CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript 

[Theme Music]  
 
This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

On each Tuesday of this month, in celebration of Asian, Asian-American, and Pacific Islander voices, we are revisiting conversations from our archives that feature AAPI writers, thinkers, artists, and healers. Today we are revisiting CIIS Integrative Health Studies Professor Megan Lipsett’s conversation with mindfulness teacher Sister Dang Nghiem recorded in January 2021. Megan talks with Sister D about her work, which brings together her experience as a survivor, certified MD, and ordained Buddhist teacher to offer a body-based, practical approach to healing from life’s most difficult and painful experiences. 

Because CIIS' history and identity is indebted to the wisdom traditions of Asian cultures, we are particularly called upon to stand in solidarity with the AAPI community. We hope that in hearing these episodes—again or for the first time—listeners are provided opportunities for connection and healing. 

 
[Theme Music Concludes]  

Megan: Welcom to you all. I'm so looking forward to this conversation with you Sister Dang Nghiem and I'm gonna add one piece to your bio that I think is really notable and important, which is that you feel a deep sense of awe and wonder when you view the miracle of the evening primrose blossoming and bursting open and I think that's very telling of your yeah, you're just this salacious way with which you engage in the present moment and it shows up in this book, and this book to me is such a beautiful pairing of really hearing your story and the wisdom that you have really cultivated along the way. And so, this book Flowers in the Dark, which I'm sure many of our folks listening will get to explore later when it comes out, is really about healing from trauma through mindfulness practices and Buddhist practices. And you speak in the beginning about trauma being both simple and miraculous and throughout the book you ask this question, how do we as individuals overcome the deep and often widespread breaches of trust that occur? Often, they are early childhood, you speak a lot about childhood abuse and other early adversity. And how do we overcome that so that we can have full and loving and trusting relationships? So, let's dive right In and start there. How do we do that? How do we move from trauma to full loving trusting relationships? 

Sister D: Friends. Dear Megan, thank you so much for making the time for us to have a conversation together. I appreciate all of your time. First of all, I also would like to express my gratitude to my editor, Hisae Matsuda, and Parallax Press. Thank you for believing in me and what I have to share and thank you for putting so much love and hard work into this book. It’s definitely a collective effort and I am deeply grateful for all of your loving work and I hope that the sharing will benefit many of our friends. Thank you also Megan for sharing your general impression of the book and I noticed that you use the word trust a few times in your introduction and that actually touches the core of the book because I trust that most of us in some ways or another we have gone through trauma, whether it's verbal, physical, psychological, sexual or racialized trauma, or gender trauma, systemic trauma etc.  

We all have gone through some sort of trauma and the first thing, the first element that we often lose is faith, trust in others, how could they have done that to us? How could they have perpetrated such an injustice, such a crime, such a wound to our body and our mind and simultaneously we also lose trust in ourselves. Trust that we can take care of ourselves, protect ourselves, because apparently, we couldn't have that's why we the trauma happened to us. So there's that mistrust towards ourselves as well. And through my own experience through my childhood trauma and growing up I've gone through different kinds of trauma and I learned that through the practice of mindfulness we can regain trust. First and foremost is trust in ourselves. And so, in the book I share about learning to come back to the body. The body, the body speaks to us all the time. I discussed we have the head brain that you know, often produces many thoughts and perceptions and feelings and sometimes we can be totally lost in them but we all we regain the trust in other brains in our body such as the lung brain, such as the heart brain, the gut brain, the body brain because these all the time have the sensory experiences and send messages through the head brain and we can come back to the body and experience this body, these messages and know that the body is always there for us to protect us, to take care of us, to communicate with us.  

And so, when we are able to be aware of the messages from our body, first of all, we don't become so cut off from ourselves because many of us also experience the out-of-body experience. We feel very alienated with our body. So, to be in touch with the body is to establish that re-establish that trust, and to learn to take care of these messages from the body, to take them seriously to care for them, to embrace them, to embrace ourselves that is definitely re-strengthening or strengthening the trust that we have that we can be there for ourselves, that we can take care of ourselves, we can protect ourselves. And to learn that there's an inner child in us whenever the trauma that happened to us, whether when we were child, or teenager, or an adult there's always that child that person of that age still very alive in us and to get in touch with that child inner child and to listen to him, her, to them to take care of them. Again, that is to bridge that trust, and once we can have trust in ourselves and know that we can take care of ourselves, really, we heal a lot. That's to start with. Thank you, Megan.  

Megan: Thank you. There are so many ways that trauma, and mindfulness, and enlightenment can be discussed and defined, and I was so struck by the definition of mindfulness that you gave in your text, and it's related to what you've just been speaking about around the way that we can really resource the messages from our body and you mentioned that they're so concrete right, compared to the sort of abstract messages we get from mind and from perception. And so, I'll give the definition you offered in the book.  

You say, “Mindfulness is the energy that enables us to wake up and listen to the cry of our own suffering. Embracing it tenderly the way of a mother holding her child in her arms. To acknowledge our own discomfort and to find its causes so we can remedy the problem and bring about relief and well-being.” So, you know, I want to talk a little bit about where we are at culturally with our ability to do that, just to presence why this issue is so important, and for that I'll give one more definition from your book, which is that “Enlightenment is opening our eyes and waking up to the way things are.”  

And for you know some, you know acknowledging the way things are for some of us will mean acknowledging the state of suffering that were in individually and culturally you focus on the suffering of child abuse as well as cycles of intergenerational trauma that exist around it. So, I guess tell me about why it's important that we as a culture wake up to most difficult state of society? 

Sister D: I work with many young people and they use the word escape a lot. Young people have learned apparently from society, from the adults, to escape their problems with their electronic gadgets, with the bombardment of information and that somehow helps them to, helps to divert their attention from the problems that they have at a very early age. And escape, yes, we can all escape and which many of us use that modality as a way to cope with our stress and our pain and suffering, but in the end also the working of the mind is that of the brain in particular that however much we try to escape to preoccupy the mind, the moment that is not preoccupied it comes back to the problem. Or it's working in the underlying current it always tries to work itself out, the problem out. And so, in that way there's a saying, “wherever you go, there you are.”  

If we don't address the pain, the suffering, the trauma in us then it will manifest in every single aspect of our life whether we acknowledge it or not. And so, in that way mindfulness, actually the Chinese character, it has two parts. The upper case is jin means now, and the lower case is the character of the heart, or mind. So, mindfulness is the literal meaning is the now mind, the now heart. The mind that is in the now, the heart that is in the now, to recognize what is. And so, in that way instead of escaping as a mechanism we use we come back to that natural capacity in us as human beings to be able to have self-awareness to be in the now, to be having now mind. To know what's going on.  

For example, to be aware of our breath. Many of us who have trauma then we experience difficulty with breathing whether our breathing pattern is very rapid, very short, very laborious, heavy. Or it can be a deep long sigh. We can experience the chest highness or the suffocation, the heaviness, the squeezing. Pain in our chests. So instead of being oblivious to these signs and symptoms which they are always there, then we can learn to come back and through my own practice I realized that at first it is uncomfortable to recognize that but to be able to just say it's okay. I'm here. I'm here. I'm breathing with these waves of sadness, of pain, of heaviness in my chest. I breathe in a little deeper, I breathe out a little slower. I put my hands on my chest.  

Actually, it's very comforting because in the end all us want some kind of comfort, some kind of presence that can be there to hold us, and we through the practice of mindfulness can be that presence, can hold that tightness, that squeezing pain or that suffocation by just gently saying I am here. I'm here. I will not run away from you. I'm here. I love you. Through the practice I've learned to say that to myself many times a day in the day. When I'm in public, when I'm private, in the restroom, before I fall asleep, in the middle of the night when I wake up with this like general anxiety. I just put my hands on my chest on my belly and say I'm here, it's okay, breathe, I love you. And that is mindfulness, to be aware of what's going on with us and to direct that love, that tenderness towards ourselves towards our body and it is incredibly comforting and soothing and it helps us to not be afraid anymore, to not have to run away anymore.  

Megan: You know I can imagine someone out there listening maybe even feeling soothed by hearing you speak to your own inner child in that way, and this is of course such a big piece of this writing and of your approach to healing. And I can imagine someone feeling intimidated perhaps by having that conversation with themselves or feeling maybe like they can't access that voice. And I wonder if you have advice for them on kind of getting started with building that relationship. We sometimes, and I think you do as well, talk about mindfulness as re-parenting ourselves, and I wonder if someone isn't quite connected to that wise voice, that loving voice, that compassionate voice, how might they get started? 

Sister D: I had a monastic sister who was, I just used this as an example. She was quite young when she came to the practice, but she had a lot of trauma in her life and she was a bit harsh towards other sisters, but I noticed that she loved animals. One time she got a little bird falling out of the nest and she actually put the bird in her coat inside coat to keep the bird warm. So, I said to her, you know, if you translate that love for the kittens, for the birds and just made that soft and gentle towards us, then all of your sisters would be very happy. And I think we can use that example too, even though we may be very afraid, coming back to ourselves we may have quite a hostile, judgmental relationship with ourselves. We may judge or blame ourselves for many things, but for sure each one of us have a love for something. For nature, for animals, for somebody, for the ocean, you know.  

We can access our love and tenderness toward something, and we know what it is like to be tender and to be kind and generous with that animal, or the nature, or somebody and so in that way we can also sit and breathe and visualize that and then slowly invite that feeling, that sensation towards ourselves. I never said I love you to myself for many years of my life. I first for that, I didn't have people in my life who told me that, because I came from the Vietnamese culture and it's not common that even my grandmother loved me, but she couldn't tell that to me so much. It was she showed that through actions more than through words, but I have learned to say that. And it felt at first strange to me to say you okay. Thank you. Thank you for you. Or even when I have such pain in my you know, my abdomen or in my joints, I would say thank you for telling me of this pain. Thank you for making me aware that this pain, you know, because pain is a mechanism to let us know what's going on, what is wrong with us, so that we can take care of it.  

When we don't have pain like people who have leprosy or who have end-stage diabetes where their sensory nerves are damaged, they don't feel pain. So, if they bang their hand against something it doesn't hurt but it will cause injury and because it doesn't hurt, they won't dress the wound, they won't take care of it. Then it becomes more infected and so in the end, they lose the limbs, you see? And so, we learn to recognize that while the pain is a protective mechanism, and if we can breathe and we can speak tenderly to the pain, we will recognize that the pain is not always there, but it waxes and wanes and that we can touch that pain with tenderness, with openness and it soothes and this relief in the moment that we can listen to that pain, that discomfort in our body. So, in short, we can access that tenderness, that openness that we have for something or somebody and slowly bring that back to ourselves because love is always in our body. Love is always there. And the moment we connect with that love, with that trust that is there, we gain a very deep confidence in ourselves, and then we will be able to look at the pain with less intimidation, with less fear.  

Megan: There is such a beauty in being able to see our emotional experiences and our sensations as messages, you know guides, and to understand a kind of functionalist perspective on emotions, to even move past our cultural conditioning around negative emotions and positive emotions and instead be able to become curious and grateful. To understand that this emotion is illuminating a need perhaps. Or, maybe it's celebrating a need that has been met and yes, it can change the way that we experience them as well, right.  

And yet, culturally we're not necessarily teaching this right, I think at some point you say that we’re in fact quite unequipped culturally to manage healing from traumatic experiences, and you speak several times about the culture of shame and the culture of silence around trauma. And I wonder if you could speak to just how that perpetuates these experiences and how you might see a shift occurring? 

Sister D: I use an example, a young woman that I met doing a retreat. And she shared with me very openly upon our first meeting, her cousin introduced her to me, and she said to me “my father sexually abused me as a child, and when I finally came to my mother and told my mother she said don't say anything because if you tell people they will take you to foster care and you will break this family apart.” So, in that way her mother was afraid that if other people know it will bring great shame to her family, to her marriage and so in that way she was she silenced the child, her own child. And so, the girl became silent. Yes, and she moved out of the house when she was 16 years old, but pain in us is never silenced, it's always there. It's like a warm festering, day after day, year after year, and it affects all aspects of our life.  

So, in our Asian culture, but I also find it in any culture really, of course, we want to have a good appearance. We want to carry a facade that people think that we are doing well that there's we have no problems. But if we understand that the human nature, we pain is a part of our life, is a part of our body every day. It is that running away from pain that perpetuates pain, that escaping suffering.  

Megan: Thank you. 

Sister D: That… I hear the bell so I'm just breathing. Here at the monastery when we hear the clock chime, we stop and breathe and relax the body and just quiet the mind. It's a wonderful practice throughout the day every 15 minutes the clock chime. So, I invite you all to practice that and with your phone as well. And so that you can come back to yourself all the time and to listen, and to be thankful, and to acknowledge what’s there and not have to be ashamed of what's there. 

Megan: Maybe Sister D, it’s a perfect time for us to take the practice we spoke about together and just to kind of set that up, you know, Sister D mentioned a few minutes ago about this ability to begin to listen to our gut mind, or our skin mind, or our heart mind and of course, I want to acknowledge that what we're speaking about touches all of us in some way. We all have our stories, our community sub-stories. We feel that now and here it's present and I think part of the importance of what you are choosing to, how you're choosing to frame this work is by really centering practice and there are many, many practices, helpful practices throughout this book. And I think part of the basis of which is recognizing that healing always occurs in the present moment that it's you know, a very common tendency for us to project ourselves into the past and especially to adverse experiences and to heal that you know is to acknowledge those griefs, but also to celebrate the present moment. And so, sort of in that vein and because of the bell, which we could not hear, but I'm so glad to have it remind us. Let's take a practice. If you wouldn't mind guiding us through that practice to connect to our bodies together.  

Sister D: Wonderful.  So, let us take a moment wherever you sit on the on your chair on the ground on the cushion. Just come back to the body have your back upright, your shoulders open and relaxed, let your arms rest alongside your body, we can hold our own hands. Gently smile and relax all of the muscles in our face. Gently come back to the in breath as it is breathing in, I befriend my in breath. Breathing out. I befriend my out breath as it is… befriending the in breath, befriending the out breath. Release and smile. Smile with the in breath say hello in breath. Wow. It's been a long time since I paid attention to my in-breath. Hello, out breath. And just breathe and enjoy, enjoy our breath… and if we cannot enjoy the breath because we feel it is suffocating or short or it’s become uncomfortable, we just simply smile and say, okay. Okay. It's okay. Help me to be there for you. And as we breathe in, we follow the in breath the best we can. See how it, when it begins and just follow it with our mind until the end of that in breath, we see that there's a pause. We smile and relax into that pause before the outbreak breath. We also follow from the beginning of that out breath slowly to the end of that out breath and breathe and smile and relax with the out breath.  

Following the in breath, following the out breath, and if a thought or feeling arises we can smile and breathe into it. Breathing in, I befriend my body. Breathing out, I smile with my body. Hello, my dear body I know you are there. And I'm happy and grateful. Sorry, I've been neglecting you. I've been too busy. I've been absent, but you've always been there for me, taking care of me. Thank you. Thank you.  

And as you continue to follow your in breath and your out breath, gently scan through your body. Scan through your face and smile relax all the muscles there. Scan through your shoulders and if the shoulders are tight, tense just breathe into them and relax them lower them a little bit. Scan into your chest. Feel the rise and fall of the chest. Scan through your abdomen feel the rise and fall of the abdomen. Scan through your legs. Thank you, legs. I know you're there. Thank you for being able to walk, to run, to dance, bend down, pick up things, to do so many wonderful things. Thank you. Thank you.  

Hello, my dear inner child. Help me to see you. Help me to listen to you. Help me to be there for you. Help me to be aware of your cries, of your laughter, of your needs. Help me to befriend you, to take better care of you. Continue to enjoy some more in breaths and out breaths.  

Smile… we can do this practice in different variations for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. However long, you can lengthen it or shorten it, but anytime and anywhere instead of waiting for a phone call, for a bus, for somebody we practice not waiting, we just come back, check in with our breath, check in with our body, check in with our inner child, anywhere, anytime and that's t building trust saying that I am here. I'm not running away from you anymore. I'm learning to take care of you. And enlist that help from our inner child, from our own body. I want to ask you a question Megan. 

Megan: Great.  

Sister D: [laughing] So, you are one of the few people who got to read this book, besides us, and now our friends from Parallax Press. You are one of the very, very few. How has it affected you, how has it, in some small ways changed your way of looking at yourself, or the trauma that you may have gone through. How may it benefit you?  

Megan: You know, I think in reading this book, there's a kind of affirmation of a transformation or trajectory. I've gone through in my life of, especially coming first from the kind of integrative health world, where you know in health and wellness coaching and really in most behavior change conceptualizations, there is a focus on the individual… and this sense that we as individuals need to sort of figure it out, figure out the formula for ourselves, if you will. And you know with a sort of focus on willpower for instance, and I think the pieces that struck me a lot in this text were the reminders of the creating the right conditions for healing. That it isn't about sort of, I don't know a particular strategy or something I need to exactly have… but it's just a kind of dedication to myself, you know dedication to healing and to be kind in the approach to that, to be kind in not almost in some ways we can without realizing it, I think in many of our practices, in psychotherapy, in mindfulness etcetera we can without realizing it suggest to ourselves that we are broken. Just by simply saying that I you know, well, I need to fix this, is that a suggestion that were broken. And so here it's a recognition I think that we are all… we are all humans who will experience forms of suffering and that it's right to be kind to ourselves, to create conditions that can foster healing. And so, it was I think just a beautiful reminder to kind of be tender and to be in a space of togetherness or belongingness with other beings who are also experiencing their own healing process. That… that's your first review. You can put it on the back cover or something. [laughs] 

Sister D: Wonderful. Thank you, Megan.  

Megan: So, I think we need to definitely talk about the concept of interbeing. This is such a core part of this work. And so just to kind of set it up, you know, that we very often experience a kind of sense of who we are which may be one of separateness, and the implications of that tend to be at once a sense that maybe we are better than... right, a kind of egoic thing can occur, or that we are less than, right? A questioning of our value. And as with many mindfulness practices you talk about what I know is dis-identification, right? But this stepping back so much from the sense of self being bound to the thoughts and sensations that are arising, and instead to sort of wake up to our… inextricable togetherness, our interbeing right? And so, I wonder if you could speak about that, you mention it, you know in recognizing the interwovenness of life and death or even in recognizing the interbeing between victim and perpetrator and so, yeah talk about interbeing and how it really drove a lot of these concepts.  

Sister D: Thank you Megan for bringing up the teaching on interbeing which is essential to us as practitioners, but also to... I think that wisdom is always there in all of us, just to be able to recognize it. Our teacher often quotes Shakespeare, “To be or not to be? That's the question,” but our teacher would say “To be or not to be? That is not the question,” because we are into our, and probably most of us are aware of the yin-yang sign that has you know, half is white and half is black, and in the white part, that's the black dot, and then half black it has the white dot. That's the yin-yang. We also have beings like that. So, in the whites, there's the black and in the black, there is the white and that demonstrates the teaching of interbeing: in this there is that, in that there is this.  

Our culture is full of division and schism. We separate body from mind, from individuals, from others for the collective, but we learn, for example, through this pandemic, a tiny little virus from very far away affects all countries across the continents. That is interbeing. It's the wildfires in California, the red-orange glow of the skies for many days. Slowly all of those pollutants travel to the East Coast and to Europe. That's interbeing. We are in each other, and we... so when we learn that insight of interbeing, we... many of us feel, ‘oh, am I selfish when I learn to take care of myself, when I dedicate time to sit quietly instead of doing housework or doing the work for my job? Am I being selfish?’ But we see that in the one, there is the all. When we learn to take better care of ourselves, to be kind, to be compassionate, to be more accepting, naturally that will expand outward and we will be kinder, more accepting, less judgmental, more embracing towards others.  

And I also recommend you to read the book by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insights. And she talked about left brain and right brain and she had a hemorrhaging stroke in her left brain and how she experienced the right brain that became more active and how the border, you know, between the body and everything around her and her environment dissipated. She felt that oneness with all that is. So, the wisdom of interbeing, of oneness, is in our brain and everything about our body. There's no boss. There's no one organ that is more important than other. Any organ, even one cell in my body, our body, when it is diseased, when it's malfunction, it affects the rest of our body. That is interbeing. The one is in the other. The one affects the all. And so, in that way we practice to see that the pain that we hold inside and we often think the perpetrator is outside and we direct that pain, that anger, that resentment, that sadness outward, but we realize also that the perpetrator is in us. We have become the perpetrator.  

The trauma may have taken place at one point in time in our life, but we have continued that abuse of that trauma, like we may say, ‘oh you're so stupid. You cannot do anything right.’ Or we put ourselves in vulnerable positions so that our body is disrespected or abused or used. So, in speech and thoughts in bodily actions, we may have perpetuated that abuse, that violence. So, the perpetrator is no longer outside of us. The perpetrator has become us. So, to be able to make peace with that, to say, ‘I am the victim but I'm also the perpetrator, and I learn to breathe and hold her/him/them with tenderness inside of me because there's a war going on in us.’ There's that wall, that schism right inside of us, and to be able to acknowledge and to embrace that, that is very healing. The perpetrator is not outside. And many of us who perpetrate violence and abuse, it's usually because we were victims at one point in time in our life and we have learned that is the way to view the world. That's the way to behave. So then we also perpetrated towards our own body, but also towards other people. So, the teaching on interbeing can be experienced concretely at every level in our body, mind, in our environment. And the more we see that, the more reconciliation we can touch. To love ourselves is to love others. To take care of others, is to take care of ourselves. We enter our at every level like that.  

Megan: I've heard this concept referred to as interdependent origination and I think that's such a beautiful phrase. I think I heard Alan Watts say it once first, and it's I think a fantastic thing to recognize and an enlightening aspect of existence to become present to, you know. I was reading a poem once that was describing a little blastula that was coming into being and it was describing the first moment, this is Patty Ann Rogers from her book Firekeeper, and she was describing the moment of the first beat of the heart and in the poem she says, ‘and that was when it became liable to death.’  She chooses that term instead of ‘that was the time the blastula was born,’ and it's, you know, helpful to understand in that way that in the interwovenness or the way these things are leaning on one another.  

When it comes to this recognition being applied in terms of reconciliation, I think we can all recognize that this can be complicated. Forgiveness can sometimes feel confusing. We may have equated forgiveness with apathy or with justification of a wrongdoing. And so, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to what is meant by forgiveness and how it's different from those things. 

Sister D: To me forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened. We, the body remembers it. Everything about us remembers it. It is to make peace with ourselves, to forgive ourselves first and foremost. That is in my experience. We think of forgiveness as directing that energy towards people or circumstances outside of us, but I have experienced that it is actually for ourselves. In the practice of coming back to the breath, coming back to the body, coming back to the inner child, we learned to heal the trust in ourselves. To know that we are there, we are not abandoning, neglecting ourselves anymore. That is very deep forgiveness. That is a concrete step towards forgiveness is to say, ‘I will do differently. From now on I am specifically having these actions, this loving speech, these loving attentive actions. Positive thoughts towards myself and I will not injure or harm, put myself in danger anymore.’ That is something that we can do.  

And through my practice. I also realized that wow, I expect others to... how could have they have done that to me or how could that situation would have taken place? But as I look deeply, I see that wow, how can I continue to perpetuate that pain and suffering? To consume violence, and fear, and hatred, and discrimination in myself towards myself and those to others. So, in that way it's very humbling to say, ‘we can blame others,’ but if we look deeply, honestly with ourselves we see that we do it towards ourselves. Very much so. So, it becomes instead of judging others, we become more humbled by the fact that it's almost like somehow a mechanism that is so reinforced in us to be judgmental and harsh. And the practice of mindfulness, of coming back to ourselves, to the body and speaking... listening deeply and speaking lovingly towards ourselves brings that reconciliation, that forgiveness towards ourselves, that acceptance, that how I am, how I have come to be, because of not just the event itself, but also the way of thinking, the way of speaking, the way of behaving since then that has fed the suffering, the pain. That has continued to help fester the wound and to be able to breathe with that realization and to say, ‘I'm sorry, I'm sorry.’ And to find ways out so that we don't continue to perpetuate the perpetrator, that thing. That naturally will bring forgiveness, first and foremost towards ourselves.  

And again, as you experience that love and that tenderness and forgiveness towards yourself, and I want to emphasize that the body is incredibly loving and healing and forgiving, we experience that firsthand, that can flow out a lot more easily. We don't have to force ourselves to forgive anybody or anything. It takes place naturally from this well of love and compassion towards ourselves. We will be able to extend outward naturally. Yes. So again, forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting what happened or denying what happened or you know, like clean slate, nothing like that. It starts with us, with that coming back.  

Megan: So maybe we can speak for a moment about the collective, if I can characterize it as this, the collective trauma that so many individuals have been experiencing together in especially in this past year, but for many years and many lifetimes, but especially now the kind of political machinations that we are observing and the environmental… degradations getting to a point, of course, and with COVID where we're in some ways all working together to face our own immortality in a very clear and present way. And there is a lot of social isolation occurring. There are many people suffering in that way. Of course, we know just the deep importance and buffering really that our social and our communities can have for us. And yet many people are lacking that now and many people even in, you know, facing fears of death though, or maybe they're even contemplating, you know their own death at this time, something you address in the book and you speak about interbeing in those spaces as well. And the opportunity to touch death in a way that reawakens our ability to live more beautifully. So, I wonder if you could speak to that and also because you say it in this way a few times, what do you mean by living beautifully?  

Sister D: I just want to say that yesterday when I watched the inauguration, I was very moved, and also the evening celebration celebrating America. I cry at different times. Just to put it out there, my blood brother is very pro-Trump [laughs] and it has been a difficulty between my brother and me. I love my brother. I raised him like his sister and his best friend and his mother but we have different view. But when President Biden said, you know, we can all have different views, but we don't have to be divided. We don't have to demonize each other. That was very insightful and so in that way, I just hope that all of us, we open our hearts and help take care of each other. Give ourselves a chance to cooperate, work together, to heal first of all, to take good care of ourselves. So that COVID, the pandemic, can be well contained and can be better contained.  

And so, and also just to listen each other more and speak more lovingly, more openly with each other so that we don't have to have such division because last night as I watched the celebration, I saw people of different cultures and I thought this is so beautiful. Why do we want to reject that beauty all of these beauties? And in my life as a nun, I have been a nun for 20 years now, I learned to live beautifully every moment in my thoughts. If there's a crooked thought, people usually ask this the way, “you must be very happy because you smile all the time,” and I would say, “you know half of the time I'm smiling to my crooked thoughts.” [laughs] So instead of thinking no, you know, this is right, or this is wrong, and this is evil and bad whatever. I just learned to smile to my thoughts. And when it’s crooked, when it's perverse, when it’s full of discrimination and judgment, just smile and then you soften that thought. You softened that feeling, that judgment right away in that moment. We're not pulled by it, we’re not swept away by it. We don't have to be afraid of it. We can think but we smile and relax our body and also the speech we can also learn to recognize the speech that can be very harsh and judgmental, puts ourselves you’re stupid. You cannot do anything right. Somebody's better than you or I'm better than that person or you can recognize that and say, “it's okay, smile. I love you. That's just my brother. You know, that's my sister. That's a human being.”  

And so, when we learn to see our own thoughts, our speech and our body actions, and smile with them and relax them, and not to be so extreme either way, to me that's living beautifully. Living true to our nature as human being. I love the word human being. We’re talking about the right brain having the capacity to simply be, be in oneness with all that is. There’s no limitation of space or time. That those things become just concepts of the left brain. To be, and be spacious, to be capacious to accept all and embrace all - that's very beautiful. And so, in our daily life, we can cultivate that right brain, that capacity to be at peace and to be in Oneness through our thoughts, speech and bodily action. And so, then that is to me living beautifully and in living beautifully we also touch death. In every moment we see the hair falls, the skin cells slough off, everything our thoughts, our emotions they have rapid turnover. They are in constant flux. That's death moment to moment. So, we touch life, we touch death, but we also touch that continuity.  

There's no life and there's no death. Things just transform this like the energy or the law of conservation. Energy cannot be destroyed or created. It only transforms from one form to another. We see that that is true with life really ultimately. So, when we live deeply, we also touch death deeply and we see that it is this constant flow of continuity and we learn slowly we become more fearless, more fearless in our views, in our way of being and we learn to embrace others and everything that is and not be so divided. And that is a great, great freedom, when the view is quiet, and the mind can be very spacious and capacious can be very embracing. That is to be in nirvana, in heaven right here on Earth.  

Megan: Thank you so much. I think those who take this book and read it will be very glad to see the degree of personal storytelling that is woven into really solid practice as well and articulation of the sort of theory of change of the practice, but mostly these very personal stories, yours and others. And so I just want to thank you for sharing those stories and to thank those who allowed to share their stories in your book. Sister D, is there anything you would like to complete our conversation with?  

Sister D: Thank you Megan. I also would like to say that I am very grateful for all the young people, for the people who have trusted me with their stories, who have trusted the practice so that together we have walked this path of healing and of transformation together and then together we share this book with all of you… and I have my full faith and confidence in your capacity of loving yourself and of healing yourself, so please give yourself a chance and share the book, share the practice with others. And just know that one person who can love herself/himself/themselves, that is the light that we bring into this world. We enter our... we affect each other. So, if more and more of us learn to be kind and loving towards ourselves, this world would be a lot kinder and more gentle and we can embrace a whole lot more than we think we can.  

When we suffer, we are so tight, physically and emotionally, mentally. We don't think we can hold anybody. We cannot tolerate anymore. But really our capacity is limitless and please give ourselves, each other a chance to be limitless, to live this life meaningfully and beautifully. Give each other a chance to do that. Thank you, my dear ones, bless you. Come to our monasteries when the pandemic is over, okay? And practice with us and we have online activities at all of the Plum Village monasteries weekly, so you can also benefit from our teachings, our sharing, our practices. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. 

Megan: Thank you Sister D and to everyone who is supporting this production right, who you cannot see, but who are handling all of this work in the background, and so we thank you and acknowledge you. And we can’t see the folks who are listening, but we can certainly feel your presence, and thank you for giving your time to this, and may this time we’ve spent together support us all in healing and to learn to give ourselves kindness on daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a continuous basis, and emanate that out into the world and into the work that we do and into the way that we interact with our difficulties, our inevitable difficulties as well. So, thank you much for being here, thank you again, Sister D for giving your time. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  
 
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