Thich Nhat Hanh on learn how to make the significant ceremony of “Starting Anew” a part of your life — together with his distinctive follow of mindfulness, “hugging meditation.”
Starting Anew is to not say sorry. Starting Anew is to vary your thoughts and coronary heart, to rework the ignorance that led to mistaken actions of physique, speech, and thoughts, and that will help you domesticate your thoughts of affection. Your disgrace and guilt will disappear, and you’ll start to expertise the enjoyment of being alive. All wrongdoings come up within the thoughts. It’s by the thoughts that wrongdoings can disappear.
At Plum Village, we follow a ceremony of Starting Anew each week. Everybody sits in a circle with a vase of contemporary flowers within the heart, and we observe our respiratory as we await the facilitator to start.
Your disgrace and guilt will disappear, and you’ll start to expertise the enjoyment of being alive. All wrongdoings come up within the thoughts. It’s by the thoughts that wrongdoings can disappear.
The ceremony has three components: flower watering, expressing regrets, and expressing hurts and difficulties. This follow can stop emotions of harm from build up over the weeks and helps make the scenario secure for everybody locally.
We start with flower watering. When somebody is able to converse, she joins her palms and the others be part of their palms to point out that she has the fitting to talk. Then she stands, walks slowly to the flower, takes the vase in her arms, and returns to her seat. When she speaks, her phrases replicate the freshness and great thing about the flower that’s in her hand.
Throughout flower watering, every speaker acknowledges the healthful, great qualities of the others. It isn’t flattery; we all the time converse the reality. Everybody has some sturdy factors that may be seen with consciousness. Nobody can interrupt the particular person holding the flower. She is allowed as a lot time as she wants, and everybody else practices deep listening.
When she is completed talking, she stands up and slowly returns the vase to the middle of the room.
Within the second a part of the ceremony, we categorical regrets for something we now have executed to harm others. It doesn’t take multiple inconsiderate phrase to harm somebody. The ceremony of Starting Anew is a chance for us to recall some remorse from earlier within the week and undo it.
Within the third a part of the ceremony, we categorical methods wherein others have harm us. Loving speech is essential. We wish to heal the group, not hurt it. We converse frankly, however we don’t wish to be harmful. Listening meditation is a vital a part of the follow. Once we sit amongst a circle of associates who’re all training deep listening, our speech turns into extra stunning and extra constructive. We by no means blame or argue.
Compassionate listening is essential. We pay attention with the willingness to alleviate the struggling of the opposite particular person, to not decide or argue along with her. We pay attention with all our consideration. Even when we hear one thing that isn’t true, we proceed to pay attention deeply so the opposite particular person can categorical her ache and launch the tensions inside herself. If we reply to her or appropriate her, the follow is not going to bear fruit. We simply pay attention. If we have to inform the opposite person who her notion was not appropriate, we are able to do this a number of days later, privately and calmly. Then, on the subsequent Starting Anew session, she could also be the one who rectifies the error and we is not going to must say something. We shut the ceremony with a tune or by holding arms with everybody within the circle and respiratory for a minute. Typically we finish with hugging meditation.
Hugging meditation is a follow I invented. In 1966, a lady poet took me to the Atlanta Airport after which requested, “Is all of it proper to hug a Buddhist monk?” In my nation, we aren’t used to expressing ourselves that approach, however I believed, “I’m a Zen trainer. It needs to be no downside for me to try this.” So I stated, “Why not?” and she or he hugged me. However I used to be fairly stiff. Whereas on the airplane, I made a decision that if I wished to work with associates within the West, I must be taught the tradition of the West, so I invented hugging meditation.
Hugging meditation is a mix of East and West. In response to the follow, it’s a must to actually hug the particular person you might be hugging. It’s important to make her or him very actual in your arms, not only for the sake of appearances, patting him on the again to faux you might be there, however respiratory consciously and hugging with all of your physique, spirit, and coronary heart. Hugging meditation is a follow of mindfulness. “Inhaling, I do know my expensive one is in my arms, alive. Respiratory out, she is so treasured to me.” In case you breathe deeply like that, holding the particular person you’re keen on, the power of care, love, and mindfulness will penetrate into that particular person and she or he shall be nourished and bloom like a flower.
At a retreat for psychotherapists in Colorado, we practiced hugging meditation, and one retreatant, when he returned dwelling to Philadelphia, hugged his spouse on the airport in a approach he had by no means hugged her earlier than. To be actually there, you solely have to breathe mindfully, and all of a sudden each of you turn out to be actual. It could be probably the greatest moments in your life.
After the Starting Anew ceremony, everybody locally feels gentle and relieved, even when we now have taken solely preliminary steps towards therapeutic. We have now confidence that, having begun, we are able to proceed. This follow dates to the time of the Buddha, when communities of monks and nuns practiced Starting Anew on the eve of each full moon and new moon. I hope you’ll follow Starting Anew in your personal household each week.
From Teachings on Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh. © 1998. Reprinted with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA.