Season 3 of Climate Magic opens with this interview with Plum Village monastic, Sister True Dedication. Sister True D, as she is often known, was a student of the Zen master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, and helped him write a book and design a course offering, both called Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. In this episode, Sister True D introduces us to Thich Nhat Hanh’s lineage of “engaged Buddhism,” and explains how Buddhist wisdom from 2,600 years ago applies to our climate crisis today. Part of this teaching is the ability to see how our actions today are the result of the actions of our ancestors since “beginningless time,” as she calls it. Then it also follows that we are ancestors too, and that our actions today are patterning the future– a way of understanding time that can give us great relief, gratitude, hope, and a sense of agency.
Shownotes
- Plum Village monastery and information about engaged Buddhism, Sister True Dedication, and Thich Nhat Hanh
- Global Optimism and Plum Village’s climate/nature leader retreats
- Sister True Dedication’s TED Talk
- Online course and book, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet
- Website describing the rescission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s “Endangerment Finding”.
Transcript is coming soon.
Transcription
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Dying and death of species of ecosystems, of civilizations, cultures, languages, human and more than human. The dying is also part of life. And and then this is the really important point. It doesn't make it any less precious.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy, human side of climate politics. We ask, what if our hearts and minds are the most radical leverage points at our disposal? How do our human emotions and mindsets and cognitive biases and wounds shape climate policy?
I'm your host, Doctor Sarah Ray, an author and a professor of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. On Climate Magic, I invite experts, spiritual leaders, researchers, neuroscientists, educators, and activists to help me distill digestible, applicable ways to help you tap your own climate magic.
I was first introduced to Buddhist thought when I was a teenager, and took a high school elective on world religions. Buddhism held this mysterious quality to me. It intimidated me, but I also found something deeply compelling in it. The simplicity of the concept of the First Noble Truth that in life there is suffering or dukkha, and that there is a way out. My own family's background is Quaker, so this thing about peace and the moral imperative to try to ease other's suffering, I think, was in my cells from the beginning. In my mid life, I have come back to my fascination with Buddhism as I found a Dharma teacher, I started meditating and even got trained as a mindfulness teacher myself.
What I'm really drawn to is how there are a lot of leaders in the Buddhism world who are actively applying the insights from 2600 years ago to the climate crisis. There's a lot going on with that, especially in the legacy of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who passed away a few years ago. One of the many things Thich Nhat Hanh did was create a community of monastics in France after he was exiled from Vietnam called Plum Village. One of his students there and current Dharma teacher is my guest today.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: One of the actions we're doing as a species right now is we are habituated ourselves to overstimulation.
RAY: It is such a pleasure to welcome Sister True Dedication, who was ordained in 2008 at the age of 27 and became a Dharma teacher in 2016. She actually has a TedTalk called Three Ways to Build Resilience and Change the World, and she's also one of the forces behind an online course based on the book she edited and wrote with Thich Nhat Hanh called Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. You should definitely check out that course and the book in the days before this interview.
Just as a group of Buddhist monks arrived in Washington, DC at the end of a 2300 mile walk for peace, the Trump administration repealed what's called the endangerment finding, a crucial determination of the EPA that greenhouse gases are a threat to human life. This is a finding that underpins all federal climate regulation.
We are living in these hard, paradoxical times. Some days feel harder than others. What can the monks teach us about alleviating all the suffering? Few people think more deeply about climate change, suffering, and what we can do in the face of all of it, than Sister True Dedication.
Let's dive in.
Welcome to the show. You're a monastic at Plum Village. What is that? And if you can throw in a definition of an engaged Buddhism while you're at it, even better.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Okay, so Plum Village is actually many small villages here in the southwest of France, and we are more than 150 monks and nuns who live here. So we're literally one of the biggest Buddhist monasteries in the West, in Europe and America. And we all came here because we were inspired by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, who is often known as a bestselling author and a great, a great figure. He passed away a few years ago. So he's, belongs, in a way, to a different era. He was friends with Doctor Martin Luther King. He was active in the peace movement to stop the Vietnam War. And then he was also active in the sort of later 20th century peace movement. What does it make? What does it mean to have. What does it mean to truly be a peace activist in a really violent world? And so the kind of engaged Buddhism that inspired the 150 of us to come and live in the French countryside, shave our heads, wear these brown robes, and become Buddhist monks and nuns, we were inspired by the kind of meditation practices and mindfulness practices that can help us touch, a different kind of peace. Rebel against the system.
I think our engaged Buddhism is, Buddhism of rebellion at some level, to show that communities of resistance are possible, that we can step outside of the capitalistic framework, the rat race, the grind, and to be able to live a life that is much simpler, much closer to the Earth, that has more meaning. And we're kind of community, is what lays lies at the heart of our daily life, and that allows us to consume less and to live kind of much more simply. And I think for us, our engagement is it's a lot to do with how we are a sanctuary for the world. We have about, 7000 people come every year to spend at least a week with us. So we are very much a kind of I. Sometimes it's a word hospital, but let's say we're very much a refuge.
And so we receive people from all walks of life and I think many of us, we want to touch a different depth to, to things that we can get caught up in, not only what the concerns we have in our professional time, our livelihoods, our work or our studies, but a lot of us can get just swept up with the kind of bad news that we see on our screens all the time. And so I guess we're the place that people check out into. And so holding that sanctuary, holding that refuge and holding a unique perspective on the world is already, I think, a large part of our engagement. So our engagement is to show that another way of living is possible. And it's really defined by ethics.
So we have kind of ethical views on consumerism and capitalism. We sometimes have ethical views, even on politics. We can have ethical views on a lot of the big, yeah, big questions of the day. And I think that's also are engaged Buddhism. Sometimes people think that Buddhists, we, we sit quietly with our eyes closed, and we're maybe only concerned about our own experience of the world, but in our kind of engagement, really, from our teachers activism with Doctor Martin Luther King and the peace movement and his resistance, in a way also to like the American colonization, around the world, which they experienced as the American war that we, we in the West think of as the Vietnam War, but that all of that resistance to these larger forces, really, I think, defines us as a community that we always want to embody a resistance to that.
RAY: Which just really attracted me in the last ten years or so to Buddhism, is that it feels like even though the teachings are from 2600 years ago. Why do they feel like they were invented for this moment? I don't know if you have some thoughts about that. They I just that some of the key concepts of interbeing or right livelihood or the first noble truth that there’s suffering, I just feel like, wow, now we need this stuff now. And you are deeply involved in the kind of climate, environmental side of thinking about Buddhism and, and that that is very alive for me as well.
And of course, is the point of this show, how do you make sense of this sort of why is Buddhism so applicable to our moment or how?
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Yeah, well, I completely agree to and I guess I guess that's why I thought it would be worth investing my whole life in it, I think. It is the way to go and I'll give up everything because I feel this is what we need. And then I and then that deep wish to understand these teachings do my best to live in them or embody them and evolve them, adapt them even further to be even more relevant to this moment. And I think, like you say, it has a lot to do with this. At the heart of Buddhism is this deep understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive and free from, I want to say, free from lots of these bigger questions. You know, like, is there a God? How many gods are there? You know, all of that. We're free from that. It's like, what does it mean to be alive? Is the primary question.
And then one of the first answers is it means that we hurt. It means that we experience pain when we love. We also then experience the pain that goes with that loving someone else, someone who's impermanent, who's going to one day pass away. And so I think there's something so deeply human about the Buddhist teachings. And it's so it's much more of a humanistic approach to being alive or just being than it really is a religion.
And I think that's why it's so powerful. And I think in some of our religion, we get so caught in the stories and the dogma that we forget the practice and the experience of how to be a good human on earth. And and I know that in Christianity and especially some of the earlier Christianity that's there, that is there, how to be with God when you're with the mountains and with the trees or the redwoods or the ocean, you know, like, how can you be with God in those places? And that's the kind that kind of spirituality is much closer to what Buddhism is, which is in the moments of our daily life. How can we touch something much more sacred and bigger than ourselves, and how can we have a loving embrace for all the pain, knowing that pain is part of life and that's this noble truth of suffering.
And so I feel that Buddhism is almost a science, I want to say, with practices helping us deal with the pain of being human and the pain of being alive, which is also the joy of being alive. You know? So I think for me, that's why it's so relevant. And I don't know if you saw this week that, Mamdani, in New York said something or so he quoted some Buddhist teachings and the Four Noble Truths about how it's very empowering also to be able to to name that suffering is there. And that would there is a way out of suffering.
So it is real and there is a way through it. There's a way to handle our suffering so that we suffer less. And that is very empowering and very liberating. We don't need to wait for God to take our suffering away. There are ways we can respond to the pains we have as individuals in our close relationships, in our communities, in our countries. There's ways to be with that pain, to make the pain less.
RAY: I'm speaking to you the day after the cancellation of the Endangerment clause of the EPA. And I and I'm feeling really heavy hearted about the work ahead and the harms, that continue to happen. And I'm sort of curious, you know, sort of myself joining you. And I'm building, which is supremely tempting. You know what? What is a kernel of wisdom from you about how you confront?
And that's just one example, right? The cascade of and firehose of those kinds of things coming about the world, the suffering that's in the world that we get news of now more than ever. Does being in the world that you're in give you a particular, sense of, okay, this is, you know, here's how here's the trick. I used to not get caught up in that or to not feel that. And it's a little bit of a trick question, because I'm assuming you're going to say no. Yeah. The whole point is to feel that. But what is that? You know, what is that lifeline for you?
SR TRUE DEDICATION: So I think the lifeline when there's bad news is like it is operating at several different levels. And I think actually, I myself, I used to work in a newsroom. I worked for three years before I came into the monastery. And so I really had this experience actually, even of practicing mindfulness in the newsroom and like how I handled the news feed and, and what I felt it did to my heart. So I think the first thing for all of us is to be able to acknowledge the pain, because our natural human response is either the numbing, the running away, all of these things that we know we do to not feel it.
And sometimes we get this juxtaposition of, which is why I think news and scrolling and can be so toxic because we have supremely tragic things happening next to like then the I don't know, yeah, you can have the result of the Super Bowl or whatever you want, you know, so you get like different things are happening next to each other. But the attention we need to bring to that bit of information we've just heard is really different. And so I think part of it is how to honor that feeling of pain when we hear, yeah, that a really important protective policy has been canceled.
Or if we hear that an ecosystem is dying, that we hear a population of whatever species is, whether it's birds or insects or in the oceans, that those populations are collapsing. How to honor that pain in us and allow it to be as real and big as it is, is for me. Part of my practice is to be able to say, this is terrible.
And there have been times in the monastery when having read a news report, I go to the meditation hall and I allow myself to cry at the altar and even to use we use these kind of prostration gestures as also as a way of moving grief through moving pain through the body. And I've done that in order to really, Understand that it's not a joke. I think it's what I want to say. Everything we're seeing is not a joke. And so it's like knowing this, how will I live my life differently?
And I find that energy by going deeply into it. And that gives me huge amounts of endurance, of, determination, of, just energy. And, and I think that that is one of the ways that I metabolize these, these sort of terrible pieces of news. And then what I find through that is then we get into some of like the deeper spiritual practices, so I remember, yeah, I would just say it's a bit heavy, but I would just say it. So one of the things that also really that led me to do this was, you know, there are some communities, that hunt the dolphins, on masse, so that the dolphins then sort of breach on the beach and they can, can kill entire communities and cultures of, of the, of dolphins and as part of a sort of a ritual that belongs to their tribe and to their people.
But now with modern shipping and modern boats and you can really. Yeah, you can you can obliterate entire, lineages of dolphins that have their languages. We know in their culture and their way of communicating. And I went to the meditation hall, and I had a good 30 minutes of crying and 30 minutes of shame to be human and 30 minutes of feeling powerless and frustrated and just angry and just hating my humanity, hating the fact that I'm also a part of this. Probably I had Viking ancestors at some point, and they are a part of this and just feeling the non separateness that I'm also part of this harming.
But what was really honestly surprising for me that having spent time being with the pain. By about 45 minutes an hour in, I started to realize the larger scope of like there is there is mass death happening in so many different aspects of species across so many different like eras and time frames. And I could cry also for the dinosaurs, you know, I can cry for all these different waves of incredible species that have lived on Earth and then through that, then I arrive at a kind of a point where there is a little bit more peace, a little bit more peace, because I understand that dying and death of species of ecosystems, of civilizations, cultures, languages, human and more than human, the dying is also part of life. And then this is the really important point. It doesn't make it any less precious. It is still precious. It is still a tragedy when there is loss and death and extinction.
And the deaths and extinctions and loss are also part of life. And so through my spiritual practice, to hold both as being true and that allows the pain to be as big as it is, and it also allows a sort of larger freedom that is beyond lifespans.
RAY: I'm so moved listening to you, and I just I'm, I, listeners can't tell where, like, tears are streaming down my face. Just very touched by that. The spiritual practice of holding. Holding two truths together. That way to find some peace in the both.
And, that really lands for me. Yeah. And and it's interesting how many people I spoken to when I sort of asked this trick question of what tools do we need to survive this often will answer some sort of grief, literacy and what you've also offered there. Not just grief literacy, but, practices with understanding impermanence to use a real Buddhist concept, practices with understanding facing mortality. And you're not saying by facing mortality and, and sort of naturalizing death, that therefore we should just accept it and not fight against it and let it happen and have no and kind of have a moral relativism about all deaths are equal and it doesn't matter, you are saying is so precious and we still have to fight for it.
Also, so I, I am hearing that.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Exactly and exactly and thank you for reflecting it back even more eloquently. Sarah, you know,
RAY: Are you kidding me?
SR TRUE DEDICATION: But what it means like just really concretely, for example, you know, qs part of my awareness practice, I love to listen to birdsong. I love to try to recognize the species that I'm hearing. I like to pay attention who is nesting, where and who is having a bit of a territory dispute in the woods over there. And so I just love to be aware of the the sound landscape, just my immediate environments. For example, of the birds.
And then I become aware when, like some of the morning birdsong or now we're just entering spring and it's, it's thinning out, you know, there's just less noise than there used to be. Like, I can feel the the morning birdsong is, is getting quieter. I've now been in Plum Village almost 20 years, so I have sort of 20 years of range. And I can I can feel that. And here's the thing. At first there's like this wincing pain. I'm just like, oh, it's not so many birds like, oh, this morning, that's interesting. There's a few birds, but not so many. Not as many Orioles as I used to hear like five years ago or whatever it might be.
And I have the species and I'm like, And I'm like, wow. Maybe in 50 years, no one will even be able to hear this many birds. So I have to hear them with all of my heart, all of my ears, and celebrate it. Because this is so precious. And future generations will be like, wow, I never had a chance to hear so many birds like that.
So to kind of to it makes me want to be in that moment more deeply, to understand how precious it is.
RAY: Yeah. That is that is truly what I think the gift of thinking about mortality gives to us. Yeah, the real intense absorption of the beauty of the moment. Thank you. I think I wanted to ask you a little bit about Zen and the Art of Saving the planet.
And why do you think Thich Nhat Hanh and yourself included, sort of turned and in his later years to thinking about climate so intensely as the kind of cause of, of that part of his life and what it was like to do that book with him. Yeah.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Yeah. Well, I mean, fun fact firstly, the really interesting thing is that he was already thinking about the environment and pollution back in 1970. And they convened, convened one of the earliest like kind of conferences, in Europe of different scientists. And at that time, you know, it's environmental scientists and biologists and all these things. And he was really concerned also at that time with overpopulation.
And they actually founded so they came up with something called the Menten statement. Folks can find all about it on the company's website, because I love all these incredible archives. And then they were they wrote to the United Nations saying, you need to have kind of environmental conferences. And I think the first UN kind of climate conference was actually in 1972, I think, in Stockholm. And so then they organized a parallel. What they called a great togetherness by dong kind of community gathering.
At the same time, sort of in parallel because they were like, you have to see civil society coming together, caring for the earth, caring about population, caring about, the destruction of the ecosystems and pollution. And so in a way, he was kind of really ahead of his time. And I think that ecological awareness came from his spiritual practice, came from his peace activism, and came from the depths of Buddhism, where there is so much reverence for the earth, for the natural world. And this already in like the Buddhist teachings, there's a sense that we are a part of the earth. The earth is us, we are the earth.
And so that's really was in Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings for like his entire kind of career in the West, really from from the early 1970s. And then this fascinating thing that he had these sort of new insights. So he would be entering his 80s at this time, and he had these insights about as, as a, as a human to fall in love with the earth and to give yourself permission to be in love with the earth and a lot of his writings before then were about the wonders of the present moment, the beauty of the earth. But he didn't have this sweet, open heart connection of falling in love. And that's what really happened in some of these later years of his teachings from like the 20 tens onwards.
And that was I was then his student at this time, and I could see this new language appearing in all his lectures and his talks and his writings and, and and then he started saying, we need to have an intimate conversation with the earth, with Mother Earth. And he's like each one of us as an individual challenge, an invitation we need to open up our own dialog or communion with the earth. And then so then he came up. He started coming up with all these different texts about it. And then at some point he called me in and he's like, right, my child?
Because, you know, there's this sort of student teacher relationship, right? My child, I need you to organize me a press conference, because I'm here to announce this insight that everyone needs to have an intimate conversation with Earth. And I was, you know, like, fresh out of journalism.
Okay, three years in the monastery. And I was like, I just I just don't know that I can convene a press conference for this. But that's the kind of that's that's how he felt the inside. He felt he'd had a kind of breakthrough, a ripening of this Buddhist wisdom, a ripening into this moment of if only humans and an each one of us take responsibility. Could I talk to the earth in my heart, in my body. Can I lie flat on the ground and feel this living, breathing earth around me? Can I surrender to Mother Earth and ask mother, ask the deepest questions of my heart and can I be attentive enough to hear how she replies?
And so that's really the kind of these were the kind of insights that land lay behind, then a whole series of teachings. In his final years of teachings, his last 3 or 4 years of teachings, really about this challenge to allow to give the earth a place in our lives. The earth is not mere matter. The earth is alive. The earth is what we are made of.
And I think, especially in the West, because of our heritage with the Abrahamic traditions and this idea that God has to be somehow other and above and beyond, and we are somehow chosen and different from the earth. It kind of gets in the way of what a lot of indigenous peoples have as their own, their own known truth, that we are in the earth of the earth, and the earth is alive and is a mother home.
RAY: I love imagining this moment of it sounds like maybe giddy delight or something where he says, order, let's get a press conference. I have an insight. I can imagine how fun, fun that must have been to be a part of one of the things that I love about the book, and also about Buddhism, is how it challenges us to think about what action is. And I know that folks in the world of psychology are also thinking about this. There's sort of a constant refrain I hear all the time. In fact, sometimes my words are misunderstood this way, that the way to cope with your climate anxiety is action, as if action is a really clear thing, that everybody knows what that means.
And if I am suffering from climate anxiety and I see a headline like that, I'll know exactly what that means I need to do and I'll just go do it. Buddhism, and especially in the book, complicates that quite a bit. And I'd love to offer some of these quotes for the listeners. Thay writes in in his book, “In Buddhism, we always understand action as having three aspects– thinking, speaking, and acting.” I love this framing of thought as an action. He continues. “When we produce a thought, it is energy. It is action, and it can change us and the world in a good way or a bad way.”
And he, of course, he is also famous for saying, don't just do something, sit there. So, you know, and in Buddhism, non-action is action, right? There's a sort of like Zen koan ask thing going on there about, you know, when is in action, in action or, I don't know, just can you help us understand what we might take from this teaching about climate action or what action is and why it is that even just thinking and sitting might might need to be fit under the umbrella of action, or why inaction or sitting or thinking might need to, Challenge the definition that most people think of when they think of action.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Well, thank you for this question, Sarah. And one thing I really appreciate in your work is the kind of precision you've also brought to this and then and helping walk people through this at the different levels because I want to I guess I want to start out by saying engaged action is still really important. Like to these very, concrete gestures we can do in our local communities, in our workplaces, in our places of learning. There are many, like intentional additional actions we can do going on to the streets, speaking out, engaging as a citizen. These have their role.
And I just want to start off by saying that these have their role as well as those actions, having their role and having their impact. In Buddhism, we have such a deep understanding of what action is. And as you said, it's anything we're thinking, anything was speaking and anything our body is doing or not doing. So we have. And that's leaving an imprint in the world that's rippling out into the world every day. Choosing to stay at home and hide under the blanket is also an action that is rippling into the world. In choosing to, drown ourselves in other things is also in action.
And in the spirit of Buddhism, what we are really understanding is that whatever we're doing today, we are patterning, patterning, that way of being into the future. If we are under our blanket, it means that in 50 years, in 100 years, more humans will be under their blankets because we will think that that's a solution. If we are drowning ourselves in the music, in the streaming and the binge watching, in the sports, whatever it is, that means we are imprinting that into our human culture as something that future generations will also do. If we choose to say, I will go out and sit under a tree for two hours and listen to what I can hear, whether it's the sirens of the city around me, whether it's the birds, whether it's the ocean, if there's an ocean nearby, whether it's just the chaos in my own head. If we can do that, we're making it more possible for future generations to do that, to be able to go and sit under a tree and listen.
So in our Buddhist understanding of action, what we are doing, it kind of contains the future it we're building the future with today. And that's because of the way we mirror each other, the way we learn, the way we respond, you know, all of us being, you know, so attached to our screens right now. That means we have whole generations of young people that only know that kind of life. So that's why, I guess our generation is first generation with so much screen time. It means that we need to find a way to handle that so that we can truly be with the natural world, which we're doing less like. We statistically, so much less with nature, without screens. We need to find a way so that future generations also know how to be with the natural world, and how to not feel that restlessness, because what's happening is work for example, one of the actions we're doing as a species right now is we are habituated ourselves to overstimulation. We think it's perfectly normal to be bombarded with stimulation, sights, sounds, images, even sensory experiences. We think that's normal and that's not normal.
But are each we sort of patterning that into a kind of hunger that we will be passing on to future generations? And so when we talk about shifting, resisting, showing that another way of being as possible, we're talking about action, all of these kind of layer layers and levels. If we can learn how to be at peace with ourselves in the natural world, even if it's only an hour a week, even if it's three hours a week, like I'm not saying everyone has to go and live on a mountaintop, but just like if we can learn how to do it as an art, as something that is in our bones, and we can sink into that feeling, then the next generation will remember and will know how to do it. And so when we talk about yeah, so when we talk about action, our quality of presence is a term we often use in Buddhism. Our quality of presence with the natural world, but also with other humans.
And this kind of comes a little bit to the more human dynamic after our current moment. And the polarization, the intolerance for different views and different ways of being like, how can we follow our breath when someone is saying something that we really disagree with? How can we tolerate somebody whose way of being makes us uncomfortable without wanting to fix them, change them, or cancel them? And that is a kind of action, actually. That is action like, and it doesn't take much, but it does take something. That's the weird thing. It takes energy. We say, I want to be more tolerant of my classmates, of my colleagues, and of my neighbor, who is completely on a different political path. My, that takes energy like that means you've got to go off and have a drink with that person. That means you've got to go and you know, go and listen to that person you hate listening to as a generous act of tolerance and inclusiveness.
These are all kind of ethical values we have in Buddhism that help, like, weave our society together, our community together, and helps show that there can be a future in which, yeah, diversity, compassion and tolerance are part of that future. Because if all of us believe only that there's me and then there's my enemy, so as long as we start making other people our enemies, we have a big problem. And this was a real theme in the civil rights movement. And for Doctor King and our teacher, it was like, if man is our enemy, with whom shall we live? Was one of their phrases they come up with if man is my enemy, with whom shall I live like we? There's a kind of a really radical calling I feel right now that like. And this is the kind of reconciliation across difference of to learn how to be tolerant of each other is a real challenge that we're facing right now. And of course, there's this paradox. The tolerant want to tolerate the intolerant, but the intolerant don't want to tolerate us. Right. So this is like this political problem.
But I think this is what meaningful action could look like right now before you've even gone onto the streets, before you've even started saving a local forest or whatever. These are all the kind of things that all of us can contribute to.
RAY: Some of the things that you're bringing up for me as you're speaking is that the epistemology of my Western upbringing tells me that my action doesn't matter, because this stuff of the future is inevitable, and I can't stop at that. I'm only living in this one little blip of time, and I my actions now don't have any effect on the future that, you know, all of these things are happening. It's such a small scale in my life that it doesn't matter. So the my sense of my, my constrained and limited sense of time and space, right. Like that, my impact is so limited in time and space means that I just get maybe give up.
And what you're what you're offering in many, you're offering many things. But one of the things you're offering is this kind of push back on. You said something like, the future is in our actions now, right? So you said something that really made me think, oh my goodness, this is more of a cyclical vision of time and temporality. A, a different epistemology or a different way of understanding. Time and space would help me see my actions, no matter how small, small. I'm putting small quote marks, you know, as and that's one of the things I think of, you know, Buddhism is offering this if I can't practice peace in this mindful moment of sitting here talking to you, of the mindful moment of of doing my chores again every day, then how can I expect peace to happen at this much bigger scale? Right. This kind of I want to practice in my daily life what I want to see in the world.
And it's just offering me this new way of thinking about it. Right? Like temporality and space and time and scale and smallness are sort of not the same as what, my Western background would have me think. And that's what I'm a part of, the thing I'm getting from what you're saying. So thank you for that.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Yeah. And we could even say also like so we think, as you think, Sarah, that you are just Sarah and you're just small, but you are a miracle of how many millions of years of evolution like how many ancestors had to succeed over how many generations for you to be sitting there breathing and smiling now like this is a victory for an entire lineage that that goes all the way. I mean, it literally goes all the way. So your life is a miracle and you are. It's like your turn to live on behalf of your ancestors. They are there in every cell of your body. You will have gestures that might be hundreds of thousands of years old. You will have a way of thinking or feeling about sounds or spaces or different. You know, being out in nature that is in your bones because that has come down to you through your lineage.
So we think we're just us living now, but we are the hopes and dreams that our ancestors had for us. They wanted us to not live in famine. They wanted us to not live in war. They wanted us to be safe. They wanted us to be able to wake up in the morning and smile to the dawn, like that's what they wanted for their descendants.
And we are those descendants, right? And then what's so cool is, you know, we think a lot about the future and we worry a lot about the future. But when we do one small thing, well, we are doing that for the future. And we're making it much more possible for them, just like our ancestors made this moment possible for us, when we can say, all right, I'm not going to bash through this pile of dishes, I am going to just say dish. You have also traveled since beginning was time to be here right now, and we will just have a moment together at the sink, and we will just enjoy this miracle of being alive. My grandmothers and grandfathers didn't have soap and sponge I do, so let's enjoy it for all of us. You know how cool they had to be down by the river with a bit of stick and some ashes or whatever?
And here I am, soap and sponges. Check this out. This is so cool. And then you kind of have this moment with the dishes that we then also know means that future generations will also see that all the mud and all the daily chores of life and all the challenges are part also of the miracle of life. And that's the sort of knowing that we want to be able to kind of pass on for everyone.
And it's just our turn to be in that mud, our turn to be in the pain and the difficulty and the wonder. And we know our time is short on this planet. We know we don't have. We don't have it near as much time as we wish we could have. So it's like how to enjoy it.
And I think that's the powerful thing in Zen and in Buddhism, which is there is also space to celebrate this life. We don't need to wait to die and to think that we go into heaven later. We don't need to feel that this is a mortal coil that is making us suffer. This is the miracle and we are living it and how we live. It will also. It's for. It's for both the past and the future. Contains the past and the future.
RAY: Oh yes. Thank you for that.
If you're just joining us I'm speaking with Sister True Dedication, editor and coauthor with Thich Nhat Hanh of Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet.
Okay. Can we talk about burnout. Yes please help us.
All right. So I'm going to read a beautiful quote from Thich Nhat Hanh to get us in the mood. “Someone asked me, aren't you worried about the state of the world? I allowed myself to breathe. And then I said, what is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart. If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick and you will not be able to help.”
So this thing about Buddhism that's really been a lifeline for me is this acknowledgment and acceptance that my capacities, my well-being, my state of mind, the quality of my heart really does matter and that I can't joke around about it. It's not just something I can wait until there's all peace in the world, and then I can focus on it. And it's also actually the biggest thing stopping me from doing that work is a sense of how selfish and privileged that I could do that at all. My burnout is serving other people, and that is, that is my duty on the in the world, you know? Surely I can push myself a little harder, you know?
So, yeah, I'm imagining other listeners feel this way, this way. So I know that you have beautiful things that you offer folks who are in burnout. And I know that there is, a lot of ways that the village is really geared in some ways to help folks with burnout. So I'm curious what you're seeing. Show up at your hospital.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: And what we're seeing show up in ourselves.
RAY: I am assuming this is for you, too. I don’t want to say anything about that. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you had some personal experience with this.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: We are totally human, too, in this. I think. I think especially for those in any service profession, you know, whatever kind of service profession, whether it's in teaching or health care or activism. And then for us, it's this, you know, spiritual service, I guess. I think for all of us, we always want to give everything we have to give.
And and that's really true for me personally, too. And I think, that is a really natural part of, generosity. And it, it, I also want to honor that because it's a way to live fully the hours we've been given to live and to move energy in places that we want to move that energy. And in the light of the Buddhist teachings, like we kind of I mean, but the question is like, what is that quality of energy that we are bringing to our service and bringing to our work, and how to include ourselves in the orbit of, kindness and in the orbit of our care so that we are also modeling for the next generation a sustainable way of serving. And for those you know, Sarah, you're also a teacher. You know, for those of us who are teaching, we put all our heart into and I speak for myself also in trying to train the next generation, stay up late, stay up late, preparing what we want to share with them.
And then it means that we like, look more tired and more most more stressed when actually we're trying to teach them, you know, like how to be resilient or something, how to handle their emotions. I rather how to respond. So I think the thing I would say for me, I think in the Plum Village tradition and what our teacher Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh taught us was, we have to take refuge in a community, and how we can be of service together is so much more than in our individual parts. And that means to be able to have peer support wherever we are. And he would say, to be able to find solidarity and a way of being among teachers.
So the teachers in the schools should also feel that you are a community looking out for each other, professors in a university. You should feel that there is this care and solidarity, that solidarity and a kind of a mutual kind of processing the challenges of our service by being together. And the same might go for hospitals and health care environments. If there is a community spirit between the doctors and nurses and health care professionals, that will be felt as part of the healing that people are experiencing in those settings.
And he had a chance to come in 2013 to Stanford University, and they have a program there called C Care, which is the kind of compassion training program and set up by Doctor Jim Doherty and Thich Nhat Nanh, our teacher. He was so fascinated by this dialog about what does a compassionate environment mean and how, like therapists and health care workers can also not burnout from like it's I think it's called compassion fatigue and all these kind of things.
And and he really gave his first response was it's to do with a community spirit. And that means you got to have time to hang out. You got to have time to, quote unquote, drink tea, whether it's tea or cake or whatever it water or a drink, whatever it is like, you got to have time just to chill together, and you're going to have time to listen to each other, to hear each other's hearts. So you're no longer operating as individuals, but as a body. And so in the monastery, that's also how we model it, that the monastics, we have time to be together and to support each other, listen to each other, laugh, cry together. And that enables us to create this kind of sanctuary atmosphere that others can then take refuge in. So I think whatever kind of organization we're in, we get so drawn into the cause. We do a lot of work with activists and especially environmental activists, and it's so much like whatever for that, you know, means for the ends.
And it's there can be so much sacrifice and so much, maybe even friction and antagonism in activist organizations and local charities and things. But it's like, what if our way of being together while we do our service and while we do our action, is as important as the final action itself? And that's really from the kind of metaphysics of Buddhism that's really what this all this talk about action is pointing towards. If, if the activist organization, if the charity, the school, the hospital, the monastery, if we can be in harmony while we're doing and going in the direction we want to go in, while we're serving what we want to be in service of our harmony and our togetherness is already part of the solution. Because we are, we are showing that as humans, we can embrace diverse views. We can have different ways of doing things. We can take it in turns. We can embrace suffering together.
So, you know, we can hold the pain as a group. And I think part of our in the West, maybe particularly, we don't make enough time for this togetherness aspect. And I think that comes from the capitalist work ethic. Maybe it comes from Protestantism. I don't know where it comes from, but there's not enough time for the being human together.
And I think the global South still has that a lot in their way of being and engaging and acting. But I think in the global north, we've really lost it. And I think that has impoverished our legacy as kind of a human society. And so I think that's a real part of the burnout. But really, on a personal note, I think burnout has so much to do with compassion and to do with allowing ourselves to have limits and to not be able to fulfill all our crazy dreams and to not be able to be everything that people needs us, need us to be. You know, folks need us to be everything, you know, when has the world needed more like, you know, saints and saviors? I mean, heaven's like, this is like, so there's such a need for that. The one answer, the one solution. And to be able to stand in that and allow ourselves to be human, to be, to have our limits, to be broken and still to be lovable, lovable to ourselves, lovable. You know that the earth loves us. And I used to find it really hard to have self-compassion. And then I realized, like, I could have compassion for everything except for myself. But then I did this kind of logical thing when I was like, but if I am the Earth, then I have to also have compassion for myself because I'm also I also belong to the earth.
And I kind of did this like I got there intellectually, but I think it's a lifetime practice to be able to be compassionate to ourselves. And I mean, Sarah, we are both women here. I think women, we often give a lot of ourselves to the next generation. We've learned from our mothers, you know, they wanted to live their dreams and maybe conditions were not really there for that. And so where to where did they empty their hearts?
And so I think there's a lot that we can heal for many generations going backwards. Also of how to care for ourselves, what we care for others and what we care for the earth.
RAY: You're speaking so many truths for me, I'm just taking it all in and I feel like, oh you move on to the next question, but I just need to pause and take it in. It's so beautiful. Compassion fatigue, the gendered aspects of that, the healing of her past generations. What legacy we're leaving how I show to my class burned out from preparing to teach them to be resilient. From the night before you see me, you know, you really see me. That's funny.
Yeah. It's a lifelong practice. And I love what you said I got there. Intellectually, it's interesting because often I'm hard on myself for being so over, maybe over balanced in the intellectual world. Like the intellectual getting there actually is my is my comfort. It is how I heal and soothe myself.
And, I'm often feeling like, oh, I should be feeling it in my body, or I should be feeling it in my heart. And I'm like, no, my head got me there. My head got me there. So yeah, sometimes our head gets us there, sometimes not. Sometimes it gets in the way.
So thank you for at least validating that sometimes our head has to get there and is a practice. Is there anything else that you feel like you'd like to add.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Well I want to say that, you know, you mentioned that we do a lot of work as the Plum Village community with also climate and nature leaders. And this has become really important for us because we feel they're like the architects of the future. All of these, whether it's activists, policy workers, frontline, indigenous folks resisting, corporate forces and trying to protect their lands and heritage. And so there's just such a huge scope of people who, embodying the kind of pragmatism and optimism to build a different world forward. And we really want to support that community.
And it's very deep work. And it's also very affirming work because we realized that, you know, the powers of presidents ultimately is our limited, you know, and that there are so many layers when we talk about systems change and systems, it's actually so many layers to those systems. And there are so many good humans that are a part of those systems and so many good humans having huge impact in the work that they're doing. And and so when we have, being on these retreat experience with climate and nature leaders, you know, they're always talking about impact. And they really find these teachings on action and, and, trust and let things ripen in their own time. They find those teachings really hard.
And so we're often kind of we're offering them doing a kind of dance with them, that it is a lot to do with actually freeing their minds from being too outcome oriented. And so it's like we're like, no, no, no, you still keep you still do your project, but you still do the thing but have more ease and freedom while you do it, because you have a different and deeper understanding of the real fruits of of how you're engaging. And so this has become really a fascinating journey. We've now been doing these retreats for more than three years, and so I think we've now done 8 or 9 of these like weeklong kind of conference dialogs. And it's just really fascinating how we've also grown in our understanding of of action.
And there's the incredible stories of how, when people can touch these insights, their work amplifies and their teams become healthier and happier. It's just so unbelievable. And it gives me a lot of confidence in these teachings, because I know if someone can be more ease with themselves, more free in relation to the outcome, have a really wholesome intention and aspiration and volition, like the kind of things that small teams can do and how those small teams can then grow into big teams. It's very beautiful to see when that alignment is there and when we pay enough attention, I guess, to our, mental attitude, to our insights, to our ways of seeing and being. And then really then you get the impact, but not because you want the impact. It's like it's kind of you get the accidental impact paradox.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think that nonprofit world too, with their requirement to be in compliance and have deliverables and the outcome, it just it seeps into the worldview and into the cells of how their intention, how they show up with their intention. And I love that permission and invitation you're offering these folks. Yeah. You have to do that thing because that's the way the funders saying.
But that doesn't mean it has to shape everything about how you get it done. The how really matters. That's what I'm hearing a lot. And much of what you've offered today is that the how is really it? The how is the way.
So thank you so much for, you want a gift we've offered here to me personally, but hopefully to anybody who picks up this and wants to listen and, and those folks who are listening on the radio, too. Thank you so much.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: Well, thank you, Sarah, and thank you for this amazing conversation. It's it's such a privilege to be able to speak to you. I love your book. I love your work. I'm so grateful to everything that you have offered the world and that you offer the next generation.
And thank you for bringing so much. I want to say loving pragmatism like loving like path. I feel you walk young people and everyone you're working with. You walk us through a journey for how we can handle these things. And with so much heart and so much insight.
And so in the monastery. Your book is one of our favorites. So thank you.
RAY: I can't even take it. I'm flattered beyond description. Okay, I'm gonna have to go take that in. Thank you.
SR TRUE DEDICATION: So good, it’s on the novice reading list. I'll have you know.
RAY: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Yeah. That's amazing. Thank you so much. You're so sweet.
You just heard my conversation with Sister True Dedication, a Buddhist monastic from Plum Village, the monastery founded by exiled Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. You can subscribe and listen to this and other episodes of Climate Magic wherever you find your podcasts. Show notes are at KHSU.org. You can follow Climate Magic Pod on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
