Love Is Liberation

1 Our Journeys to This Moment

Valerie: Grief and love are deeply interconnected, and it was my experience of both that led me to write the article “Contemplations on the Five Mindfulness Trainings: A New Paradigm for Racial
Justice and the Global Pandemic.” I began writing in 2019 as I supported my brother, Sam, month after month during his treatment for chronic heart failure, which eventually led to his death in February 2020. I was not only grieving his death, but I was also mourning the end of my ambiguous and complicated fifteen-year marriage. This was followed by desperate months
of quarantine, isolation, and physical distance due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each day revealed new and disturbing information about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, immigrants, elders, essential workers, and low-income communities. And then came the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; the worldwide and national protests calling to defund the police; and the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

As each event cascaded into the next, I instinctively turned to to the Plum Village mindfulness practice and teachings. Months before, I had visited Blue Cliff Monastery, a mindfulness
practice center in the Plum Village lineage in upstate New York. Just as I was about to walk to the front of the Great Togetherness Hall to offer a Dharma talk, a nun had approached me and given me a copy of the Sutra on Transforming Violence and Fear. I turned to this sutra to help me understand my own feelings and the colliding events within the United States and beyond. I read and reflected on the sutra almost daily. Then I began reading the Third Mindfulness Training on True Love because love seemed distant and inaccessible, especially in light of my divorce. Each day, line by line, I read and reflected on this Training and this sutra in the presence of my brother’s death, the global pandemic, and the social upheaval happening all around me.

To support my healing and deepen my understanding as a new Dharma teacher, I attended an online training program, Buddhist Healthy Boundaries, by the Faith Trust Institute. I learned the fundamentals of healthy and appropriate boundaries and self-esteem in spiritual teacher-student relationship; the impact of appropriate versus inappropriate boundaries in promoting effective teaching; and the guidelines for developing appropriate boundaries and necessary self-care strategies. During the program, I began to reframe my beliefs around power. As a Black woman, I realized that I was overly identified with my non-dominant social group identity and saw myself as lacking power, agency, and self-esteem because of it. The course came at a time when I was feeling particularly powerless, and it helped me to acknowledge the presence of power in my life and work and to understand power dynamics in the student-teacher relationship.

Shortly after my brother died, protests for racial justice in the United States spread rapidly, with calls for a worldwide reckoning on race in the United States and other countries. I participated in a two-hour virtual healing gathering for BIPOC, led by Ruth King, a respected teacher in the Theravada tradition and author of Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out. It was sponsored by Liberate (now called The Village), a mindfulness app designed for BIPOC. Hundreds of people gathered, expressing grief, rage, and anger. I felt confusion and anger in me as I listened to the speakers. And then Ruth King asked a life-changing question: How do you fight injustice without hating?

The question became a bell of mindfulness for me. I continued to read and reflect on the sutra, the Third Mindfulness Training, and this powerful question. I began to think deeply about the meaning of power, power dynamics, and how to offer my power more skillfully and in greater service to others. Interestingly, my Dharma name is Chan Tang Luc—True Sangha Power, or True Power of the Sangha. A Dharma name is a personalized name given by a teacher to a student upon their ordination or taking precepts, symbolizing the practitioner’s unique spiritual path. After I received this name at the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings ordination ceremony in 2003, Sister Chân Đức approached me and said, “Power is not what you think it is.” That stayed with me. I have come to understand that she was referring to the Five Spiritual Powers that Thầy articulated in his book The Art of Power: faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.

With all this in mind, the Contemplations on the Five Mindfulness Trainings emerged. I was motivated to write them to understand and make sense of my feelings of numbness, loss, and grief, as well as my outrage over the social upheaval occurring at that time. I spoke to Marisela Gomez, a dear friend and mindfulness practitioner who is now a lay Dharma teacher, and we agreed to write an article. The last time we had written an essay together was in 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. We wrote that essay to better understand our feelings, as a path of self-healing and self-love, and to offer love and support to others who were feeling rage, terror, and so much more.

Sometimes to truly heal from loss and grief, we need to come face-to-face with a difficult truth, with regret, pain, and old wounds that are asking for a second chance to be lifted up, woven back into our life, cherished, and welcomed home. At times, my life has felt like a long process of coming to terms with a series of losses that led me to seek inner healing and inner peace. In a roundabout way, I was being invited toward forgiveness, peacemaking, and compassionate action, to live and love in the direction of kindness and vulnerability. Yet a period of profound personal losses combined with the events of the time brought me to a place of tender fragility, fear, and anxiety. I leaned on my many friends and family members—and still do.
I was especially supported in this healing process by reciting the Five Mindfulness Trainings, sometimes called the Five Wonderful Precepts, as well as the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Plum Village tradition founded by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. These Trainings, which I also refer to as precepts throughout this book, were offered by the Buddha to his monastic and lay followers as clear guidance to lead an ethical, mindful, and joyful life. Thích Nhất Hạnh has described these precepts in countless books and worldwide teachings as a way to cultivate a peaceful and harmonious life.

The Five Mindfulness Trainings help us answer pivotal life questions:

How should I live?
What energy do I want to bring when I enter a room?
How do I act under the circumstances?
What inner guidance informs my behavior?
What are my values?
What is the world asking of me?

Our individual responses to these questions are shaped by our life experience, our values, and sometimes by our energy, health and well-being, and so much more. Whether we are aware of them or not, each of us probably already lives by a set of precepts, or principles and values. Many of us are guided by common precepts such as truthfulness, honesty, and refraining from stealing and cheating. From a tender age, we are taught these ways of becoming “good citizens” in the world, in the workplace, in our family, and with ourselves.

Some people take these precepts through formal vows, such as codes of school or religious conduct. For many, though, these vows can become wooden, flat, perfunctory, and then forgotten over time. We “set and forget” them and then feel bereft from inner guidance when we most need it. So how do we bring these precepts, this internal guidance system, into our daily life and call on them when we need them the most?

Over the years, in attending retreats with Thầy and the Plum Village community, I have come to understand that the precepts are not linear. Instead, each precept connects and is interdependent with all of the precepts. For example, the first precept on reverence for life is interdependent with the fifth precept on consuming mindfully. Since they are all interwoven, practicing one precept will impact your practice of the others. Not only are the precepts interconnected, but we are also interconnected to each other and all the elements in the cosmos. Because of all this, and because our actions have an impact on others whether we are aware of it or not, when you practice the precepts, you are not doing so for yourself alone, as a separate entity—you are doing so for all beings. What you consume and how you consume will have an impact on yourself, on others, and on the earth.

According to Thầy’s teachings on emptiness, your body isn’t just yours; your body belongs to your parents, society, and future generations. All of these have come together to manifest your body, including the trees, the clouds, and the oceans. Your body and your practice are manifestations of the whole cosmos. To practice the precepts is to support not only yourself but also your ancestors, your parents, future generations, and society. To practice the precepts is to recognize this interdependent relationship between you and the cosmos. The precepts are about cultivating conscious awareness and connectedness, especially now, in a society that has gone numb with divisiveness, too-muchness, and too-fastness.

On the other hand, some people view the precepts as an unattainable set of rules that set too high a bar and are a joy killer of personal habits and preferences accumulated over a lifetime. Some say the precepts don’t take into account the real struggles people face on a daily basis and the temporary pleasure that not adhering to the precepts allows them. I am speaking about, say, the hardworking low-wage worker who takes their kids to McDonald’s for hamburgers, a meal that is within their financial means. Such a person is balancing lots of things: their financial constraints, their relationship with their children, their personal awareness of the impact of the fast-food industry on society at large, their own diet of ultra-processed food or fast food, and much more. Within this complex interplay of political, social, and personal dynamics, many of us are attached to our lifestyles even at a high cost to ourselves, those we love, and the world around us. Even Thầy has said that no one can practice the precepts perfectly, including the Buddha. Instead, Thầy says we need to live in such a way that we become aware of the suffering our actions perpetuate, make an effort to eradicate damage, and find wholesome, spiritual nourishment not only for ourselves but also for our children and future generations.

Thầy has also said that we need to identify and recognize toxins already within us because the quality of our life depends, in part, on the amount of peace and joy within our body and our consciousness and how we share that peace and joy with others. The precepts support our well-being, protecting us individually and collectively from harm. Societal change happens at the roots by changing the individual and collective consciousness driven by greed, hatred, and delusion.9
The precepts are an invitation to be in touch with what is wholesome and beneficial in and around us. They are bells of mindfulness. Ultimately, the precepts are opportunities to live and grow a compassionate life of love, peace, and understanding. We might be challenged in our practice at times, and at those times we need to recommit ourselves and reconnect with spiritual friends who support us on the path toward living a healthy and wholesome life.

The precepts are part of a set of interconnected teachings that include the Noble Eightfold Path, the Four Noble Truths, and the Five Spiritual Powers: faith, diligence, mindfulness, concentration, and insight. These powers are interconnected in that faith leads to diligence, diligence leads to mindfulness, and the power of mindfulness fosters concentration, which gives rise to insight. Thầy has said that each of us needs to have our own experience of the precepts to fully understand them. Thầy advises us not to be caught in the “outer form” of practicing with the precepts. It can be counterproductive to follow the precepts as rigid dos and don’ts, or “rules,” without understanding their deeper significance. An example from my own life was when I was caught in the form of speaking truthfully. I held rigidly to the precept around speaking honestly even when doing so was harmful to me and did not support the other person.

Thầy says that we should recognize three dimensions of the Trainings, which add depth and substance to our practice of mindfulness. The first dimension is samvara sila, or refraining from negative action. In body, speech, and mind, we need to refrain from harmful conduct. The second dimension is kushaladharma sila, engaging in positive action. When we see someone who needs our help, and we have the ability to reach out to help but we don’t do it, this is a breach of the precept, according to Thầy. He says, “We have to do what is needed to be done. … When you see something happening that should not be happening, something unjust, then you have to intervene.”10 The third dimension is sattvarthakriya sila. According to this aspect of sila, even when there is no urgent situation where we need to intervene, we must continue to cultivate a compassionate heart and mind. This is the bodhisattva path of awakened action of service and love.

The precepts are not about telling us what to do and what not to do. They are about refraining from unwholesome action, performing wholesome action, and supporting all living beings, creating a better world for all.

I received the Five Mindfulness Trainings in 1998 and the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings in 2003. I came to rely on all the Trainings during a period of profound turmoil in my life that began around 2015. I had a nagging sense, which I couldn’t shake, that my life was going to become very complicated, and I was right. At the time, I was in a sad and unfulfilling marriage, and my career as a lawyer-lobbyist consumed every ounce of my life energy. The troubles began in 2016 with my father’s long illness leading up to his death, which was followed by my brother Elliot’s heart transplant in 2017; the end of my marriage in 2019; the death of my oldest brother, Sam, in February 2020; the death of his wife, Dolores, in July 2020; the destruction of my house by Hurricane Ida in September 2021; the death of my youngest brother, Charles, in April 2022; and to add to all this, the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement that ensued. These crushing losses and social and political upheavals within the United States and worldwide literally rearranged my sense of self, my sense of inner equilibrium, and how I viewed the world.

Here’s how the unraveling of my life began, and how the precepts supported me. In 2016, I was on my way to London to offer teachings at Woodbrooke, a Quaker retreat and study center outside the city. The moment I stepped on the flight, my phone rang. It was my brother Elliot, who said, “Dad’s not doing well.”

“But I literally just stepped on the flight to London,” I said. “Please let me know how he’s doing when I get off the flight.” My heart sank and my stomach churned all the way to London.

At best, I had a tumultuous relationship with my father. When I was a very small child, he abandoned the family, literally walked out, not to be seen again for years. My mother died when I was sixteen from overwork—she supported four children, working two jobs as a maid and a barber. After a turn of circumstances, my father decided to return to “be a dad.” But that didn’t work out, so I split at age eighteen with only some of my belongings in a sheet. I didn’t see or speak to him for many years. However, after my first divorce, I realized that my father might have something to do with why my marriage had failed and why I found it so difficult to feel anything other than rage. I wrote him a letter and asked if I could come and visit him. He agreed. After a few days with him, I asked him the questions that lay like a steel plate on my heart: Why did you treat me the way you did? Why did you beat me up? Why did you walk out on us?

I will never forget his reply. He said plainly, truthfully, almost innocently, “I did the best I could.”
At that moment, I felt an electric charge in my body and a flash of recognition. I knew what he said was true; his reality was just that. He did the best he could, the best he knew. Going forward in my life would mean healing from and transforming the brutality he inherited and passed on to me.