Sister True Dedication: Mindfulness, Community and Healing in Challenging Times

[Music] [Music] Good morning everybody. It's uh strangely wonderful to see a full hall although a little bit intimidating. Today is the 29th of May. Um and we're here in the assembly of stars hall in the lower hamlet dharma nectar temple and we're in our spring retreat and we have uh folks gathered from all three hamlets today. So we have the hiking retreat retreatants here from the lower hamlet we have the new hamlet here and also the upper hamlet. So, we are uh one big family today to celebrate what's been a very beautiful week and uh beautiful spring days or early summer days. I have uh recently got back just a few days ago from uh sharing the dharma in the Pacific. We offered teachings in Fiji and Hawaii and uh so I've now come back to the other side of the planet. So having been on one side, I'm now on this side and I would love to share with you uh many some of the many things that we we learned during our trip um through what is still a little bit of jet lag. So I hope I sound coherent. Um, but first I wanted to tell a a kind of slightly amusing story about something that happened on this trip. Um, there's only a couple of ways really to get to the other side of the planet. Either you fly through Australia or you fly through the US. And because we were going to stop in Hawaii, we some of us we flew through the US. And this is an interesting time to be entering the US immigration portal. Um even the fact that some of us uh could travel through the US is because of our passport privilege. And uh since becoming a monastic, I've become so aware that uh some of us have passports that bring more freedom than others. And uh at what cost? Why why do our countries grant us more powerful passports? And on whose backs have those economies and political governments become powerful. As a young person, I traveled a lot and I went in and out of the United States with no problems. blonde hair, a little bit of makeup, big smile. I'm a I'm a easy tourist to come in on my p passport. Um, but I've discovered since becoming a monastic that uh by looking different, it already creates a problem for immigration. And my first challenge was in 2011, the first time I tried to enter the US as a as a Buddhist nun. And I had a rough time and I I was one of the unlucky few but becoming increasingly numerous who was pulled aside into the the the ugly room. So the glamorous room has these beautiful screens saying welcome to the United States, land of the free, home of the brave. But if you get pulled aside into the ugly room, it's full of like torn furniture, vomit stains, blood on the walls, a lot of shouting and aggression and anger. And I had the opportunity to experience that for more than an hour and to be really um aggressively interrogated. So it made me a little bit nervous about entering the US in general. I I I got through. Um but that's not the story I want to share. And I also don't want to share the story of 2023 when I tried to enter the US and also uh encountered a problem and was held up for about 20 minutes or so by someone who was determined that she was not going to let me in. So I felt a little bit apprehensive um as we landed uh in in the US and and I I felt more tension more tension than normal. But I tried to say to myself, I'll let go of any outcome. Because from my two two previous experiences, I learned that immigration officers don't like it when you pause to breathe after they've asked you a question. It seems to make them more angry. Um, and that's normally our like our special special solution. Um, so I approached the immigration desk uh a few weeks ago and um tried to be as calm as I could and uh gave my passport and uh the male immigration young man, young male immigration officer but quite tough looked at the passport, looked at me, looked at the passport and he said, So what are you a Zen Buddhist monastic nun? Yeah. Um he says and he's like h okay and he and uh and I said I'm just visiting you know just visiting and then he goes do you do out of body do you do out of body meaning do you do like out of body astral projection meditation I was like, I'm not sure what the right answer is because if I say yes, he's going to be like, you know, like that's quite a dangerous thing to say when my body is very much trying to come through immigration. And and I didn't want him to think I was doing any silly business at all. I'm like, "No, I'm very much a normal human being." And he's like, "But I could tell like I was anywhere. I could tell he wanted to know more, but I was just like, "I cannot risk it. I cannot risk it." So I was like, "No, no, no, no. That's that's other traditions." And um and he's like, "Oh, okay." a little bit disappointed. But then um I got the stamp and he let me through and uh afterwards all the monastics we were exchanging stories about the questions that our immigration officers asked us and I was the only one who got that question and uh Sister Hero, Sister Langim uh she said, "Hen, why were you so a chicken? You should have just said yes, of course I do. [Music] And I just thought, "No, I can't risk it. I don't know how long I would need to be there." And is that really the dharma? Is that really the dharma moment? How much explanation would it take? Well, I have a I have an hour or so this morning. So hopefully we can explore this theme a little bit. Um but never underestimate immigration officers actually. Um because uh on another trip when we were entering uh Canada um I I really connected with the immigration officer and I found him kind of quite present and so when we had all the questions what kind of tradition are you and so on I we explained and then I said and then as we got we were granted our stamp and went through and I turned back and I said we're doing an event can I just write it down and I gave him a piece of paper of the event we were doing and he came with his whole family. So, so immigration officers, um, believe in them. Um, but be careful, be careful what you say. Um, so I'd like to share a little bit this morning about um, being in the body. And we may think that the greatest superpower is to be out of the body and uh to go somewhere like far away or to do something special or to kind of transcend our body. Um, but I've really come to understand that as humans in this day and age, our greatest superpower is to have a body, to feel our body, and to be really embodied uh humans. And this may this may sound like such an obvious truism, but for those of us who have now this week had uh six 7 days in the monastery, we've learned and probably discovered that we're much more in our body today than we were five or 6 days ago. And that is because everything in our society at the moment is to kind of alienate us from our body. We spend day and night kind of running away from yeah all of our physical experiences getting lost in screens, getting distracted, having a really dispersed mind. And we are everywhere except really feeling all of our senses in the present moment. feeling our breathing, feeling our body and everything our body has to kind of tell us. And in our kind of Buddhism, we understand the body as being the foundation of all of our spiritual practice, the foundation of our awakenings. It's a kind of portal to uh insight and to discovery. And what we will already been learning in the last few days here and for those of us who are living in plum village, we are learning this deep in a deeper and deeper way all the time is that our body has so much information to tell us and we spend very little of our normal days u paying attention and and listening to what our body has to say. And what's interesting about the body is it it kind of has the good news and also the bad news. So that uh when we come back to our body often the first thing we feel is the pain, the physical tension, the stress, the pressure, the ill. And yet at the same time our body is a wonder, is a miracle, is an extraordinary symphony of kind of biological and earthly wonders. So both things are kind of happening at the same time. And part of the art and the challenge of mindfulness is to learn how to be with these two two aspects, two facets of our bodily experience. To be able to have the uh courage and the compassion and the tenderness and the acceptance to find a way to be with the pain and soothe the pain. And also this kind of grace and um curiosity to see the wonder of our body. Many of us myself included we may not like our body very much. We we we feel the body our body is not good enough in this or that way. So to learn to kind of come home to ourself and befriend our body as a miracle and wonderful enough just as it is is a real training and our societyy's not giving that to us and our education might not be giving that to us even like yeah external affirmations may not be giving that to us and so that is our spiritual work to do ourselves to truly see the wonder of our body and what it means to be alive. And the reason why coming back to our body is so important is uh that uh we live in challenging times and sometimes there can be a sense that this has t --- ffering in both in both retreats and both regions. Um and in the with the backdrop of that to then have conversations about AI was very striking. Um the most striking thing was that um some people at the forefront of this technology uh are very uh overconfident and they said thanks to thanks to AI humanity will have abundance in 10 years. We weren't quite sure where to begin with that. [Laughter] So, you're not look, you're not looking, you're not listening, you're not uh you haven't quite understood the challenge. You haven't quite understood the challenge. Um the problems that humanity faces right now are not problems that can be solved by AI. They are very human problems related to how we relate for example to trauma in our body to relationships between families, societies and nations. Um the problem is that traumatized people traumatized people AI is not embodied enough to to solve this the problems of inequality, access to resources, access to health care, injust unjust food systems. You cannot write an algorithm to solve these things. Um but they're extremely confident and uh that was alarming for us uh as spiritual practitioners and really in the engaged Buddhist tradition of our teacher. We're very aware of the the human challenges we face, but also of the immense immense potential we have as humans to find a way out. And many of us just in our small just actually no, let me rephrase this sentence. Some of us are trying to avoid the word just in our speaking. Many of us this week in our experience will already have touched that we start to see a way out through some of our our own challenges and difficulties with the power of becoming more mindful, more concentrated and and getting some insight and the I guess the kind of the the good news the like the the strong message of our tradition. is that we all have within us everything we need to be able to understand our pain and suffering to be able to uh understand our actions reactions and responses to find agency and to find freedom and a way out for ourselves for our communities and for our society. So we have that seed of agency in all of us and we will have started to touch it already this week. In this sense our thesis is that to be in our bodies is the superpower. To be in our bodies is far more interesting than to be out of our body. to be in our bodies is where we find the answers. And it's very important to know that AI does not have a body. It doesn't have direct experience to all these incredible sense impressions to everything we can see and hear and feel from within. We are our our whole human experience is so rich. Our consciousness is an embodied consciousness. Our body is a miracle. [Music] Heat. Heat. Some of us had a chance to be with our teacher when he met some Silicon Valley leaders back in 2013. And after this conversation with these uh AI folk, um I I asked myself, "Oh, I wonder what Tai would say. I wonder how he would have handled that conversation." And and I think one of the lines that Tai might have said is, "Why do you have to wait 10 years for abundance? With the miracle of mindfulness, you have it instantly." Um I that line comes actually from uh when we were doing a retreat in Italy and the meditation hall was here and then just in the hallway outside was the espresso machine. And so when everyone was coming for morning sitting there was a huge line outside of everyone trying to line up to get a quick espresso before the morning sitting. And one time I was walking behind Tai and he walked past like 20 people in the line. um who were not coming in to do the sitting yet cuz they were waiting for their quick shot of espresso. And then we were sitting in the hall and you could hear the espresso machine still going until a monastic would go out to say, "Okay, end of the espresso line. We're now going to start the meditation." And in that retreat, Tai said u mindfulness is even more powerful than espresso because you can have happiness instantly. You don't even have to wait, you know, one minute. [Music] So this week um we've all had a chance to touch that to touch that abundance of life to touch the miracle of life in everything that we've been doing. We've been savoring walking with a walking meditation, fast walking, slow walking. And for many of us, this might be the first time that we've actually really experienced like the 100% joy of being fully in your body while walking and allowing ourselves to feel as much as we can and to not be carried away by our thinking. And as we walk, and some of us in the longer hikes that we've been doing, we've had a chance to walk in silence. And in that silence while walking is a very um deep practice. And so on the one hand our mind can empty, we can release our mind, our body can feel and also some deeper seeds from our store consciousness might come up in that silence in that movement in the safety of nature. They they reveal themselves. It can be wonderful feelings like I can't believe I don't do more walking in my life. But it can also be painful things like painful deep memories from our own life or from our ancestors. And many of us simply by the act of walking in mindfulness fully present concentrated and with the collective energy we will have had a lot of insight this week. insight about what is going on in us. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be me in this moment? And uh like for myself, I realized we've done a lot of um walking meditation in our in our retreats in the Pacific, but also in my in my life here in the monastery. And for me my uh determination at the moment is to walk as a free person and aware of what is happening in the world to walk as a free person and allow this place and this environment to be a a pocket of real heaven. a pocket of real heaven in a world of real suffering. And to hold these two together has um become very helpful for me in my practice recently to not deny or underestimate that this there can be a real wonder and a real heaven. The orioles recently arrived back from Africa. The nighting gales have been singing through the night. So those of you that are in tense, the nighting gales have come from the Congo. So there is where there is war, where there is violence. So there is the wonder, the miracle of life and the bird song. And there is also at the same time the pain. And to be in the present moment is to be awake to both of them. but to drink up the heaven as much as we can. And as we go home and many of us will be heading home tomorrow, this is a challenge for us. How will I take my pocket of heaven home? How will I continue my walking practice uh when I go back home? And so you may make a commitment that a couple of times a week or a few times a week you will go to a nearby park or garden and create a really nourishing moment for yourself. Or if you live near the ocean or near a river or a hill to really create conditions to soak up the heaven that is near you because we need it. We need it to find our strength. We need it to nourish our body and mind. We need it kind of to survive. Or you might like to do uh something like choose a distance in your daily rhythm. Maybe walking to the shops or walking on your commute to work or to study to say these few hundred meters I will walk as a free person. I will see the wonders of life that are here. Even if it's in the middle of the city, there's a small flower just in the concrete there. There's a tree doing its best to survive in the concrete jungle. And we walk every step seeing these little glimpses of heaven, claiming our freedom and saying, "I don't want to be swept away from myself. I don't want to run anymore. I want to live my life. Every moment is so precious." And we can make this kind of determination before we leave. How will you take your practice of walking home? And while we've been eating also together in silence, we've been coming back to our bodies and receiving the gift of the earth into our bodies. And to eat in silence is very powerful. to eat in mindfulness to have the energy of the community around us and a lot of things also emerge in that silence. Our body has so much to tell us. Maybe we've heard the voice of our ancestors in us who didn't have enough to eat and so always serve a little bit too much. Oh, the energy of our parents running, running, running, trying to push us out of the house in the morning for get to school after breakfast. Maybe we learn to eat fast, to eat rushing, never enough. So these habits, we have a chance to transform deeply and really reclaim our life simply while eating. So how will you take the practice of eating mindfully home? How will you like defend the space of the heaven around your food? Will you turn off the screens, turn off the music? Will you sit where you've got a slightly better view? Perhaps you might breathe in and out three times before any meal. See what your family members say. Come on, start eating. Maybe three breaths. Maybe we could try three breaths. And when we have a chance to eat alone, you can kind of flip it because sometimes we feel sad to eat alone. But now with the --- m and pressure go to the body 101 uh SOS back to the body foundational Find a way to be with our breathing. Find a way to be with our lungs, with our diaphragm to come back to the body. Forget about the thinking. It's gone awall. Find root ourselves in the body. And I guarantee that our ability to solve what we have to solve will be much better um after we've done that. And another thing we've learned this week is the listening to each other. And this is an incredibly powerful practice. So in our sharing circles, and one reason we've been able to listen to each other in the sharing circles is because we've been listening to ourselves in the rest of the day while we've been walking, while we've been sitting, while we've been enjoying the silence and the nature. And that's given us a lot more space to listen to others. And so as we go home, we may already think who who would I like to offer my listening to? How how would I like to listen differently to some people in my life, whether it's people we live with or family members or colleagues. And earlier this year, we also did another climate leaders um retreat in Africa in Tanzania. And uh we had a wonderful Masai tribal elder in the retreat. And at the end of the retreat uh he was very happy because uh he said he had suddenly realized something that um he their particular tribe you don't have a fixed place of living. You move between different kind of uh uh village clusters or hamlet clusters of huts. And he said he wasn't sure where he was going to go next because he's itinerant. He wasn't sure where he was going to go next after the retreat. But with the the practice of listening and he said, "Ah, I want to take I want to go to the village where my children are because I want first to bring this blessing to them." That really moved me. It really moved me to bring the blessing of presence and listening to our loved ones first. And some of us after having had this retreat, we may also have some new ideas about our mornings. Um we may be extremely ambitious about how we will transform our mornings. Um but we perhaps we can start gently uh with how we enjoy our tea or coffee in the morning. Perhaps some silence before we open music or the screens. Maybe how we prepare breakfast. We can challenge ourselves to prepare breakfast really mindfully. And uh actually also in Silicon Valley there's a whole thing about morning morning regimes and it's become kind of extracted and capitalized and optimized and in our spirit of really introducing the art of and integrating the art of mindfulness in our daily life. It's not about optimizing. We're not trying to trying to achieve something. We're trying to reveal. We're trying to reveal our life. Reveal ourselves to ourselves in the morning. Reveal the wonders of the morning. The wonders of breakfast or the cup of tea or coffee. Um so beware the energy of optimizing especially when people ask about the retreat. You know, we may be suddenly feel pressured that we're having to frame our experience in terms of goals and achievements, but we are learning to be alive and be a fully alive human. And this is uh this is something that we we can know to be true ourselves. So each one of us will have had a different experience in our time in Plumbled and that is true and real to us and we don't need to like outsource the validation of that experience. We don't need someone else to tell us um how I'm doing in my meditation at what stage I've attained or we don't need someone else uh yeah to measure. We we know deep inside uh what we need and our heart has been telling us this week, our spirit has been telling us this week, our body's been telling us what we need, what's most important um where which way the path of of well-being goes. And I I say I use the word well-being here and I will will give a bit of context to it because for us mindfulness isn't only about well-being and sometimes mindfulness can get completely extracted um and diluted and become only about making us feel well in a broken world. And that may then like take away some of our determination to change or heal this broken world. Um but for us um yeah mindfulness is about much more um much more than uh being well. And uh our teacher he he spoke about um how we all have two levels of concerns. We have our our daily concerns and we have our ultimate concerns. [Music] And um today I want to share that everything we have been learning this week, yes it is helping us with our daily concerns, but it is also deeply helping us address and look into our ultimate concerns. So the daily concerns they are everything that we are preoccupied with in our daily life. Having enough money to survive, to be able to pay the bills, to have enough food, to have a shelter or a home or a mortgage, to be able to have a salary or a job. These are kind of daily concerns. So we can have we can speak about kind of material material there's a material aspect to them which is very real and mindfulness can really help us bring um courage and clarity and stability to the the struggle for our material concerns and the Another aspect of our daily concerns is kind of like our emotional and effective needs. Um especially in our relationships, um we're very concerned, you know, do our friends and loved ones or beloved one, you know, do they love us? Do they understand us? Do I love them? Do I understand them? Um are they supporting me? am I supporting them enough? Um, and so we can speak here about kind of some of our um kind of um effective um or emotional needs. And and Tai, our teacher, he he even used the word comforts here. We're looking for material comforts and we're looking for emotional comforts. And then he said, "But that's not the main thing that's going on in our human existence. These things are important, but there's also so much more. There's also so much more." And uh he said that we may spend 99.9% of our time preoccupied with our our daily concerns. But as a a spiritual practitioner, as a seeker, we have an opportunity to address our ultimate concerns. For example, who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing here? And we can ask that question in our professional life. For those of us that are monastics, we can ask it of our monastic life. What am I doing here? These are real questions. Who am I? What am I doing? And um what do I want to do with my life? Does my life have meaning? And uh I I remember when I was about 6 months into being a monastic, so I was a young novice. Um, I was taking care of the young people's group in the summer retreat and they had so many questions on these like ultimate concerns because young people they haven't yet um numbed out the sound and they had all these questions and I didn't know how to answer them. And so I organized a little lunch. I asked Tai's attendant would Tai sit with the young people and at that time there was not so many young people like maybe 20 or 30. And uh so we had a lunch of Thai with the young people and he's like do you have any questions you know and they started asking all of these kind of big super big questions and I was like thank heavens I knew this was a good idea. I'm so glad that Tai is here to like help answer this and I was like and also like I just do not know the answer like you know and so I was I was just so happy that he was going to be there. We get the absolute live Zen master wisdom. At which point he says go on you will answer [Music] which was I mean I was completely flawed. It was kind of like like this is not how this works. Like we are all here and we've definitely created this moment to hear your answer. Um so I had to say something. Um, I'm not sure I can even remember what I said. Yeah, I don't want to misrepresent. But what I learned in that moment was only we have the answers to our ultimate concerns. We can't even outsource it to the Zen master [Music] and it's a whole a whole journey for each one of us. And Tai said that if we don't give time to listen and to look deeply into our ultimate concerns, we won't be able to have peace in our meditation. we won't be able to be at ease in our life because there's some like work left undone. We're betraying our chance to to address these things in this lifetime. And so, um, when we ask ourselves these questions, who am I? What am I doing? Why am I here? What do I really want to do with my life? We're starting to get into what we could call like our deepest desire. Our deepest desire. And that is uh what we learned about in the four neutrans. It's what we call valition. Volition. Um and our valition is a very important energy that drives us forward in our life. It's a source of energy. We need to identify what we want most in the world and allow it to kind of carry us forward. And I I recently became aware that um I'd got a little bit lazy in my practice of deepest desire, which can be a danger if you're a monastic because you've already made this like huge decision. What am I going to do with my life? I'm going to be a monastic. And a part of me had thought that that is something I just decide once and then everything else unfolds from --- enerosity or gratitude, loving speech, it reflects back on us and out into the world. And through our actions, we continue and we're already continuing and we continue long after the disintegration of the physical body. [Music] These teachings are very powerful, very deep. And in our retreats for climate leaders, so in Fiji, in Hawaii and also in Africa, we discovered that uh it is possible to offer uh a lot of teaching without needing to um deliver Buddhism. And this has been a really interesting journey for some of us. Um sometimes when Tai was asked um what insight is he most like happy with or proud of that he had and there's one Q&A where he says the realization that uh um I'm ready he said that I am able to let go of the idea of Buddhism that he can be free from Buddhism as a as a label as a package And that's quite shocking and quite deep because all the heritage and everything we're all experiencing here this week and in our practice is the is the the gift of this wisdom tradition of Buddhism and yet it has a kind of signless nature a formless nature and we can teach these very powerful and simple practices and teachings without needing to teach an apparatus of Buddhism or a a religion, a dogma of Buddhism. And in the in the climate leaders retreats that we have done, um it has been extremely powerful to see what we have to offer as as plumbage community, plumbage monastics and four-fold multiffold community. What we have to offer is not exactly Buddhism. We don't need to give people Buddhism. And especially when we went to Africa, Africa has had more than enough imposition of different religions, different faiths coming from the outside to say this is what can help you. This is what you need. So very intentionally when we were designing and preparing the retreat in Africa, we said we will offer the practice of mindfulness with all its depth but we will offer mindfulness. We will offer all the well we call them dharmadors but we didn't call them dharmadors there of being able to touch our ancestors being able to touch into being able to generate the energy of mindfulness and really practical tools for how to do it. And in our teachers um dharma talks you often see what he what's called the triple trainings mindfulness concentration and insight. And if I'm really honest, I think only recently have I really started to understand the power of these three trainings in Tanzania when we were able to generate a collective energy of mindfulness in the retreat. with the sitting meditation, the silence, the walking meditation, the mindful movements, the eating meditation, the dharma sharing, the deep relaxation. What we were doing is bringing everyone extremely talented bodhicattva heroes, incredible souls, bringing everyone into a collective energy of mindfulness. And that energy itself had so much power, mindfulness of the body, the feelings and of each other. And the structure of the retreat allowed us to hold that energy of mindfulness in a kind of state of concentration. Hours without being on the phone, hours of being close to our body and our breathing. hours of really being aware of the presence of everyone around us and holding that energy of mindfulness and concentration in the insight of interbeing and interconnectedness. What that then allowed everyone's insight just can reveal itself. So I I don't know if um this is interesting for the monastics but what I'm trying to share is that I don't know what we think it is what we do when we offer retreats but what we discovered in Africa when we offer retreats is that we're creating this incredibly powerful way to have a collective experience above all of mindfulness and concentration which allows everyone's own insight to reveal themselves for somehow this was the first time I'd realized that that's what I am doing with my life when I'm being a monastic in my life this is what we're doing cuz I think somehow I had thought that we have to give insight that somehow it's for us to generate it and then serve the world through insight but now now I've understood it differently we create this powerful energy and when we came to Fiji And there was a huge amount of um raw pain that emerged in the container of the mindfulness and concentration because the colonial legacy is so close to the surface and has done such destruction there in particular from um the UK but also from Australia also the us it's very the the wounds are very close to the surface but the collective energy of mindfulness and concentration was so strong that everyone had the courage for some of them for the first time to be able to safely feel those wounds. And so what our kind of uh I feel what our community can offer our world in this these hellish times is a way for us all to learn how to be present, how to be concentrated enough, how to find communities of solidar ity so that we can kind of hold the pain that is there and find the path of healing together and that path reveals itself. And this is an embodied practice. We need to be in our body, not out of our body to be able to do this. And when we go home to our friends, our families, our colleagues, they may ask us, "What kind of Buddhism was it?" Or they may press you a little bit to talk about Buddhism. But actually what could be more powerful is for you to be in your energy of mindfulness being present following your breathing for you to create some conditions in your interactions of a bit more peace and concentration. maybe turning off the TV, turning off the screen or radio to be able to be a bit more present for folks to be more in the listening and the curiosity to hear them out to hear their insights and maybe just simply holding space just like the monastics we're learning to do. Holding space for others is maybe the best gift we can give them. um rather than kind of big ideas or something. So I think um there's a very uh powerful coming together which is that um precisely because there is so much pain and suffering in the world that is why we need even more to be able to be in touch with ourselves, with our feelings and body, so that we can take care of the pains, so that we can find the source wounds and so that we can give rise to a very kind of strong volition or intention to choose how we want to spend our life, how we want to spend our energy, how we want to help, how we can do less harm. and more help. And when we were in Hawaii, there were many um Hawaiian activists at the sessions that we led. And uh at the end um one of them shared that thanks to the energy of mindfulness and concentration in those sessions for the first time she said really this is the first time I've been able to touch peace to touch peace and it's not about saying that the struggles and work she is doing is complete that work is still there the pain is still there but she was able to give herself and her ancestors in her permission to touch peace. The energy of mindfulness is kind of like a a sacred energy that we can bring to like everything that we do. And she was able to find to touch that piece. And another activist said that thanks to this practice she felt she could find reclaim her agency find her agency. So being um connected to our body, our feelings, our emotions, our pain unexpectedly can give us a huge amount of agency because we have a chance to choose how to direct that energy for action. The energy of despair can be redirected to an energy of vow. I vow that that that loss, that suffering, that destruction will not be in vain. I will invest my time and energy to be of service to help to find the way out. And so we we learn how to move the energies through our anger. Our anger also contains love within it. So allow yourself to soften the anger and feel the love and the care that is kind of behind the anger and transform that anger also into our volition our vow. And so for each of us how to to to be with ourselves is really part of the the way out. So, as uh the name of the Plumbish podcast, but the way out is in. We come into ourselves and that gives us the energy to find the way out. And I'd just like to finish with um um some words that Tai had um written and and in this book uh love letter to the earth and it's only recently just in this spring that I've started to understand a bit what he was talking about. and he says um humanity needs a kind of spirituality that we can all practice together. Dogmatism and fanaticism have been the cause of great separation and war. Misunderstanding and irreverence have been the cause of enormous injustice and destruction. In the 21st century, it should be possible for us to come together and offer ourselves offer ourselves the kind of religion that can help unite all people and all nations and remove all separation and discrimination. If existing religions and philosophies as well as science can make an effort to go in this direction, it will be possible to establish a cosmic religion, a cosmic spirituality based not on myth or belief or dogma, but on evidence and the insight of into being. And that would be a giant leap for humankind. Thank you. [Music] [Music] Thank