time in silence
both with people but also with nature
and so we may ask ourselves
in my daily life, am I making time to rest
So resting without screens
resting wihtout maybe headphones
am I able to rest and listen to my body
and how might we incorporate a practice of resting in our daily lifes
So those of us that work from home we have a great chance to do relaxation
after lunch.
Because no one can see you.
So, you can find the Plum Village App or your favorite relaxation teachers
and you can listen to a relaxation
and make it a part of your working day.
We can make a commitment to ourselves, a promise to ourselves
to spend more time in our nearest park, or to use
our days off from study or work to actively go out into
nature.
And we can also , like, learning from this experience of being
with people, in nature, is great.
How can we invite our friends and organize to have more time
in nature together.
That is actively cultivating ourselves, our body and mind
our awakening and also our resistance.
What I mostly want to talk to you today
about is, spiritual resistance.
How the choices we make about how we live our life
are fundamental, deep form, or resistance.
to collective consciousness and to society.
So choosing to rest in our super busy world is a form of resistance
we don't need to consume, we don't need to do,
we're gonna be in the way that is the future we would
like to see.
more simple, more connected and more whole in ourselves,
not relying on external things.
like consuming and doing to be happy.
Another thing we've been doing on this retreat has been stopping
and looking deeply. We have had a chance to step back
from our life, to step outside
the constant
pressures that we are under
to kind of take stock to reflect alittle bit and to listen
and so the question about how we could take this kind of
stopping back with us could be
is there a practice that you can take in your life where
every day has at least one moment of stopping in it.