Thich Nhat Hanh

The Thirteen Mindfulness Trainings
The Thirteen Mindfulness Trainings form the moral guidelines to develop harmony in any simple community. Every moment of our lives gives us the chance to put them into practice.

Sitting and guided meditation
Before we begin our sitting meditation it is essential that we prepare ourselves and the room in which we sit. The room should be clean and very beautiful. And for us is often good to have a period of silence before starting.

Three Touchings of the Earth
The connection with our spiritual roots, the tribe, the Ayllu, the family, the big family of seekers and ayahuasqueros is something which is strongly emphasised in the practice and in ceremony.

The Mindfulness Bell
The bell is a central feature of our mindfulness practice. It acts like a bodhisattva helping us to come back to the present moment and concentrate our awareness.

Teachings
Our own direct experience with Ayahuasca is our best teacher. However, reading, writing, discussing with others and our own practice are the best means of understanding our own experience clearly and in depth.

Eating in mindfulness
Before eating the evening meal, everyone can sit around the table, and recite a gatha.

The Four Immeasurable Minds
Love, compassion, joy and equanimity are the very nature of an enlightened person. They are the four aspects of true love within ourselves and within everyone and everything.

The Heart of the Prajñaparamita
The Heart Sutra is said to contain the core of the teaching of the Prajñaparamita and hence is commonly known as The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom or Perfect Understanding, as Thây prefers to say. It is one of the most celebrated of all Buddhist texts and is chanted by many schools of Buddhism as part of the daily practice.

Embracing our pain in the afternoon of the tsunami
Our planet Earth is suffering, and this tsunami is the cry of the earth. We have to look at suffering as a collective matter, understanding karma and rebirth in the light of no-self.

Equanimity meditation
First we take someone we like to be the object of our meditation; then, successively, someone neutral to us, someone we love, and someone we dislike very much.

Feelings and perceptions
A so-called neutral feeling can become very pleasant, it depends on our way of looking and our capacity of transforming neutral feelings into pleasant feelings. In order to understand someth­ing, you have to be one with that something.

Love meditation
Mindfulness of anger. One energy embraces the other. Don't be angry at your anger. Don't try to chase it away or suppress it. Anger is just an energy, and all energies can be transformed. Your suffering has its roots in your store con­sciousness, in seeds that are already there, the other person is only a secondary cause and the other person is also suffering.

Growing the seeds of happiness
Joy meditation: The images of the flower, the mountain, the water and the space will help you to concentrate better and to feel fresh, stable, calm and free.

Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing (Anapanasati Sutra)
"Observation meditation" is a lucid awareness of what is going on in the Four Establishments: body, feelings, mind, and all dharmas. When we observe something, we are that thing. "Non-duality" is the keyword.

The better way to catch a snake (Snake Sutra)
If you do not practice the Dharma cor­rectly, you may come to understand it as the opposite of what was intended and can cause harm to ourselves and others.

The diamond that cuts through illusion (Diamond Sutra)
You look at and touch every­thing as an experience, not as a notion. Because of our tendency to use notions and concepts to grasp reality, we cannot touch reality as it is. Grasping reality with concepts and notions is like catching space with a net.

Thich Nhat Hanh - Ravij Mehrotra
The many insights of 'interbeing' is seeing and understanding the nature of interbeing and the connection between all things. When we see all beings as simply one rather than many, the need to be angry or to punish vanishes and all that exists at that point is peace.

Three Dharma Seals
The first Dharma Seal is impermanence. Nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments. The second Dharma Seal is non-self. Impermanence is from the point of view of time; non-self is from the point of view of space. The third Dharma Seal is nirvana, which means "ex­tinction," the extinction of afflictions and notions.

Dealing with our anger
Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something, just as anger is always anger at something. When you drink a glass of water and are aware that you are drinking a glass of wa ter, that is mindfulness of drinking water. In this case, we produce mindfulness of anger.

Teachings in Spanish