“Be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves….” As he lay dying, the Buddha gave this advice to his beloved disciple Ananda, who was imploring his great teacher for guidance for himself and for his fellow monks. Some versions of this teaching use the word lamp. The word diipa means both island and lamp, Island is the accepted meaning, and the essential meaning is the same. “Those who are islands (or lamps) unto themselves…should investigate to the very heart of things.”
The spoke of being your own refuge. He didn’t mean be cut off from the rest of life. Meditating means unplugging from the thinking mind that endlessly compares ourselves to others. It means turning the attention to our own experience, accepting it as it is so that we might directly experience the cause of sorrow. Even in a life of total seclusion, alone in a cave or a cell or alone on an actual island, couldn’t help but notice the life inside and outside changing, waxing and waning.
Be your own living proof. See that this is the nature of life. See that the truth of suffering does not separate you from others. It unites you. The Buddha didn’t mean be totally self-sufficient, proudly independence above all, beholden to no one. The Buddha (along with all wise beings) understood that our freedom and our power comes as we come to realize that we are part of a greater whole, and that we owe thanks in every direction for this life of ours, inside and outside, up and down, north, south, east, and west, the way Native people give thanks.
By being an island the Buddha meant be grounded, dare to touch the earth of your own living experience in the present moment, not grasping for ideas from outside, from “experts,” but by being willing to experience the living truth. The practice of meditation allows us to settle down and open up. As we learn to relax, we travel from the surface to the depths of our human experience We might feel, for example, how good it is to be alive, and how mysterious. Last night was despair, perhaps, and yet here we are, supported by benevolent forces.
We may realize the true scale of the present. It contains the whole of our lives. “To practice the way of the Buddha means to completely live out this present moment—which is our whole life—here and now,” teaches Zen master Kodo Sawaki Roshi.
In such a moment it can seem as if our ancestors are with us, witnessing life through our eyes. Or we can discover that our sense of isolation is an illusion. We can suddenly realize that we are not blame for all the ills of the world–and become free to truly respond. Beneath all that thinking, those defensive postures, that delusion that clouds the mind, we are responsive creatures. We are kinder than we think. We are more.
The Buddha taught that craving is the root of all suffering. Another way to understand being an island is being still in the midst of that flood of desire and grasping, observing and experiencing craving without reacting. Scientific research shows that mindfulness quiets the part of the mind involved in rumination and obsession. As we learn to be still we let go of stories about who we are that are based on not having what we want and being burdened with what we don’t want.
Being an island means remembering where we are and who we are, that we are living beings on a living earth, under a sun, part of a vast and mysterious web of life. In such moments we see that attention itself is an extraordinary gift and a means of transformation and freedom.
As an experiment, notice how it feels to stop and be still in the midst of the rushing stream of life. Allow yourself to remember to the depth and extent of your life. If you wish, tell about it.
Once a poor miller was summoned to meet with a king. The summons itself must have filled him with terror. Evolutionary biologists tell us that we fear public speaking and other ways of being on the spot because we are all wired to link survival with acceptance by the tribe. And this king was the absolute ruler of the miller’s tribe. He held the power of exile and even of death.
No one knows the official purpose of the meeting. A good guess is that it was about how things were going down at the mill. A king wouldn’t ask a miller to tea or to ask his opinion about foreign affairs. At some point in the conversation, however, he must have asked the poor man about his family. We know this because all subjects were trained never to speak to kings and queens unbidden.
But what an answer! It reverberates through the ages. The poor miller boasted that he had a beautiful daughter who could spin straw into gold. In some versions of the story the miller first spoke of a beautiful daughter with golden hair. Probably, this sparked zero interest. Possibly, the poor miller felt like no one in those cold, royal eyes, and as if his daughter was no one too.
What we know for sure is that the miller spun out, as we say these days. He left the earth of his living, moment-by-moments experience and thought of something that he thought the king would find more fantastic. This is perfectly natural, of course. Our brains are well equipped for flights away from our immediate embodied reality. And our egos and personalities are built to help us survive and be someone special in this world. Imagining, especially in children but not just, can be a way of exploring the world.
When I was a little girl, for example, I used to pretend that was a jungle princess in primordial India, padding around with an invisible panther consort named Striker. Striker was super intelligent and super strong. We both had powers of telepathy and teleportation, which helped us when we were dispatched on various spy missions in the capitals of Europe. In reality, of course, I was an ordinary child playing in a backyard in Northern New York. Yet imagining I was an amalgam of Mowgli and James Bond, helped me run and climb trees and hide behind bushes in a way that helped me play and explore how wonderful it was to be in a body.
But as fun and natural and bolstering as our fantasies can be, they can also take us away from the real magic of being alive on this earth. When we get pulled into an orbit of thought, we can forget the real grandeur and scale of seemingly simple things: breathing, walking, being part of life. We can get so caught up in the fantasy world of thought that we forget how good it is to be alive. We forget who and what we truly love.
We can only imagine how the poor miller felt when he came to his senses and remembered his love for his daughter and how much he valued her life on its own terms. By then the damage was done. She was imprisoned in a dungeon in the royal palace, sentenced to spin straw into gold. I can’t think of her plight without remembering what it was like to sit up at night in college, writing papers. I remember the pressure I felt to spin the straw of my own impressions into gold. I remember layering my papers with learned quotes from far more distinguished people, demonstrating my learning but also something not so good: I left my essence, my native impressions and heart and mind, for a shinier, wittier version. The practice of coming home to the experience of being in this body in this moment, opening up to the life inside and outside, is a way of turning all that acquired gold back into the straw of what I really am.
Sometimes we remember what is really essential and precious. In the wake of a loss, we feel the true size of the presence of a person. In a time of famine or calamity, we remember what really has value. Milling grain, for example, is an ancient human occupation. Even hunter-gatherer societies had millers. I once visited Gandhi’s ashram in the heart of India once. There is a big mill wheel on the porch of his humble dwelling. The great leader and everyone else on the ashram spent time every day turning the wheel, which I couldn’t budge. But I understood the value. Feeding people is inherently finer and even more magical than spinning gold. Just think of how it feels to eat when you are really hungry. It can feel as if life itself is pouring back into you and supporting you. It feels like love.
The miller’s beautiful daughter was thrown into a royal dungeon piled high with straw and given until daybreak to spin it all into something shinier. Most of us know how it feels to believe that our parents and culture need us to be more than we are, faster, smarter, better in every way. How radical it feels to let go for a moment and just be. I gently encourage you to try this. No judgments, no notes to self, no to-do-lists in the mind. Be like the lilies of the fields, as the saying goes. Be straw.
On the first night of my seven-year-old daughter, Alexandra’s, first Buddhist retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh smiled and looked into her eyes as few adults ever look at children. Although he sat very still on a stage, the Vietnamese teacher seemed to bow to her inwardly, offering her his full presence and inviting her to be who she really is.
Alexandra threw her jacket over her head.
“Children look like flowers,” said the man who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., in 1967. His voice was soft and bittersweet. “Their faces look like flowers, their eyes, their ears…”
Surrounded by scores of monks and nuns who had traveled with him from Plum Village, the French monastic community that has been his home since his peace activism caused his exile from Vietnam, he lifted his eyes from the little flower who was huddled, hiding her face, in the front row. Before him sat 1,200 people who had gathered in a vast white tent on the wooded campus of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York. Thay, as he is affectionately known, had convened us for a five-day retreat dedicated to cultivating mindfulness through practices such as sitting meditation, walking, and sharing silent meals.
As the master talked about the “freshness,” or openness and sensitivity of children, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way Alexandra was ducking for cover. He extolled freshness as one of the qualities that each of us possesses in our essence, our Buddha-nature. Alexandra, shrouded in nylon, was reminding me that true freshness isn’t limited to those moments when we feel happily and playfully open. It often means feeling raw and vulnerable. I wondered if it had been a mistake to bring her here, to risk exposing her to the way we really are.
During the retreat, children and adults came together during different parts of the day. In addition to sharing meals and a daily mindfulness walk, the children clustered at the front of the stage for the first twenty minutes of Thay’s dharma talks, which he carefully framed in simple, poetic images that children could remember. I brought Alexandra hoping that contact with Buddhist practice would stimulate her imagination and awaken her own wisdom. I thought she could be inspired by the various techniques Thay described, such as listening to the sound of a bell that can call us back to “our true home.”
“My true home is in Brooklyn,” Alex whispered. She had peeled off her covering and lay stretched out on the floor with her head in my lap, jittering her foot to convey how bored and impatient she was. On the first night, most of the other children nearby were sitting cross-legged, quietly, and listening with what seemed to me preternatural attention. Alexandra was muttering to herself and writhing around on the floor like a big, unhappy baby. I wondered if she had some mild form of autism that had escaped detection.
Seventy-three-year-old Thich Nhat Hanh was sitting directly above me, embodying a mountainlike stability and compassion. A monk on the stage winked at Alexandra, a pretty young nun dimpled up in a fit of silent giggles. The people around me were friendly and relaxed. I felt like a terrible mother to be judging and comparing my daughter in these gentle conditions. It was almost as if the spirit of nonjudgmental acceptance that surrounded me was triggering a perverse reaction, drawing out my darkest, meanest thoughts. I felt like a vampire who had stepped out into the sunlight.
As we made our way back to our little cabin, the power went out all over the Omega campus. And a light turned on inside Alexandra. We stopped on the path, unsure which way to turn. I had left the flashlights behind. Alexandra took charge.
“Let’s go back to the visitor’s office,” she said, leading the way. A kindly man on the Omega staff gave Alexandra a candle and walked us to our cabin.
“You knew just what to do,” I said as I tucked Alexandra into bed. “That was good thinking.”
“I hated to think of you wandering around in the dark,” she said, beaming in the candlelight.
The next day Alexandra asked, “Mommy, is Thich Nhat Hanh a man? Like, does he have a penis?”
Yes, I offered, he was an ordinary man but he was a monk. That meant that he lived for the happiness of others, so he might seem different.
My answer felt vague and wimpy, not as real as the question.
The following day in the dinning hall, I discovered how deeply traveling with your own pint-size Zen master makes you feel aware of yourself, and how apart. The majority of the people there were moving about with a kind of underwater grace, practicing silence. We parents struggled with the task of filling tray and settling children while trying to remember to stop and breath consciously when the mindfulness bell sounded.
Alexandra and I sat at a table in the dining hall facing a table decorated with pumpkins.
“Mommy!”
I whispered to her that we were supposed to try eating silently together.
“This is not my experiment,” Alexandra reminded me. “I don’t want to do it because I have a question.”
“What’s your question, Alexandra?”
“Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?”
“A vegetable.”
“Why are you being so mean? Aren’t you supposed to be happy?”
The interconnection of all phenomena is a constant theme of Thich Nhat Hanh’s. He speaks often of “interbeing,” the actual state of reality that, once recognized, nurtures compassion and empathy. As people ate in silence around us, I remembered an incident that had happened several weeks earlier. Alexandra was going through a phase of pondering how she was related to the first person who ever lived and to all other people.
“Every living being is connected,” I had told her as I was putting her to bed one night. “The whole universe is alive, and what you put out in the world is what you get back. If you put out love and kindness, you tend to get love and kindness in return.”
Alexandra and I had decided to put the little purple bike with training wheels that she had outgrown down on the street for someone to take. She crayoned a sign that read, “Whoever takes this bike, please enjoy it, love Alexandra.”
She had been full of anticipation. The next morning she bolted out of bed and ran to the window.
“Mommy, my bike is gone!” she’d said, as radiant as on Christmas morning. “Somebody took my bike!”
The concept of the web of life was alive and breathing that morning. But by the end of the day, not surprisingly, she had moved past the shimmering magic and was applying the cause-and-effect practicality of a kid.
“So when do I get something back?” she asked.
David Dimmack, a longtime student of Thay’s was the volunteer in charge of the children’s program on the retreat. He taught the kids the “Flower Fresh” song, the theme song of the Community of Mindful Living. At the beginning of a dharma talk one morning, they all got up on the stage together and sang to Thich Nhat Hanh and the rest of the sangha.
“Breathing in, breathing out,” sang Dimmack and the children. “I am blooming like a flower, I am fresh as the dew. I am solid as a mountain, I am firm as the earth. I am free.”
When I stood in the back of the tent, watching the children on stage, it was impossible for me not to compare it Sunday school.
Dimmack had called the songs, “entertainment,” matter-of-factly acknowledging that sometimes teaching just comes down to presenting ideas in a way that gently and gradually makes an impression, like water wearing away rock. At the same time, though, he emphasized that there was a constant creative tension in the children’s program between teaching and allowing, between imposing structure and letting the kids be.
Mark Vette, another student of Thay’s, works as an animal psychologist and lives on a ranch in New Zealand. Vette had the inspired idea of teaching the kids to use dowsing rods made of bent coat hangers and pendulums made of little pieces of wood.
“Here’s the dowsing prayer,” he said to the group of us gathering on a big meadow in the center of campus. “May I let go of the things that are known and embrace the things that are unknown.” After the kids tired of looking for water and chasing each other (“Lead me to a dork!”), many of them settled down to find their place of “inner power.” (The kids liked the word “power” better than “peace.”)
“Pendulums and dowsing rods seemed to be a perfect way to introduce them to their own intuitive sense,” said Vette, a sandy-haired, athletic man who by the end of the week had completely captured my daughter’s heart. “In the bush, these thing work because we really already know where that lost animal is or where north is. And the kids can use it in the same way to learn to meditate, to find their center or their true home.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
One day, during walking meditation, I began to get an inkling of what it is to find my true home. Every day the children, who left the dharma talk after the first twenty or thirty minutes, were invited to meet up with Thich Nhat Hanh and the grown-up students as they flowed out of the dharma hall to walk to the lake. On one beautiful azure day in late October, those of us who were with the children watched Thich Nhat Hanh walking toward us from the dharma tent, leading his multitude: 1,200 tall American dressed in bright Polartec colors following a small figure in brown.
No sooner had Alexandra and several other children joined to walk up front with Thay than she split to scamper off to the top of a leaf-carpeted hill.
“I’m going to roll down this hill!” she shouted to another girl. “Come on!”
It actually awed me that she was so unselfconscious about shattering the silence. Alexandra rolled down the hill, sounding like a bear crashing through a forest.
I dropped my head and trudged along. Suddenly. I noticed Thich Nhat Hanh gliding along, like a mountain on rails, almost next to me. His face looked calm and fresh, while mine ached like a clenched fist. Alex had raced ahead to the water’s edge, where she stood waving and smiling at me. I felt a pang of love for her and really experienced how the voice of my heart was being drowned out by a welter of negative thoughts that seemed to come from somewhere in my brain that didn’t even feel organic—more like a robot, a split-off part of me mechanically repeating bits of old programming.
Aware as I now felt, I was haranguing myself that really good mothers didn’t get swamped by nasty reactions. Good mothers, my mind chided, were capable of unconditional love.
The bell calling for mindfulness sounded. I knelt down in the warm sand. The bell rang again, and a third time. I picked up my head to see an old man’s hand gently stroking a familiar head of thick ash-blond hair. Thich Nhat Hanh and my daughter were sitting side by side. It slowly dawned on me that it was Alexandra who had just rung the bell calling the rest of us back to our true homes. Thay had been inspired to pick Alexandra, the loudest kid there that particular day, to sound, or “invite,” the bell that called everyone to silence.
At that moment the ideal of unconditional love seemed nothing but a brittle concept, a fetter. I felt I finally comprehended what Thich Nhat Hanh meant when he said that acceptance is understanding and understanding is love.
“I was throwing sand and I looked up and he was looking at me,” she explained later. “He was kind of smiling. He waved for me to come over and sit by him. He didn’t say anything he just showed me how to ring the bell.”
Back in Brooklyn, as Alexandra and I slipped back into our daily routines, I wondered from time to time what effect, if any, a week of mindfulness training might have. Then, one night many months later, I was fuming with frustration.
“Breathe, Mommy,” said Alexandra. “Just relax and breathe and return to your true home.”
Tracy Cochran 