In 2011, on a 21 day retreat in Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hahn (Thay) encouraged his students to go out and share with others in our communities and workplaces.

 

He said, “We don’t need the word Buddha and we don’t need the word Buddhism. We need to teach people how to be happy.”

 

This was his way of making his zen practice meaningful to any person who wanted to experience happiness and peace.

 

Through Thay’s way of being, I was able to learn what it means to embody a state of peace. After decades of living with anxiety, I learned to trust that I too could handle this fundamentally ambiguous experience that is life, and even to sense that there is something within the fabric of reality that is beloved.

 

Thay’s vision inspired me to teach mindfulness in various secular and outreach organisations across Scotland and England. I have truly loved those moments when I have seen others come into rest and come alive from the still center of their own being.

 

All my life I’ve valued two things with equal intensity: the value of silence and the power of stories. I’ve always been a teacher in one form or another. Firstly of literature (the stories we tell each other). Then psychology (the stories we tell ourselves). And, for the last decade or so, mindfulness and meditation (the ways that we drop story and inhabit stillness).

 

I've been practicing meditation for over 20 years and it's informed my whole life. This life of practice has been fed by many traditions and teachers; Tibetan monks and nuns, zen teachers, Christian mystics, Hindus, artists and ecologists. I don’t really know where I sit in the various categories between ‘secular’ and the names of these traditions. For me, there is a living practice that arises anywhere there is a direct encounter with life itself, with its intelligence, its expressiveness and its ineffability. And alongside this, there are ways of identifying less and less with the provisional story of self and letting go more and more to the wider intelligence of that living current.

 

I no longer feel that I have anything particular to ‘teach’. But I continue to be moved to inhabit spaces of awareness with others - so that we might encounter one another from this place and, together, to grow in insight.

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