Being with Busyness

Welcome

Hello dear friends! We are Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino. We’ve been walking alongside each other on the spiritual path for eighteen years, and we cohost the podcast The Way Out Is In. We’ve written this book together in the spirit of friendship, with a very clear purpose: to offer balm for the modern ailment of busyness that so many of us are experiencing.In this book, we draw on our own life experiences and the collective wisdom of Zen practitioners throughout time. We share practices that have helped shape our own lives, which we hope will offer you practical support at times when you develop that tightening in your body and mind—signs that you are stressed from doing too much and feeling there is too little time.But first, let us introduce ourselves. 

Brother Phap Huu: I’m Brother Phap Huu, the abbot of Plum Village’s Upper Hamlet monastery in southwest France, a position that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is known, asked me to take on at the tender age of twenty-four. As abbot, it is my role to look after the well-being of a hundred monastic and lay residents as well as thousands of visitors each year. I ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of fourteen and was the personal attendant of Thay (which means teacher in Vietnamese) for fifteen years. So, even though I was accustomed to managing responsibilities as Thay’s attendant and later as vice-abbot for three years, you can imagine that when I became the abbot of one of Europe’s largest Buddhist monasteries, I quickly learned what it feels like to be overwhelmed! And yes, despite being well practiced in the art and science of mindfulness, we monastics do also face burnout.

Jo Confino: I’m Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change as a leadership coach and spiritual mentor for activists and leaders in the climate movement, business, and the arts. Like Brother Phap Huu, I’ve had periods of overwhelm, particularly in my forty-year career as a journalist, during which I faced tough deadlines, complex editorial decisions, and difficult ethical choices. I have also known times best characterized by the English phrase “when it rains, it pours,” meaning that difficult situations sometimes follow each other in rapid succession or happen all at once. One moment my life has appeared to be in relative balance, and the next, it has felt like it was falling apart.Thay’s calligraphy “The Way Out Is In” is the subject of our deep contemplation for this book as well as for the podcast series we cocreate and cohost. This phrase encapsulates the core healing journey of our lives: the way out of suffering starts with looking inside and gaining insights before putting them into practice in order to help transform our situation and find a deeper sense of well-being and happiness.

Part 1
Busyness, Overwhelm, and Burnout

Many of us are leading busy, complex lives, caught in a vortex of needs, wishes, plans, tasks, and projects. Each of us in our own way works hard to juggle competing needs for our attention, but on occasion things can spiral out of control, leading to feelings of overwhelm and even burnout. It’s like the spinning plates act at the circus. There are only so many spinning plates the entertainer can keep in balance on their poles before some start to crash to the ground.

Our “busyness” is never only ours. In the light of interbeing, a word Thich Nhat Hanh coined to show that nothing can exist by itself alone, we can see that by taking too much on, we cannot help but make others busy; in turn, others’ busyness ripples out and puts us under greater pressure. It is a collective societal issue caused, in part, by the demands of the capitalist system in which many of us live, a system that values striving and individualism and often generates the belief that we are not good enough and therefore have to achieve even more. 

When we become overwhelmed, we can quickly lose our ability to respond effectively to our situation and we may have the sense of wanting to escape or to stay in bed, curl up in a ball, and pull the blankets over our head. We may experience depression, anger, anxiety, or numbness. Anyone can feel overwhelmed, regardless of their age, class, race, or gender.

In our daily work, the two of us are privileged to listen to a wide range of people whose lives are interconnected with our own: leaders, teachers, activists, corporate executives, spiritual seekers, as well as our friends and family members. We have found no one who is immune to this feeling of sometimes being engulfed by life.That is why we gave this book the title Being with Busyness—we recognize that we cannot escape our many individual and collective responsibilities. We need to earn a living, nurture our families and friends, and deal with the many other demands of daily life, whether it be our health or taxes. We are also collectively confronting the poly-crisis of climate change, uncontrolled pollution, and ecosystem collapse, spurred on by our insatiable appetites and our focus on consumption and extraction, all of which threaten the the very existence of our civilization and endangers the natural world. As if this were not enough, we are also facing the tyranny of technologies that bring all the world to our doorstep all the time.

In this era, when so much stress and anxiety are filling our hearts and minds, how can we embrace joy and a sense of ease? There is a growing recognition that one effective response is to look back to the ancient wisdom of our ancestors for guidance and support rather than to continue to thrust ever forward. Buddhist teachings are more than 2,600 years old and are as relevant today as the moment the Buddha started sharing the fruits of his enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree. We both feel very lucky and privileged that the causes and conditions in our lives, albeit in very different ways, have brought us into the presence of a modern Zen master such as Thay and the mindfulness practices of the Plum Village lineage of Buddhism that he and his students have established over the past seventy years.

Not only did Thay develop a profound understanding of Buddhist teachings but more importantly, he integrated them so deeply into his way of being that he had an extraordinary capacity to synthesize the teachings of the Buddha and transmit them to others in the most simple, accessible, and yet profound way. That kind of integration is perhaps the clearest example of the quality of pure presence, which Thay exuded in abundance.

In this book, we seek to continue this approach, reflecting on some core insights of Buddhism and making them relevant to today’s world and to our everyday experiences. By integrating some of these insights into your life, you will be able to recognize the early signs of overwhelm and burnout and begin to transform whatever situation you are facing in order to come back home to yourself and into a greater sense of balance. In doing so, you not only benefit yourself, but also all the people around you, your family, friends, colleagues, and society. Just as your busyness is contagious, so is your more peaceful presence.

Busyness, overwhelm, and even burnout are ultimately not problems for us to solve using force—if we see them in this way, we may well end up suffering from the overwhelm of trying to make the feeling of overwhelm go away! Instead, if we can have insight into our suffering and learn to understand and befriend our emotions and see them as our teachers, they will be sure to point us in the direction of home, to our inherent peaceful nature.