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Thich Nhat Hanh answers questions during a retreat in Plum Village (May, 2014).

In this Dharma talk offered on 17th January 2021, Sister Boi Nghiem (Sister True Pearl) teases apart the light and shadow constructs of ‘normality’. By looking deeply at the Vietnamese words, bình thường (normal), we can see the light elements of bình as peace (bình an), calm (bình tĩnh) or recovery (bình phục) and the shadow elements of thường as abnormal (bất thường), strange (lạ thường) or low (tầm thường). Observing our patterned way of thinking can awaken us to these contrasting elements that we define as normal. This awareness can challenge us when normality leads to fear, e.g. systemic racism, or leads to recovery, e.g. witnessing the daily miracles of life.
When Thay teaches us about Right Thinking in his book, “The Heart of the Buddha’s Thinking”, he asks us to pose the question, “Are You Sure”, when observing our mental formations. In this way, we can tease apart the elements of ‘normal’ and do a course correction if we are normalizing the abnormal. This can mindfully return us to the bình side of normal....to a place of clarity and peace.
Through Sister Boi Nghiem’s intimate, poignant and delightful personal stories, we can learn to embrace our normal, ordinary, daily occurrences and transform them into present-moment miracles. We can then be careful of our conclusions of others and see the Buddha in everyone.

The video version of this talk is available on the Plum Village YouTube Channel.
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How can we be sovereign in our own life? How can we be free, & free from discrimination? Community life can be uncomfortable, and impossible to control: so why do we choose it? How can we help a loved one navigate the process of dying? How can community help?
In this panel sharing from December 6th 2020, three Plum Village Dharma teachers share from their heart about their practice during the past 10 weeks of the 2020 Autumn Rains Retreat. They reflect what it’s like to live in community, especially during difficult times.
They share insightfully and engagingly on a number of topics, including:
— How they practice to arrive in the present moment, to be available to the wonders of life. And how they establish their sovereignty, to be able to respond to life from intentionality and wisdom.
— How they practice to embrace and look deeply into suffering, within them and around them.
— What they find most helpful about living in a community that lives in simplicity and mindfulness.
— How they practice to stop building “castles in the sky”, projecting into the future to try to construct a desired identity and a space of control and comfort.
— The nature of true freedom, and the role of social “pressures”, expectations and norms, in society and in an intentional community.
— How our perceptions, and language itself, lie at the root of our tendency to discriminate. How we can begin to unravel this in our daily life, such as the way we read news.
— How to find common ground in order to be able to understand and accept the differing views and visions of others

“Even if you don’t call yourself an environmentalist but you take good care of your body, then you are taking good care of Mother Earth. Some people say that they lose trust in their body when they become sick, but I gain trust in my body when I become sick. It is a chance for me to come back and look deeply into my body.
Now we are going through a pandemic, which certainly has something to do with how we are living on the Earth. Will we change the way we live on the Earth?”
Sr. Chân Đức speaks about accepting unpleasant feelings as part of life, how everything is always in a wondrous state of change, and how we can practice in moments of uncertainty to see that we already have more than enough conditions to be happy.