Why There's Nothing Wrong With Your Anxiety | Brother Phap Dung and Kaira Jewel Lingo

Key Takeaway

When anxiety, sadness, or anger arises, resist the first impulse to outrun it. Pause, feel your breathing and body, and name the reality: “This is it.” Acceptance is not resignation; it is the starting point for responding wisely. Today, try two minutes of stillness before reacting, planning, or distracting yourself, and notice whether meeting the experience directly gives you more space and choice.

Episode Overview

Dan Harris speaks with Thich Nhat Hanh’s senior students Brother Phap Duong and Kaira Jewel Lingo about four concise Dharma phrases: “Breathe, you are alive,” “The present moment is the only moment available to us,” “I have arrived, I am home,” and “This is it.” They explore how these reminders can interrupt distraction, help people meet anxiety and pain, and support compassionate action without denying difficult realities.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why There's Nothing Wrong With Your Anxiety | Brother Phap Dung and Kaira Jewel Lingo from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. As many of you know, I am obsessed with Buddhism, aka the Dharma. And one of my favorite ways to practice and learn the Dharma is through pithy little catchphrases, these little mantras, these, as I like to call them, Buddhist earworms that weasel their way into your mind stream and then surface at exactly the moments when you need them. We've done many episodes on the show where we talked to my longtime meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein about the many Buddhist earworms that he has personally coined.

However, he's not the only meditation maestro who uses pithy little phrases. Another person who has done so is the legendary Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh died a few years ago, but he was, as I said, a Zen master from Vietnam, the author of many, many books and the man who started the well-known Plum Village lineage of Buddhist meditators. And today we've got two of Thich Nhat Hanh's senior students here to talk about some of their favorite top 10 phrases from Thich Nhat Hanh.

My guests are Brother Phap Duong and Kyra Jewel Lingo, both of whom have been on this show several times, and they're both amazing. Kyra Jewel Lingo, Brother Phap Duong, welcome to both of you. Welcome back. Thank you, Ben. Happy to be back. Yes. Always good to be with you. Well, Kyra Jewel, let me just start with you. So Thich Nhat Hanh, as I understand it, coined a lot of these little phrases that are great ways of teaching the Dharma, and he often did so using calligraphy.

So can you just give us some background on these phrases and how he came up with them and how he taught with them? So this is a classic kind of activity for a Zen master and for a Zen practitioner to have a brush and to have ink and to have some rice paper and to create an art form on that paper that supports people in their practice, that captures some essence of the Dharma so that it's up, it's in your eyesight, and you remember to practice.

So it's really a reminder of who we are, of what we are, of why we practice, of how we can be awake in every moment. And so these calligraphies of Thay really came from his own heart and his own, you know, seeing of what, you know, what things people needed to be reminded of. But also they would come, you know, he would say something in a talk that people would really like, and then they would say, can you make a calligraphy of that for us? Or can you help us, you know, remember that teaching by putting?

So he generated some of the phrases. Other people kind of said, you know, we need this as a calligraphy. So it was a very organic and very community-driven process. And then there were all the translations and all the different languages. So he was doing calligraphy in Chinese and in Sino-Vietnamese and Vietnamese and English and French and Dutch and German and Spanish and Portuguese. So wherever people, you know, were that, that were students of his or that practiced in his tradition, he would, he would make translations as well.

Brother Fabiung, I want to say a few words and see if you agree with me. One of the questions I get frequently from people who listen to me or subscribe to my stuff is, why do I need to hear the same thing over and over again? And I often remind people that one of the original translations of the word sati, which we now translate as mindfulness, is remembering. There's just something about the human mind, the human brain, where we can hear something very inspirational on social media and a podcast and a book, and then we just forget it.

And so remembering seems to me to be the name of the game. Would you agree with that? Yeah, you know, that's true about remembering, recollecting is another, for meditation. And it's also in Zen Buddhism, there's also an emphasis to protect our beginner's mind. So refreshing, refreshing, reviving. It's like a human nature to become like complacent and like, you know, one time Thay came to the deer park and we walked around. It's the first day he arrived here from France. He went into the meditation hall, and then he saw these calligraphies that has been up there for like, you know, five years, six years, and he said, take those down and replace them with new ones.

And you know, in the dining hall, he does the same. And then, you know, I'm walking out and he's like, go do it now. So it's just like, you know, it's like you have a sign, a calligraphy, but if it's there and it's always there, you just don't see it anymore. So not only with our practice and so on, but particularly with these calligraphies or any practice, it becomes kind of like, I don't know, like gnolled. I don't know what else to say, but I experienced that.

So the calligraphies help us, remind us, and his Dharma talks, he's constantly talking about breathing, the breath, and it's like, almost like the same talk every time. And people always say, well, why is he teaching that? It's because we hear it, we love novelty. It's like, oh, something new, and it triggers us, but actually the diligence and discipline is actually keeping it fresh and revived and new. So sometimes meditation, you go to sitting and it's just no, there's no life to it, no life energy. So our practice with these calligraphies, when we see it, is to remind us and come back to our breath and then enliven it again, what it meant for you or what that teaching is.

And that's personal, you don't know who's doing it or not, you need to know if it's like no longer working. Nobody can tell you, no teacher can tell you. And so you have to have that motivation to know when there's no life in it, there's no substance, it's form. And that's usually the weakness of humans. We love the form, but it's the real essence. So the calligraphies kind of help with that, but once in a while, you got to change it because it becomes like your calendar, you don't see it anymore or like your favorite picture.

And so a friend comes by, he's like, oh my God, look at that beautiful calligraphy or that painting in your wall. And then you're like, oh yeah, I didn't realize that until you remind me again. So anyway, it's not just calligraphy, it's just everything, you know, in our lives, right? So I hope that helps. It does help. One note to listeners and viewers, you will hear and Kyra Jewell uttered the word earlier and you will hear sometimes Brother Phap Duong and Kyra Jewell Lingo referring to their teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh as Thay.

Thay, I believe, is Vietnamese for teacher. So don't be confused if you hear that word. Well, the two of you have very kindly put together a top 10 list of your favorite of Thich Nhat Hanh or Thay's phrases. Kyra Jewell, I'm going to start with you, but of course, Brother Phap Duong, please jump in and vice versa. But here's phrase number one, breathe, you are alive. Why does that resonate with you? Such a central teaching of our teachers and, of course, of the Buddha. So breathe is, first of all, just remember that you are breathing and feel your breath.

Be aware of your breathing. And then breathe, you are alive, is a reminder to feel this, you know, flow of life happening in us, which if we actually feel our breathing, we can begin to feel this sense of aliveness in our bodies. It's a very powerful feeling that we can forget and lose sight of. And we think we're just everything that our mind is telling us. And we can forget that we are alive, that we still have life. And so when we forget that we are alive, we don't use our life very wisely.

And so breathe, you are alive is an invitation to come back to life, to be fully alive, to realize that we still have this moment and we can do something with it. We can be in this moment in a way that is beneficial for us and for others, rather than be asleep, be dead to life, right? Life is offering us so many gifts all the time. The fact that we can perceive things, whatever senses we have, those are gifts to be able to feel the sun or hear the rain or pet an animal or whatever it is.

And if we're not alive, if we're not aware that we're alive, then all of those gifts don't get opened. We don't get to enjoy them, appreciate them. I don't know about you all, but as I am now in my 50s, I really feel like I'm on the downward slope and time seems to be going much faster. And I think a lot about how I don't have much time. The way I saw time as a young person, it's really changing and I'm really seeing my life and like, how do I want to use this time?

It's really limited. The expiration date is coming closer and closer every day. And we never know, right? It could be today. There's no guarantees. This life is so precious and people can just exit so quickly in such kind of surprising ways. A friend of ours fell down the stairs and had a very serious head injury and she may never recover from it, just from falling down the stairs. And that can happen to any of us. I'm not trying to scare anybody, but just this is reality.

Our days here are very numbered and our lives are super fragile, however much we try to convince ourselves that we're invincible. And so, yeah, this calligraphy is like, live life to the fullest while you can. Get to know the people in your life now. Love them as much as you can. Love yourself. Get to know yourself. Cultivate your mind and heart and don't wait. That point you made about time accelerating, I'm in my mid-fifties and I feel that. I don't know who said it. There was a female writer who said something, I believe in her eighties, that to the effect of when you reach my age, it feels like breakfast arrives every 15 minutes.

It's really true. I hear it all the time, Dan, I know I should meditate, but I'm too busy and I get it. Many of us feel time starved, which is why over on my meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, we now have a whole batch of super short meditations. I'm talking three to five minutes. These new meditations are from this amazing teacher, Devon Haase, who you may have heard of. She wrote a great book called How to Not Be a Hot Mess. These meditations are on self-compassion, on learning to pause, on getting back in touch with your body.

These are things you can do right in the little cracks in your day. So you get a little dose of mindfulness and then you can keep it moving from there. Check out the 10% with Dan Harris app wherever you get your apps, or you can get it at danharris.com. We'll be right back after this. Most of us can remember being about 15 and feeling completely invisible or worse, extremely visible, but for the wrong reasons. I remember one year when I was a teenager, I had a pimple in the crevice of my nose for the entire year.

I didn't like that. Either way, even if we have painful memories of that age, most of us tend to soften it in memory and it was actually harder than we remember it now. That is the territory of Carrie, streaming October 7th on Prime Video, the first ever television adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, eight episodes from Mike Flanagan with Stephen King as an executive producer. Flanagan had described this show as a tragedy. It's about a girl who doesn't feel seen by anyone and about how small everyday acts of unkindness compound into something nobody meant to cause, which happens now at a speed and scale that would have been unimaginable not long ago.

What I really appreciate about the show is that the show takes Carrie seriously as a person rather than as some sort of symbol. And the season keeps circling around one major question. Are you watching the making of a hero, a villain, or something more complicated than either of those options? Carrie is streaming October 7th only on Prime Video. I don't want to overlook the fact, though, that waking up is not all rainbow-barfing unicorns. Being awake also means you're going to experience the sadness of a friend falling down and perhaps damaging his or her brain.

You're going to experience the pain of illness. You're going to experience all sorts of physical discomfort and on and on. Yeah, that is a, you know, as a young person first coming across Tai and the retreat and then hearing this, it's like, you know, what's the big deal? But it actually woke me up to realize some of the things that we chase for and consider are happiness. I grew up in Los Angeles and a culture that is like always trying to achieve, you know, as an architect, there's very, there's a lot of things, goals that I want.

And so I think this, when I first came across this, I first did not like it, but then I realized the powerful truth of it, that actually, you know, being alive and that just such simple awareness, like it woke me up. And it's because there was also a shadow side to this phrase, breathe your life, meaning, you know, you are going to die. So that combination of awareness, that life is so precious and why are you running after these things? So it is a training to actually come back to these things that are right in front of your face, that you have good lungs, your eyes are in good condition.

As a young person coming across this and cultivating this awareness of the simple, and I remember visualizing sometime and seeing myself in the hospital bed with tubes in my nose, because I've seen this with my dad, with sick people that we visit in the hospital. So I know that breathing for them is so precious. So it is an exercise, it is a training to actually feel this truth rather than just say, oh, I agree, I don't agree. But breathe your life is a reminder for us to cultivate that.

It's like that simple awareness that right now you are alive. Eventually you will be in the hospital, just like your loved ones are, your friends and so on. And breathing will be like, it will be so precious that you can take a breath on your own and so on. And this for me, like it's so tight. Our teacher, you know, and they measured his breath while he was sick in the hospital and with this finger thing. And it was like the oxygen. So he's been training his whole life, breathing deeply.

It was almost 99 percent. And they measured ours, all the attendance and we're like in our like low 90s and 86. And here is, you know, our teacher is sick in the bed and he's like almost 100 percent. So it's very interesting. And I keep that in mind now to actually breathe deeply. And I think, you know, I think physiology has shown that, you know, the breathing helps the aliveness in your, you know, your brain, your life and so on, your positivity as well. So it's not like just a philosophical or religious thing, but it's, you know, breath, spirit.

They're all related. Breathe your life. It's pretty basic, but also massively important and worth being reminded of quite frequently. OK, so that's that's phrase number one in this top 10 list. Let's move to phrase number two, brother Phap Duong. I'm going to stay with you for this one. And here's the phrase. The present moment is the only moment available to us. Please say more. You know, our whole practice is to stay in the present moment because I think our culture, my education is so it's trained us to always try to like run after the future.

So this is a kind of sickness of our culture and our education running and thinking that our happiness is in the future. So the present moment is really precious. And here the present moment includes also the past and the future, how you take care of healing of your past as well as your purpose is how you take care of your present moment. And this is so beautiful. And I've seen and I've experienced this myself practicing because we're so worried about what the future is. And then some of us still carry the past and it's heavy.

But I feel like if we take care of the present moment, like whatever you need to do and you're fully present, insight comes about my past. And so I've had realizations and changed my past or changed the way I look at my past by being fully in the present moment. It includes the three times, the future, the past and the present. So for me, that is a kind of way of dealing and fully kind of in the present moment, you can actually find new futures. Because, for instance, like what I used to think it was the direction of my life running to be a famous architect by taking care of, you know, and I sacrifice a lot of myself and my heart, my caring, my, you know, communal energy, these things I sacrifice because it was competitive and I wanted something in the future.

And the practice helped me to come back to the present moment, take care of myself. And these kind of simple act redirected my aim towards my future. I don't know. So in a way, when you take care of the present moment, it changes the future. Your aspiration, what you want, and it clarifies and it hones in and it makes the happiness not in achieving it, but as a direction in the present moment. So this is my experience, how this teaching of taking care of the present moment has helped me heal my past.

So I don't change the past, but I change the way I look at what happened to me during the war with my family, what happened to me, my relationship to my dad. So the way I look at it changes. So in a way, changing the past because it's now healing and it's more accepting of my father, accepting of the trauma of being refugee and being discriminated. And so now I don't blame. It's just, you know, it's just I used to be very angry at those things that happened.

And now I see that all those conditions actually make who I am now in the present moment. And I cherish that. So for me, that's what the phrase teaches me and what has helped me kind of redirect a little bit and say, you know, I'm not running anymore. And I also know that there's stuff in the past with me for me to heal. So this is in the present moment. So it's kind of like an anchor. And you know, when you you've lost it is when you're like carried away and you're you know, trying to achieve and you sacrifice the present.

So that's what, you know, that phrase present moment is the only one. He's written that theme many, many different ways. Present moment, wonderful moment, present moment. This is the only moment. So it takes, you know, many versions of that. It's funny for me when we we talk about the present moment, because it is like the the spiritual cliche. Therefore, when you hear, you know, exhortations to be in the moment, it's easy to kind of ignore them. And I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I've been experiencing very uncomfortable uptick in anxiety personally.

And what is anxiety if not, you know, pulling you into fretful projections about the future? And I find that just remembering to wake up, be with my life as it is right now, coexist with the discomfort of anxiety, the physical sensations that that have come along with it, but but can be experienced in the present moment. I find that this this idea that is often rendered as a cliche can be very powerful as a way to make life better, even in difficult times. So I say all that, Kyra Jewell, just to get your thoughts on anything Brother Fabian said or anything I just said or just on the phrase generally.

You know, I think when things are difficult, it can be hard to remember that there are useful things in this moment when it's hard, when we feel anxiety, when we feel stress. And it's wonderful to hear, you know, your practice of, yeah, sort of turning toward that. And I would really say that, you know, we can only do that in the present moment, like we can't take care of ourselves outside of the present moment. Whether it's, you know, beauty and joy that's arising, whether it's pain or, you know, suffering that's arising, the present moment is the only moment where we can handle that, right?

We can try to get out of that, escaping to the past, escaping to the future, drowning ourselves in the present with, you know, with some kind of, you know, distraction. But the only place we can meet ourselves and really take care of ourselves and really be free from these things that haunt us or are so hard to experience, that is another way to say the present moment is the only moment. But it's only by, you know, stopping and turning towards what's so challenging that we can become free of it.

If we try to get away from it, we might do that temporarily, but it will often just make that experience, you know, more intense, harder in the end. So, it's like, you know, the present moment is the only moment. It's like, how can we make peace with whatever's happening? Because if we can do that, a whole range of experience will open up for us where we only see two dimensions. If we can really turn towards this moment in all of its horror, in all of its, you know, surprise, whatever, the three, four, five dimensionality will manifest to us and we can see it.

We can experience it in a different way. I just had an experience this past weekend where I just was, you know, I'm a pretty, I don't know, upbeat person. I don't have a lot of down moods, but I did. I just couldn't shake it this one morning. I, you know, some different things had happened and I was just kind of feeling low and I turned to my partner and I'm like, I'm just in this place. He just, good, let's talk about it. Just be in it.

Don't, you know, like, there's nothing wrong with this. You know, it was such a helpful reflection because in my mind, I'm like, what's wrong? I'm not usually, I don't usually feel this way where I feel kind of like I just can't, you know, move through something difficult. And we just talked about it and we talked about whatever the things that might be that was coming up and, you know, the conditions were right. We had the space, we had the time, we, you know, and just doing that, it passed, you know, like I gave it space, I gave it time.

I honored that and I explored it. I was curious about it and something shifted in doing that. So, there's so many unexpected and hidden gifts in these difficult times that if we can hang out in the present moment, you know, it gives them a chance to show us their other sides. It's so interesting because I don't have as much meditation experience as either of you, but I've got, you know, some and yet when I'm in a moment of depression or anxiety, the last thing I want to do is feel it.

Like, I want to check my phone, eat something, distract myself in some way, go chase one of our cats, whatever, anything to not feel the thing. And yet, feeling the thing is the way out. It's the way to suffer less. Just express our whole culture, which is this distract ourselves with consumption so we don't have to deal with the present moment. Yeah, it's actually the great medicine for our times, considering the digitizing of all our lives, where we're easily doing something else rather than being in the present moment.

I mean, I see it so often at the airport. I love to play this game, to go there, to see someone who's really at the airport and present. It's very hard. It's like rare species, just have someone sit there and just like not doing something to catch up or like whatever work. So I go to the airport and I sit there and I play this game. That's how I stay in the present moment because it's so easy to catch up on my email, get around my laptop or read a book.

But it's just like, you know, so anyway, it's my medicine to actually go to the airport and I have like a two hour window and I'm sitting there and I have this itch to catch up, to do email, to like catch up on the news or do something. And I was like, okay, because I remember when I did that, I was reading a book and Ty came over and he like with his two finger closed the book and say, go and join your brothers and sister.

And they're all on the ground sitting having tea. And I was like, no, but it's like, in my mind I was like, this book is so good, Ty. And Ty closed it with his two finger, but the way he did it, it never left me. So now when I'm at the airport, I'm so like aware that my teacher is gonna close the book on me. Because you know, we're so easily tempted to be doing something else. And it might be even the best thing, which is like, oh, I'm gonna catch up on this.

I gotta write this email from someone. Anyway, that is the culture at the airport. I don't know if you know this, but like it's- I have. I have, I've been at the airport a lot recently because I've been flying a lot. And the next time I'm at the airport, I'm gonna take this on as a practice. Sorry, I hope it doesn't make me simpler though. Not long ago, my wife had an interior design dilemma. She's been researching a book for a while. And in order to do the research, she's been ordering a lot of books that she is then reading.

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I just wanna add one other piece to this because I remember I asked Ty this question when the first summer I spent at Plum Village, I was like, but how do you plan for the future? I understand being in the present moment, we all have to plan for the future. And so I remember I wrote a note to him and I get this question so often from people that I just wanted to share his response, which has really held true for me all this time was he was like, it's very possible to plan for the future while being in the present.

You don't have to sacrifice the present in order to plan for the future. You can know I'm planning for the future right now and you can still feel your body, you can still feel your breathing. You can still, if you start to plan and you start to feel anxious, that's what happens to me. I look at my calendar, I'm like, oh my gosh, but this is happening, but I have to do that. Oh, I didn't realize I double booked or whatever. And then you get anxious.

Being part of, being in the present moment as the only moment is knowing that's happening. Coming back, feeling the body, okay, I can handle this. This is gonna be okay. I might need to write an apology to someone or whatever, but so you can be taking care of the future even as you are grounded in the present and you notice what's happening to your mind as you start to plan and you support yourself to do it. Yeah, I love that. Cara Jewel, let me stay with you because I wanna move on to the third phrase.

And I'm just gonna say right now, we're not getting through top 10 phrase, we're just not. This is, we're just two, we're three chatterboxes and this is not gonna happen. So we'll get through as many as we get through. There's a moment of wonderful hope. Yes. The conceit of the top 10 list has now officially been abandoned and let's just enjoy the freedom of that. Okay, so the third phrase is, I have arrived, I am home. So Cara Jewel, what does this mean to you? Ty has said if he were to condense all of his teachings or summarize all of his teachings of 80 years because he became a monk at 16 or almost that many decades, it would be this one sentence, I have arrived, I am home.

And for me, it really means there's nowhere else that we need to be, this is it. Like we are, wherever we are in the here and the now, we can call it our home. We can come home to ourselves. We can arrive fully in this moment. And sometimes I think about it as like calling back all the various parts of myself because sometimes we can, one part of ourselves is over there thinking about that or holding that concern. One part of ourselves is over there in the past or future or worrying about that situation or thinking about that person.

But so I have arrived is like calling all of them back to just be right here. And then when we have fully arrived, like then we can actually engage with something or someone, right? Like I mentor people and sometimes we get on Zoom and they're like, oh, I just came from a meeting or I just did it. I'm like, okay, let's take a few minutes in silence before we start our session. And invariably when we do that, after even just two minutes, three minutes, they're like, oh, I needed that, right?

So it's this acknowledgement that we sometimes can be very dispersed. And so I have arrived as calling ourselves back to this moment. And I would often say the address of our true home is the here and the now. That is the address. That's where we know we can find ourselves. If we put the GPS to help us figure it out, it's here and now, like no other place, no other time. So I come back and I touch that. I actually have everything I need right in this moment.

I can be at peace with things just as they are, realizing I can take a breath. I can take a step. I can feel my body. I can notice what's happening in my mind. And I can be 100% here. Thay would often tell us, he often taught this teaching when we were about to do walking meditation, because so often when we walk, we walk in order to get somewhere. We don't walk just to be in each step. And so he would invite us to practice this as we would walk, that we would breathe in and take one step and say, I have arrived.

Breathe out, take a step and say, I am home. And really come home. I remember he put stickers in our shoes. He gave us stickers once to put in our shoes that said 100% so that when we put our shoes on after we come out of the meditation hall, we say, I'm gonna walk with 100% of my being, of my attention. And that's part of I am home, right? I have arrived in every step. It's I'm 100% here. I'm not dispersed. I'm not, you know. I mean, it's okay too if we're 20% here.

We realize, okay, I'm only 20% here. And so we walk a few more steps, maybe we're 30% here. And then we slowly, slowly over time, we become more and more and more percent of ourselves is really at home. And when we get that feeling of being arrived, being at home, there's nothing like it. You know, nothing compares to that feeling. No ice cream or whatever else we think is so pleasurable or so, you know, we gotta have it. Nothing is as good as feeling like we are home right here, right now, that we don't need anything else.

We don't need to become anything else. We don't need to have anything more in our bank account. We don't need to, you know, have this or that status symbol. We really are perfectly content to be just as we are. As I'm listening to you speak, I'm having a memory of many years ago, I went on a meditation retreat and I did a very dumb thing, which is I let a camera crew come with me because we were filming it for content for my meditation app, which is like typical move of like double dipping always, you know, being maximally productive.

I'm gonna do a retreat, but it's gonna be content. And the first couple of days, the cameraman was really bothering me. And plus the first few days of a retreat are horrible anyway but by day seven or eight of this nine day thing, I really did arrive. And there's, I saw a video the other day cause we're finally starting to use the video from it where I'm just standing outside, kind of gazing up, eyes closed, but like my head kind of slightly tilted upward with the rays of sun hitting my face.

And I look so stupid, but I am really happy. Like I am truly at home in the universe as cliched as that sounds. And you're right. Like I, my lizard brain is telling me that true pleasure will come from finishing that next thing on my to-do list, going to a meal, watching a movie, whatever it is, like the next party I've got going on that's on my calendar. But actually the deepest happiness I've ever experienced is when all of that falls away and I'm just right here.

It's so embarrassing that the truest things in the world are also annoying cliches. And so hard. I just want to acknowledge it. It's so, I can say this and I know it. And yet so often I will choose the movie or getting one more thing done when I could do that. I mean, the thing is is that it can take a while to get there and that's where it's hard to sometimes put in the time. It's kind of like why these calligraphies are, they're like so essence, so simple, but like so hard as well.

And that's basically what makes a good calligraphy or what makes a good like condensed teaching of that teacher. Because it's like, it's so easy and you're like, oh, come on, oh yeah, I get it. But it's so powerful. And so this phrase, it's my anchor. So it's always been my anchor. And ever since I became into this practice and tradition, it's like anytime I feel flustered, it is what I come back to. And it's saved me so many times. And I swear it works all the time.

And you just stick with it for like, whatever, however many minutes. And you just feel like, ah, you have such a much more space. But I wanted to share with you like on this phrase, I've always contemplated and I wanna go into the brain of Tai when he actually formulated this, when he was a refugee or exiled from his country. And all his students were being killed and persecuted in Vietnam. And the Vietnamese people, our people are being like bombed on. And he's here exiled from doing something about it.

And you can feel that pain of wanting to go back. And then later on, finally realizing and accepting that. And now I just think of the historical moment or that surrounded Tai that actually squeeze this phrase out. That is so like right on. But I does have a historical sense to it that he longed to go back. He didn't choose to be out here in the West. It was like forced on him and a lot of Vietnamese people. So I think that was a teaching in the historical context to a culture of the Vietnamese people who had to take refuge outside of the country because of a war and destruction.

So I think for me as a refugee and Vietnamese, being outside of my own culture to come home and what is my real culture? What is my real authenticity? And it's so beautiful. And it's helped me come to terms with my kind of bi-culture and like belonging. So anyway, addresses a lot of what's happening with people and identity and where we belong. So arriving at home is such a good medicine. And I feel that in Tai, it came because of this wanting to help his country and his fellow people.

And then he finally accepted it. I was like, okay, no need to go back to Vietnam. So you transcend. the notion of where is your real home, you know, it's where you love and accepting of yourself. I like to put it in that perspective because it's happening, you know, right now in the world, like a lot of refugees and a lot of, uh, with the Palestinians and so on and, and with the Jewish people, right? So it is a great, beautiful comment, we don't, you know, uh, uh, yeah.

So yeah, for me to add that point in there, the history of our teacher and his experience and with many people who are running and refugees and so on. So it's, uh, to find that healing and that will connect you with beyond just your culture and your, you know, cultural identity and your nation and whatever. I think it is a beautiful key, I think, for the unifying our human family rather than identifying, you know, home as a culture or a nation or an ideology. And that phrase has that for me, not just from Buddhism, but a time of war in Vietnam.

Yeah, I appreciate the context. It's really helpful. Can I say one more thing? Cause it was so beautiful what you just said, brother, about, um, where our true home really is. I just want to add, when you do this practice deeply, you become a home for other people too. Cause Ty really was a home for so many people. He, he showed so many people how to find their true home. And he was also part of that home. And he, he, because he was able to take such refuge in himself.

He showed so many people, like you said, brother, who, who may have been refugees or, you know, so many people of color in this country who don't feel at home. There's this deep, deep teaching that we, all of us can find home and, and we can take refuge in ourselves. And it's not about, I mean, yes, the world outside needs to be, and injustices need to be addressed, but the more we can find that deep peace in ourselves, the better we can address those injustices. Okay.

Phrase number four, brother Fabian, let me, let me come to you for this. This phrase is very short, three words. This is it. What does that mean? This is it. You know, we were prevented from using that for a tour because Michael Jackson rewrited it. So every time I hear it, it's just like, it reminds me of this corporate culture. But also, you know, humorously, of course, you know, but yeah, this is it. It's so powerful, you know, three words and, you know, you know, people use it in the song and all that.

But for me, when I hear Tai share it, it's kind of like a whack, you know, and in the face a little bit, because, you know, we, sometimes we don't want to accept the present moment or like our situation and what's happening to this country, you know. And actually, this is it teaches us to really come back to what is happening within us and accept it first. This is it. So for me, that's how I, when I hear Tai and when I come to this phrase, and it's helped me to really not, because so many of us, we want to like get rid of something that we don't want.

So for me, it's something to do with not denying what is happening. Like, you know, I still get angry and I beat myself up for it, you know, and it's, you know, for us, for me to really accept myself. Well, this is, this is it. This is who I am right now. And this is, so in accepting that, it gives me a more, like more warmth to, you know, really look into it and then, and actually go apologize, you know. So for me, yeah, I used to actually, my MO before coming into this practice is actually not accepting things.

And so for me, this is it. It's a reminder that, you know, to accept the suffering and to accept the happiness. Acceptance is another one of these spiritual terms that gets thrown around a lot. I think where people get confused and maybe even frustrated is how do you draw the line between accepting things as they are, not being at war with reality and being passive or a doormat or a palooka on the other hand? Yeah, it's just the first step. It's not like, you know, and then the second step is to look into it.

And for me, not accepting it, I would go around denying it or don't want to ignore it or delay it or don't want to, you know, it's like I have that a habit. So for me, it's not accepting that it's like not changing and not acting and do anything. But if I don't accept it, I still am caught in it. And like, especially denial, but it could be emotional. Like I'm really, you know, I'm like, the energy's hot. And if I don't really, you know, so it helped me to remind me to like, calm down and come to terms with it, look into it.

And so there, you know, it's not passive. So this is it. And so, you know, you can repeat it. And then it helps you stop. And then I look into it. So it's helped me a lot with dealing with my own kind of like, not accepting myself, because I still have a lot of weaknesses, still a lot of things to transform. So for me, this phrase reminds me of that every time I see or I hear Thay talk about it. And so it reminds me that, you know, there are other aspects to me, and there are other aspects to life as well, not just the difficulties, there's also the wonder, and those things can coexist.

So this thing wakes me up to that. It helps me, yeah, to deal with it more. I give it a little distance. And then I come back to it. Kaira Jewell, I imagine this is a question you get from your students all the time as well. Like, what does acceptance really mean? I think what Brother Phap Duong is saying is, and I'd be curious for your take on this is, yeah, acceptance is the first step. But you can't take effective action from a position or a standpoint of denial.

So you got to start where you are. Absolutely. And, you know, to me, it's all about how do we come to the situation? If we come to it with a big block, or pushing it away, or judging it, or tensing against it, you know, just like when you have pain in your body, if you tense against that pain, it's going to make it worse. But if you can open to that pain, if you can breathe into that pain, if you can, you know, you have to have a resourced mind to get curious about it.

But if you can soften around it, if you can even let it expand and take up more space, all of those things will have a very different effect on the pain than doubling down and clenching, you know, guarding against it. And so, you know, I have back issues, and I've been learning also with an app called Hinge Health. It's like a physical therapy app that gives you exercises, but it has these really helpful articles that help you understand pain as well, and just how to heal yourself when you've had an injury.

And they, you know, based on medical research, it says, you know, you have a perception of your pain that's not always accurate, right? That you will guard against doing things, but actually, if you, you know, having a little bit of discomfort or some discomfort as you heal is normal. So, if you prevent yourself from doing those things, you won't heal. So, you know, it's like, how do we approach pain? How do we approach difficulty challenge? If we can approach it with this willingness to have some bitterness in our lives, like Thay would often teach about this vegetable, bitter melon, that's an Asian vegetable.

It looks really cool. It has all these knobs on it. It's bright green, but it's very bitter, but it's good for your heart. It's really good for you. And so, if we're willing to, you know, take in the bitterness, there can be, you know, some real benefits. So, it's our attitude to that. And anytime we can, you know, open rather than shut down, that can really help the situation or soften rather than tense up. And just one other thing about surrendering to things as they are is different from giving up, that when we surrender to things as they are, we can work with them.

We still have access to our full capacity. If we talk about it in terms of brain science, you know, surrendering means we still have our executive function available. Giving up, we are in our lizard brain. We're in collapse mode. We're in, you know, we don't see our agency. So, when we surrender, we are accepting the way things are, but we still see that we have choices. We have, you know, this amazing, you know, human mind that can, you know, work with the hardest of circumstances and still have some measure of freedom.

If we think of, you know, all of our heroes, like the Tibetan monks and nuns who were in Chinese gulags or Nelson Mandela in jail for so many years or Elie Wessel in the concentration camps, right? Like, how did they keep their humanity? How did they come out of those experiences more whole? It was because they understood surrender, the power of just accepting this is it. These are my circumstances. I still have a choice of where I put my mind, of how I use my attention.

I can't change the circumstances, but I can allow this really difficult situation to ripen me in some way, to mature me in some way. Can I just share this phrase, this practice that's helped me a lot? It brought me a lot of pain in the last six months, a year with what's happening in the Middle East with the Palestinians and now Iran. And I feel like, you know, having come from a war and seeing this still going on, this kind of approach and this kind of like dehumanizing and demonizing another group of people again.

You know, Vietnamese people, we were demonized as well. And so to see this, there's a part of me that's just so angry. And so actually this accepting that, you know, are the people, our human family, and this is where we are. And it's helped me really transfer this energy, first accepting that, that there's part of, you know, relatives in our family. And so it's helped me to really accept them first and not to see and do the same as they're doing to others and say that they are like, you know, to blame to other than them, you know, as not myself, but to accept that they are part of our human family as well.

And it really helped me a lot to sit with that and to, and I did this for like weeks to really accept this. And then now it's feeling me to direct my energy and where do I want to focus it? And so for me, this is a way I've dealt with it in terms of acceptance. First accepting this is it. This is what we got. This is the culture that we produce these kinds of people and education. These are not dumb people. They're very smart, you know, and how did this happen?

You know, that we are doing this to children and schools and using these bombs and guns and military things, you know, and yeah, it just pained me from that. And, but like, you know, I had to accept it first. So this is a, been a very healing thing. And now, you know, I think I've moved from that. Now I'm very focused in my energy and where I want to put my mind. Yeah. I mean, I could completely understand. Well, I can't actually understand, but I can imagine how provocative it is for you, given the history of your family, your own personal history, the history of your people to then see it happening to other peoples around the world.

Yeah. And the fact is, if you can, even after a period of struggle, if you can move to acceptance and really heightened extreme circumstances, such as the ones you've described, well, then I think I can, in the face of my garden variety anxiety or little hiccups and an otherwise, massively privileged life. Yeah, it's doable for me. It's doable for anybody listening or watching. One thing in the spirit of This Is It, I think one thing that we will need to accept is that we set out to talk about 10 of your teachers' phrases, and we got through four.

But the four we did cover were awesome, both the phrases themselves and your utterances about them. So before I let you go, let me just ask each of you to please promote anything you're working on these days that you want people to know about. Kaira Jewell, I'll start with you. Anything you got cooking that people should go check out? Yes, it's really at the beginning stages, but my partner and I were offered a monastery in upstate New York. Our vision is to renovate it as a Buddhist-Christian and Earth-based center for contemplation.

It's just an hour from Blue Cliff Monastery, one of the ones that Tay founded. Our organization is the Beloved Community for Engaged Spirituality. So we're right at the very beginning of putting it together, but we hope that it will, in a few years, be able to welcome people, and also we'll have hermitages where people can come and do solo, you know, sort of silent retreats. But we'll be having a regular practice schedule that people can also join in, and there'll be a chapel and a meditation hall.

So both faiths will be coming together. And more than just those two faiths, it'll be a place where really we're looking at how to become mature spiritual practitioners that can respond to the needs of this very suffering world that is, you know, in some kind of collapse. So what are the kind of spiritual wisdoms that we need in order to be responsive in these times? That sounds extraordinary. Best of luck. Thank you. Because it sounds like something that we need right now. And Brother Phap Duong, on your side, anything you're putting out into the world that we should be aware of?

Yeah, like I was saying, directing my energy towards education. This fall, we'll be opening our first time of the school, Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing, and to really look at education and purpose of education. So create an environment where children are loved, cared for like a spiritual family that includes their parents. So it's community. So families come and live. We're opening K-4 this time, and we want to go to K-8, and then eventually K-12. We already have many examples from the retreats that we have, family retreats, and many young people from that system have come back, and they brought their girlfriend, their wives, their husband, and see how beautiful they are.

And they know they have a compass, a moral compass, and what is good. So just one week, a year already, can you imagine like a school year? So that is, for me, how we need to change the structure of society and education as well. So I think that that is kind of like at the root of what's happening in the world. Brother Phap Duong, Kyra Julingo, thank you both for the incredible work you do in the world and for spending some time with me and us.

Thank you, Ben. Always a pleasure. Thank you very much for listening to the show. I really appreciate it. And if you enjoy listening to the show, if you get anything out of it, please do me a solid. Leave a rating or a review. I know every podcast host asks for this, but it really makes a difference. It helps boost the visibility of this show. We view this show as a mission to help people become nodes of sanity and an insane world. And so by taking a minute and giving the show a rating or a review, you're really helping us out and helping us achieve our mission.

Thank you again. And now on to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart, and Hayden Broome. Post-production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative. And Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces rubric is the security and AI operations company built for what happens after an attack hits. Not just the moment before AI has turned the threat landscape into quicksand moving too fast for any human to fully predict.

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