Meeting This Moment

Introduction

The first time Paz and I visited Plum Village, the monastery of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, we experienced the joy and honor of being married in the Still Water Meditation Hall.
The next day, Thay, as he is affectionately known, meaning “teacher” in Vietnamese, invited us for tea to celebrate our wedding.
We quietly entered his small, cozy room along with three young monastics and sat in a circle on meditation cushions. Thay was gently swaying in a seated hammock at the far side of the room, his back turned to us, while two attendants prepared tea on the floor beside him. The atmosphere felt timeless.
After a few moments, Thay rose and walked slowly over to sit with us. We drank tea together in silence, a moment of pure happiness.
Then, hoping to “break the ice,” one of the young monks said “Dear Thay, Jo was saying this morning that all your books are the same!”
Embarrassed and a little flustered that the monk had misunderstood me, and that Thay might think I had reduced the breadth and depth of his entire life’s work to a single point, I tried to explain: “Thay, what I actually said is that your books are like ice cream. They are all made from the same core ingredients, but each one has its own unique flavor.”
Thay smiled gently and placed his hand on my shoulder. That simple gesture of compassion dissolved my unease and brought me back to a place of calm.
I was reminded of that moment while creating this book.
It brings together conversations with 21 long time wisdom keepers who are from different Buddhist traditions but whose teachings arise from the same source. All of them, in their own unique ways, have played a central role in bringing the teachings of the Buddha to the West over the past half century. Together, they represent more than 1,000 years of combined practice and have helped millions of people come home to themselves and to life, offering practices that connect us with our suffering so that greater understanding, inner peace, and skillful action can arise, rooted in compassion.
You might think of this book not as something to read, but as something to enter, like walking into an exquisite ice cream parlor with 21 distinct flavors, each crafted with deep care over a lifetime. The ingredients here are not plant-based or dairy milk and sugar, offering fleeting pleasure, but Dharma and wisdom, offering lasting nourishment for body, mind, and spirit.
These interviews are unlike any I conducted during my more than forty years as a journalist. They are transmissions of living wisdom, part of a lineage that stretches back nearly 2,600 years to the Buddha’s awakening under the Bodhi tree.
As you read, you may sense not only the words, but the presence behind them, the depth of lived experience and the continuity of insight passed from teacher to teacher across generations.
Words carry the somatic energy of the person who speaks or writes them. For this reason, I have not shaped these conversations into essays, but lightly edited them for flow and continuity.
One teaching that has always inspired me is that true vision is not simply seeing clearly, but building a bridge across an abyss in service to others who can then also cross over to the other side.
The wisdom keepers in this book are, in this sense, engaged visionaries. Each has found ways to cross the apparent divide between the world of “I” and the world of “all.” They have touched a sense of oneness, a dimension many of us long for but struggle to find while caught in patterns of grasping and separation.
These wisdom keepers have dedicated their lives to building bridges between these two ways of experiencing reality, offering pathways toward greater connection, compassion, and equanimity.
What they remind us, again and again, is that there are no quick fixes, only the practice of how we meet this moment. Each day is a training for life. Through mindfulness, we gradually learn to see more clearly, to live with more ease, and to experience the deeper dimension of life, not as a concept, but as a lived reality.
They are able to do this not because they are beyond suffering, but because they have learned how to meet it. As you will see from reading this book, these 21 still fall into the same metaphorical holes. The difference is that they know how to climb out with greater ease, and they share what they are learning along the way.
Before his stroke in 2014, Thay shared in an interview about this ongoing path of learning:
“In Buddhism, love has no limit. The four elements of true love, loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, have no boundary. Practice is the same. Even if you are called a ‘perfect one,’ you can still go deeper every day. There is no end to this practice. If this body lived a hundred years more, I would still continue to learn how to love better. Humanity must learn this too; we are intelligent enough, but not yet loving enough.”
—Jo Confino

The idea for this book came to me during sitting meditation early one autumn morning in our Zendo. I heard a question from deep inside: ‘how can we make sense of this troubled, rapidly changing world we are living in.’
Moments later I had a clear vision; Jo and I would interview respected teachers and long-term wisdom keepers from different Buddhist lineages and create a book offering wisdom and guidance that responds to the interconnected crises we are facing.
It was immediately clear that we could naturally combine our skills:. As a journalist, Jo would do the interviews and as a multi-media artist, I would translate each message into a unique artwork - a sort of contemporary mandala or inner diagram.
I came downstairs, finding Jo eating breakfast, and suggested to him we were going to co-create a book. He looked up briefly and mumbled something like, “Yes, of course, darling,” and then went back to his porridge, clearly imagining that by lunchtime this would be forgotten.
Buddhist teachings remind us that even a single thought can carry great power. Twenty one interviews and artworks later, here we are.
Reflecting on that initial vision in the meditation room, I recognize that as we enter the polycrisis, we need more than just words to awaken and take skillful action.
Having created several large art installations in recent years that respond to the climate crisis, I have learned that art can convey complex concepts in a simple direct visual/emotional way, which can touch peoples’ hearts in ways that words often cannot. I have for many years been fascinated by the artistic process where energy - a thought or a feeling - can be translated into matter such as a piece of art and then through the perceptions of the viewer, transforms back to energy. Art in its purest expression is therefore the exchange of resonant energy.
For my personal practice, the process of creating art offers a gateway to get intimate with the void, my unconscious, and not knowing. The way I worked to create the body of works in this book was no different. I was present during the interviews, listening deeply and waiting till I experienced a feeling in my guts that inspired me to respond visually to what was being spoken.
After each interview, I would go straight to my studio and begin working with the materials and found objects I’ve scavenged over the years, without knowing the outcome; a painting, a multimedia work, or a sculpture.
The artworks in this book are not meant to be conventionally beautiful; they exist to reveal what is essential; the quiet imperfection, the subtle shifts, the moments of emergence that speak to the heart of experience.
What I call chance methodology guides this process: I work intuitively, allowing unexpected forms and connections to emerge. Some pieces came in one flow while others I left in the studio and returned to them over time, reflecting and experimenting until the final form evolved and revealed itself.
Gradually, the individual art pieces began to form a coherent body of work. Together they echo the function of a mandala in Buddhist art, where many distinct elements come into relationship within a single whole. Each piece has its own character and expression, yet all arise from the same underlying essence, mirroring the experience I had when listening to all the 21 interviews; Many dialects, expressing one dharma.
—Paz Perlman

Thich Nhat Hanh

The power of Mindfulness

If you know how to practice mindfulness you can generate peace and joy right here, right now. And you'll appreciate that and it will change you. You have to reconsider your idea of happiness. You think it is possible only if you win, if you are on the top. But even if you are successful in making more money, you still suffer. You compete because you're not happy and meditation can help you to suffer less.
If you're happy, you cannot be a victim of your happiness. But if you're successful, you can be a victim of your success
There must be a spiritual dimension in your life and in your business, otherwise you cannot deal with the suffering caused by your work or your daily life.
We need not fear that mindfulness might become only a means and not an end because in mindfulness the means and the end are the same thing. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way. If you consider mindfulness as a means of having a lot of money, then you have not touched its true purpose. It may look like the practice of mindfulness but inside there's no peace, no joy, no happiness produced. It's just an imitation. If you don't feel the energy of brotherhood, of sisterhood, radiating from your work, that is not mindfulness.

Maintaining peace in the midst of suffering

Our perception of time can help us. We see everything through the short span of a human life, perhaps one hundred years, so we panic. But Mother Earth has a different time. If she suffers, she also has the power to heal herself, even if it takes millions of years.
Our collective ignorance, anger, and violence may destroy us as a species, and we must accept that possibility. But Mother Earth may also produce a great being, a Buddha, a bodhisattva, to show us how to change course. We cannot predict; we can only trust her wisdom.
When we take refuge in Mother Earth, we touch the power of healing. Through mindfulness, when we look at the sun, we see that it is not separate from us. Without the sun, there is no life. You realize that you are a child of the sun, a child of the Earth.
With that insight, you lose your fear of death, because the Earth does not die, she transforms. And when your relationship with the Earth deepens, your relationship with other people also deepens naturally.
That is why education must help young people rediscover connection, with the Earth and with one another. Loneliness is the sickness of our time. When parents are lonely, children are lonely. Mindfulness, love, and connection are the medicine.

Richard Gere

Deep questions growing up

If there's no doubt, there's no awakening and I think it was fairly innate in me, a doubt, an inability to give myself to the world as it appeared to be. That was always kind of lurking there.I came out of a family that was deeply religious and my mother and father were very compassionate people and really made a point of helping others. My dad sold insurance and so he was very involved with the welfare of his small town. So when there was a fire or a car accident, they called him whether it was day or night and he was there for them.It took me a long time to understand this incredible bodichitta side of my dad, that his existence was around helping others. That was a huge imprint on me.When it comes to the deeper existential issues of what is reality, what is the nature of self. I couldn't find in Christianity any kind of explanation that worked for me. That was my initial exploration of what is this world, what is this about, what is the point?As a teenager, I could begin to articulate the questions, and then in my early 20s, I was specifically looking at different paths. I was living in [New York’s] West Village, and I didn't have any money and there was a bookstore, the Sheridan Square Bookstore, that was open 24 hours, and there was a group of people who also didn't have money that would congregate there. They had a big psychology/spiritual section there so we used it like a library, and we would go there and read books and put them back on the shelf. And there was a benevolent clerk there who didn't hassle us too much. If we bought a book once in a while it was OK to use it as a library. But that was my first encounter with reading Zen books, which was my first tradition in Buddhism , such as DT Suzuki and Alan Watts. That was my beginning point. So my first teachers were Zen teachers.

Being responsible for our own experience

There are only questions, there are no answers. I had a wonderful teacher, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche who was one of the really great teachers in the Ningma School of Tibetan Buddhism.
He would often say “I've got friends, they like to watch television, they like to go to the movies, they like to watch all this stuff and play computer games. I don't understand it. I just watch my mind. What a spectacle!So that's pretty much where I'm at. We all experience various realities but with a little detachment, it's, wow, what a spectacle and what I'm experiencing in the world is intimately connected to the state of my own mind. So I think one of the basic gifts of Buddhism is that you are completely responsible for your own experience.
Personal bliss versus planetary pain

Anyone who has practiced for a number of years, it's not that hard to have a level of blissful experience in yourself through meditation, not that hard to engage a blissful state of the mind and you certainly can have a huge effect on how you experience the external world, whether you understand it as a projection of your mind or not. By identifying with vaster areas of mind, you can radically change your experience with the manifest circus of reality.But as this Holiness the Dalai Lama says, if you want to change the world that other beings exist in, the only way to Buddhahood is to manifest a profound compassion for the suffering of others. If you want to change the world that other beings experience, you have to be in the world. Prayer can only go so far. So the responsibility of engagement is inherent in our own voyage towards Enlightenment, towards liberation. Internal work and external work at the same time.
Sharon Salzberg
Are you free from that suffering after 50+ years of practice

I would never want to say that, you know, anything is totally gone but I feel so essentially different that some of it is.Difficulties still arise. With the COVID pandemic the bottom fell out of certainty. All my plans, my teaching plans, my travel plans, everything collapsed. So that's the kind of situation, you know, where anybody would feel shattered in a way. I did, and the prevailing question for me, that I kept asking myself is, what's still true, which I would never have been able to do at 17 or 18.One definition of dharma is that which we can rely on, that which supports us. And so I really did a lot of investigation. What can I count on?Of course, I feel distress at the political unfoldings and people suffering and don't quite know my place and then I remember that I can be supported and I can go on. If I were to describe myself at the age of 18 in one word, I would say fragmented. But all the meditation practices have cohered me. I have a set of values, a sense of integration, no matter whether I am alone or with others, which is exactly what I wanted when I went to India.We often think of love in terms of sentimentality and something gooey and frivolous in a way. But I really see it as a very fundamental understanding that self is just a construct. It's a useful construct, but in truth, we do live in an interconnected universe, and the more we create an ‘other’ who doesn't count, who's horrible through and through, the more separate we are from reality. That's never a good thing. The power of what we call love is the power of truth; that we are connected. It doesn’t mean you have to like somebody. It doesn't mean you have to spend any time with them. It doesn't mean you won't fight their agenda, or you try to not be harmed or have others harmed.But harboring hatred and bitterness, fear and alienation, is very tiring. It just wears us down. If love is an ability, it's within me. Other people may inspire it, or ignite it or threaten it, but ultimately, it is mine.