Buddhist Practices for Busyness, Overwhelm, and Burnout | Brother Chân Pháp Hữu

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24:33Brother Chan Phap Huu:Wayfair, every style, every home. Okay, so we're talking about busyness and burnout. You tried to bring us in a constructive direction earlier in terms of like, what do we do about it? And I stopped you and made you marinate in the problem with me for a little bit. But let's go in a more constructive direction now. What do you recommend on a very practical level we can do with busyness and burnout? On a very practical level, I would say we have to have the ability to cultivate ourselves to even recognize and acknowledge and accept that we are a very busy person and we are stress? Like, is there tension in our body?

25:16Brother Chan Phap Huu:Is our tiredness like really, really not allowing us to be present, right? So acceptance of busyness is first of all, an act of kindness to oneself, like acknowledging that. And then the other aspect is to see from everything that we're doing, like what are the things that is bringing us joy and not bringing us joy? So like to identify it, That's the second noble truth that we speak about in Buddhism. It's like, what is the source of our busyness, the source of our stress, our burnout? And to see and go, aha, that is where it's coming from. This is the root of it. And that already is action. That is already very healing in itself, just recognizing and embracing it.

26:07And then on a very practical level, especially if we're living in busy cities and we're all around concrete or walls and windows, it's very fundamental.

26:18Brother Chan Phap Huu:but if you can allow yourself to just go for a walk in nature, like just to allow the trees, allow the sounds of the birds, allow the whole cosmos to just hold you, just embrace you. We would speak in this kind of language. It's like learn to take refuge in nature in this moment, not taking refuge in more of our stress, our over worrying, our own judgment to oneself. So that's something very practical that I still do today, like just yesterday, very busy meeting day. And after feeling quite overwhelmed, acknowledging it, embracing it. And of course, we have different options, right? We can go on Netflix.

27:00Brother Chan Phap Huu:We can even put on a good podcast, even maybe the 10 % happier podcast. But is it a way to run away and to consume rather than acknowledge and accept? and then practically we have to be more alive in those moments. And what I mean by that is to surrender to the healing energies that are present there. And sometimes it's also just hitting up a good friend, a good companion to share a moment of drinking tea or drinking coffee, to be re-in-touch with the qualities of life that is there, right? Because our mind, we're so good of doing, doing, doing, because the doing, we think we're pushing ourselves away from the stress, but it is just accumulation of more and more tension in us.

27:49Brother Chan Phap Huu:So that is very practical. And that is something that we train in. And there's another arc, and this is going to be maybe even more challenging. If you give it a chance, if you allow yourself to rest, we do total relaxation, right? We can listen to an audio to allow us to really surrender to the ground, like just to lay down and to connect to our breathing, allowing our whole body to just be present, not tensing up our fists, our hands, our shoulders. It's like instead of an x-ray, but it's a mindful ray that we're being aware of where the tensions are in our body. And if we look at our ancestors, right, Our animal ancestors, when the animals are wounded, they know how to stop and rest.

28:38Brother Chan Phap Huu:They're not going to hunt more. They're not going to look for a mate. They have the art of accepting the present moment and they have the art of resting. And we are too good at bypassing that. We have built a quality in our society to keep doing and we have lost the art of resting because our mind is like, if I'm laying there and resting, I am wasting time, right? This concept of time is money, time is to do. And that's why in Zen, Zen masters have said, don't just do something, sit there, right? It's the opposite of what we hear in the world. Don't just sit there, do something. And here the Zen master is teaching us, don't just do something, learn to sit there because it's an art to sit still.

29:25Brother Chan Phap Huu:It's an art to do nothing. It's an art to rest. So very concretely, developing that quality of rest. And try to bring it into your daily life, like little moments of resting. And there was this friend who is a producer. He's actually staying in the monastery for six months because he's burned out from producing. And when he was in touch with our practice, he would listen to the audio of total relaxation or even guided meditation. and the only time that he can really practice it was when he would sit in a toilet when nobody would interfere, nobody would intercept him and ask him questions. And he said, I know it sounds funny and it sounds crazy, but that was my moments of resting and of my own spiritual practice.

30:12Brother Chan Phap Huu:So even a toilet booth can be very holy. I want to see if I can restate that to you very, very simply, and then also drill down even further on some of it. So I'm hearing three steps there. The first step is pretty clear, although I'll restate it. The second two steps I think could use a little bit more unpacking. Again, the question was, what do you do about this busyness and burnout? And at least if I understood you correctly, I heard a kind of three-step recipe. First, accept it. Acknowledge this is the deal. In AA, they say the first step is admitting it, And I think that's true in many aspects of life.

30:48Second step, which I think we should spend a lot more time on, is you made a passing reference now several times to embracing it and transforming it. So I want to hear much more about that. Yeah. And then the third step is like give yourself permission to rest. So that could include a walk in nature. It could include sitting with a friend. It could include a type of meditation that you're referring to as total relaxation, which I also want to hear more about. So am I restating your recipe correctly? Yes, you are. Okay, good. Gold star for me. All right, so let's start on step number two. When you say embracing burnout, I think that's deeply counterintuitive to most of us who don't want to embrace anything unpleasant.

31:31Absolutely. So you have an option, right?

31:34Brother Chan Phap Huu:It's either to not accept it, and that means to not accept yourself, not accepting your state of being in this very moment. and I've learned as an art of love, I think in our society, we think of love is to buy something, to give something very generous. But if we turn inwards, like can we be generous to ourself? And being generous to ourself for me has been learning to accept myself in every state, in every moment. And I think very concretely, I can speak about myself. Like when I touched burnout, I couldn't accept it because I thought I was failing as a meditator, as a leader, as an elder brother.

32:20Brother Chan Phap Huu:I've been practicing for 16 years. And why am I in a burnout situation now? And for sure, for the first year and a half of that burnout, I was just not accepting it. I kept pushing myself. I kept doing, doing, and doing. And then I started to hate everything. I was so toxic. My relationship became so toxic, not the outer relationship, but my relationship to eating breakfast, to seeing my friends, to offering a retreat, to being a teacher, to even being a monk. I didn't want people to see me as who I am because I wasn't accepting myself. And there was this moment when we were having a celebration.

33:02Brother Chan Phap Huu:It's called the Dut. It's the Lunar New Year in Asia. and in our tradition, it's the only time the monks, we would open our residence and we would allow everyone to come in to share tea in our private space. So it's very cozy. It's very intimate in this way. And it's the only time we open our monastic quarter to the nuns community and they're our spiritual sisters. So we get to be hosts. And I just had this moment where I was feeling like I don't belong here. I don't belong here because everyone is so happy, but I'm feeling so miserable. And that was a moment when I was like, okay, we all are sharing the same present moment, but it's very clear that I am miserable right now.

33:47Brother Chan Phap Huu:And I can't fake it anymore. I can't. I can't just keep putting up a smile. I can't just telling people I'm fine. And it was that moment when I just saw myself so broken spiritually, as well as like in this community, that the power was being vulnerable and just saying, I need help. I reached out to some of my siblings. I was like, can you share a cup of tea with me? And they're like, we've been waiting for this invitation because we see you miserable, but we didn't want to also push your boundaries. That practice of acceptance was very powerful for me because it allowed myself to to have a pathway to healing because I wasn't ignoring it anymore.

34:33Brother Chan Phap Huu:I wasn't bypassing it anymore and I wasn't faking it till I make it anymore. And I think all of us, we were very trained to not accept our weaknesses, to not see our tiredness or even our grief or our sadness, or even our despair. Sometimes we don't allow that to be even present. But as a human being, we know that that's all part of being a human. That's the whole package when we're a human being. We have to suffer. We have to experience loss. We have to experience failure. We have to experience impermanence. We have to experience getting tired. But at the same time, we also have the potential to also learn to adapt, to be flexible, to love, to be stronger in these moments.

35:28Brother Chan Phap Huu:Stronger here is, first of all, just accepting it. And that tenderness is a strength in its own way. So for me, when I say learning to embrace our burnout, it's starting to have the lens of a meditator, which is simply to stop running, to embrace it and to look deeply at it. Sometimes I see myself as like when I am in busyness and even burnout, it's like I'm in a fog, a deep fog, and I'm trying to look for the light. But if I just allow myself to be still and to let the fog just settle and the light will slowly come through instead of me just keep even creating more fog as I'm moving to look for a solution.

36:14Brother Chan Phap Huu:So it's the second noble truth that we're talking about, the second step is to embrace it in order to see it clearly. And that for me is when we're able to do that, that's also a transmission we give to our children, our companions, because if I can accept my sadness, my burnout, and when I see somebody else burn out, I can see that they are not perfect because I'm not perfect. And there's an acceptance that is present there too. The more we're able to accept ourselves, it gives us the art to accept others also. That's what I've learned and that's what I've discovered. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.

36:59In my own experience, the cooler you are with yourself, or actually maybe even the warmer you are with yourself, it inexorably transfers to how you treat other people. And conversely, if you're kicking your own ass all the time, you tend to be quite unpleasant externally. Not all of us, but for me, for sure. But let me just get really technical with you. When you say embracing burnout, from a meditation, mindfulness, very practical standpoint, like how do we do this?

37:29Brother Chan Phap Huu:So I would have to say we do have to start from the fundamentals, meaning we have to be able to to establish the first wing of meditation. So when we speak of meditation, there's two wings, like wing of a bird to meditation. And the first wing is learning to stop. And stopping here is not just physically, but it is to come back to the present moment. And in our tradition, we train in the art of mindful breathing. The breathing becomes an anchor for our mind to have a place for refuge. It's not to empty the mind, but it is to invite the mind to focus on, not on the thinking, the stress, but to be concentrated on the breathing.

38:16Brother Chan Phap Huu:And so this art of stopping is establishing what we call the power of presence, meaning we know how to show up. We know that I have a body, I have feelings, I have emotions. So the first practices that we train in meditation is acknowledging the body that we have, learning to relax the body. So in meetings, right, like if we don't have this skill set, when there are things we listen to, we hear, we don't accept, our whole body tenses up. and to apply this into daily life. I do this all the time. Even in meetings, I can practice stopping my reactions, acknowledging, oh, I'm having a lot of tension.

39:01Brother Chan Phap Huu:I'm having a particular reaction come up is in my body. So can I be present for that body? And to just come back to my breathing, listen to what is being shared. So we have to learn to have this power of presence. So really burnout may allow us to have a reckoning. is like, oh, there is a training that I can develop to care for my burnout embracing. So we have to establish first the art of acknowledging, the art of being aware that we have a body, we have tension, we have feelings. So that is the first wing. And then the second wing of meditation is when there is calmness, there's stillness. We have the capacity to look deeper at a subject such as my thoughts.

39:49Brother Chan Phap Huu:Why am I having all of these negative thoughts? It's because of these particular conversations that I had. And then seeing clearly, it gives you some insight. Okay, that is of the past in this present moment. Do I have new views? Are there things that I can learn from that conversation? Or do I keep dwelling on that bitterness that I'm holding? So these are things that we have to develop in our practice of a meditator. And when we have this presence, this ability to be aware, then when burnout shows up for itself, instead of pushing it away, you can say, aha, I know you, you are burnout. You can call it by its name, right?

40:35Brother Chan Phap Huu:Our teacher has this poem called Please Call Me By My True Name. And I still think that it is such a beautiful poem that is almost like a sutra that I want to recite every day because there are so many things that show up in our present moment, but are we acknowledging it? Are we calling it by its name? And calling it by its name is in a way accepting it, acknowledging it, embracing it. So burnout, when it shows up, instead of being afraid of it, we can learn from it, right? When I was embracing my burnout, I had a deep discovery. I was doing research on my own patterns, my own habits, my own views that I was building up, cultivating that my own tendency to be toxic in these areas, and then the tendency to be over idealistic in these areas.

41:25Brother Chan Phap Huu:And so like, it just allows you to see yourself more clearly. And then I think for myself, what was clear when I recognized all this, I became more free. And one of my wonderful colleagues last year in the spring, he looked at me and we were having a conversation. He said, Fapu, you look so much more free. And I said, oh, thank you for acknowledging that. And he said, what did you do? And I literally said, I've accepted that I was in a state of burnout. And he's like, huh, maybe that is why you have been feeling so stuck because you were neglecting it. You were pushing it away. But the moment you were able to see it and even to be with it, to be with burnout, feeling that exhaustion and that exhaustion is in our language, it's like a bell of mindfulness.

42:20Brother Chan Phap Huu:It's a moment to wake up. It's a moment to like take care of yourself. Like how are you sleeping? Are you drinking enough water? Very fundamental things, right? Are you eating fruits? Are you walking in nature? You love exercising, Fapu. Go back to that, like sweat once a day. You love writing sweet messages to your loved ones, right? I became a monk since I'm 13 then. So my time with my family is very distant. And in the early days, like I remember once a week, I would call my mother. And the more you grow up, the more responsibilities we all have. We forget of these very practical relationships to tend to, to cultivate to.

43:02Brother Chan Phap Huu:So I started to just sending my mom a text or a photo, calling my sister, calling my father, just a very fundamental things. And it sounds funny as I'm speaking, I'm acknowledging this. It's like when in chaos, come back to the fundamentals of the things that gave you so much joy and that gave you life in a way. Yeah, I appreciate you talking about this. I think a lot of people will be find it remarkable that a monk, a Buddhist monk, no less can get burned out. And it's so useful that you're talking about it and also talking about ways that you fixed it in ways that we all can. And very practically, when I hear you talk about recognizing and then embracing the burnout, just from a, you know, if you're sitting in meditation, for me, it's like interest, interest in how is this showing up in my body?

43:51You know, what kind of thoughts am I having? You can make the burnout the object of your meditation. And in that way, you're transforming it from a vexation to like a vehicle for learning.

44:04Brother Chan Phap Huu:Absolutely. Absolutely. And by transforming my burnout, our burnout, we don't transmit these tendencies, these habits to our loved ones. Because I know that if I don't take care of this, somebody will have to take care of it for me. Yes. So in the book, you've got these little chapters where you talk about something very practical we can do vis-a-vis burnout and busyness. One of the chapters is on the five remembrances, which I'll have you remind us of what they are. It has to do with death, which, again, I'm going to use this word counterintuitive. Contemplating death doesn't seem like the move that most of us would make in the face of busyness and burnout.

44:44And yet, and yet. So please say more.

44:48Brother Chan Phap Huu:Wow, you are so right. Death is not something that we even want to contemplate and we get scared of it. And when we talk about the five remembrance, which I will share with all of us now. The first remembrance is that we are all of the nature to grow old. None of us can escape growing old. The second remembrance is we are all of the nature to get ill. None of us can escape that. The third remembrance is all of us have to die. None of us can escape death. The fourth remembrance is everything that we cherish today, they're of the nature of impermanence. We will have to learn to let go. And the fifth remembrance is the way forward.

45:40Brother Chan Phap Huu:It gives us an insight of continuation, and that is our truest belonging, our legacies are our three karmas, which are action. Karma means action, and that is the thoughts that we produce every day. It is the words that we speak every day. And it is the action that we enact in our way of being, the way we show up, the way we open a door, the way we tend to someone, the way we care for our loved ones, the environment. They are all our truest belonging that will be transmitted and will, in a way, be passed down from generation to generation. So these are the five remembrances. When you reflect on them, it's teaching you about the art of impermanence.

46:32Brother Chan Phap Huu:And that is a fact. We are all, everything that exists in this moment are of the nature of impermanence. Nothing can stay the same. and yes that sounds very scary it can even be crippling especially if you have a loved one right you don't want that person to be gone you don't want to have to say goodbye but this remembrance can also give you the wisdom and give you the power to not take for granted of the present moment it is not to see that we are limited also from just this body our loved ones are not limited from just them, who they are. But even if they are not here anymore, their kindness, we have received from them and we are their continuation.

47:22Brother Chan Phap Huu:So the fifth remembrance, it has this thread of what we, in our language, we call interbeing, meaning we inter-are with everything that we exist and we respond to. We cannot be by just ourselves. We have to inter-be with everything. We have our parents deep inside of us. We have the education, the teachers before us that have taught us how to love and understand, how to speak, how to write. The wisdoms are not even ours, right? Like what I share, I really feel sometimes I'm just passing it on. And because the wisdom have been passed down from generation to generation, all of these awareness can see that how life is so wonderful for us to even be here.

48:08Brother Chan Phap Huu:There's so many layers of conditions have to come together for us to even be alive, to be present, to be breathing. And then the knowledge that our action is our deepest continuation. It gives us responsibility and agency. Like if I want to be remembered for who I am in a way that can be a support for someone, there are actions that I can produce that they can learn from. Like in the dharma, dharma means in our spiritual world. We have a tendency to speak about the teaching dharma or the written dharma, but our teacher also shares that our way of being is a dharma in itself, our non-verbal dharma, the way we show up, the way we are kind to each other.

49:00Brother Chan Phap Huu:That is our belonging that we are giving. When we meditate on death, and I have, it's very humbling because we are so little in this whole universe and we can feel how precious this life is. And that will, almost like a software update from time to time, like I would do this death meditation for like a software update to not take for granted of the present moment of the community that I'm a part of, as well as the loved ones that I have in front of me, beside me, or even far away from me. And in the monastery, every Sunday after lunch, we would read requests where people would write down by hand or type it out.

49:45Brother Chan Phap Huu:And they would ask us to send our energy of compassion and love to their loved ones who are going through difficulties. And so many of the requests that we always read is somebody going through treatment of cancer, or somebody who has just received a diagnosis that they are on stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four cancer. I remember in the early days, it was very shocking to me because I was so young and alive. And so to know that there are people getting sick every day can be actually very enlightening, right? And it can allow us to touch life deeper, to have the agency to live deeply this moment and not to be afraid of impermanence, but knowing that we are of the nature of impermanence actually can give us so much power.

50:37I totally agree. I've tried to get into the habit recently of doing the five remembrances first thing in the morning and right before I go to bed. And it, I mean, it's a huge dose. As my wife, the former doctor would say, a bolus, that's the medical term for a big dose of perspective on your busyness, on your burnout, on everything, on your grudges, on all the stuff.

51:01Coming up, Brother Fapu talks about the practice of total relaxation. That's his term. We talk about how to have healthy boundaries without armoring up too much, how to say no without pissing people off too much, and how to protect yourself in toxic environments.

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52:13Just to reset this conversation, we're talking a little bit about the remedy for burnout. We've described three of the steps. The first is to recognize it. The second is to embrace it. The third is to start giving yourself permission to rest and can include a walk in nature. It can include calling a friend. It can include contemplating the five remembrances, contemplating death. It can also include a practice that you've described as total relaxation. I'd be curious to get you to describe that practice so that we can do it on our own if we want.

52:47Brother Chan Phap Huu:Total relaxation is a gift that you can give to yourself. In Europe, I'm not sure if in North America we have this habit. I learned it more when I was in France. All the stores would close from 12 to two o 'clock. Like that was such a shock for me when I moved to France. I was like in North America, everything is open almost 24 hours a day, right? And everybody would go into siesta, which is sleep. And that was when I discovered the power of naps, the power of relaxation. It's a dosage of resetting yourself to move forward throughout the rest of the day. And so total relaxation is an art. you would allow yourself to lay down.

53:32Brother Chan Phap Huu:And if you are a skilled practitioner already, you can come back to your breathing. I would normally put my hands on my stomach and I would just feel the rising and falling of my breathing. I can see my mind like very active. And it's like a fan. You know, when you turn off a fan, it doesn't stop right away, but it has to slow down. So from following my breathing with the feeling of it, I'm not thinking about the breath, but I'm feeling the breath, I can see my mind slowing down, coming home to the body, breath by breath. And then when you feel you've established yourself in the body, then what we do is we would bring our awareness of mind from the tip of our head, like being aware of our forehead, if there's any tension there, and then being aware of the eyes.

54:23Brother Chan Phap Huu:And we go through our body parts one by one. if we have a lot of time, we can go even deeper into our organs, our heart, our lungs. Our teacher would explain it. It's like we're using our mindfulness as a ray of care and presence. And just to be grateful, I still have good eyes, right? I can breathe. I can hear. Two years ago, I discovered that I was grinding my teeth at night. I never grinded my teeth then. And I think This is due to stress. This is due to all the doings that my mind was so active. And in the nights, it continues. And I was at a doctor and he's like, do you know you grind your teeth?

55:03Brother Chan Phap Huu:And I'm like, absolutely not. He said, yeah, you need to get a mouth guard. And that was a moment of reckoning and accepting. And so after that realization, I start to see in the day when I get tense, I would bite down really hard, right? So it's almost like resetting and acknowledging habits that we have developed. So being with the body, you get to learn to relax the different parts of your body. And then you would just gently go from part to part. And if there are pain anywhere, you can spend a little bit more time there just to breathe with it. And you can even put your hands on the places where there's a lot of tension and pain.

55:45Brother Chan Phap Huu:And this art of total relaxation has really established this art of being so present for the body that it has come into play for me and has been so helpful when I had to go through surgery. In 2024, I had an ACL surgery. It's not life-threatening at all, but I was so present for my body then. And when I was going through all of the examination, even before surgery, like you're in the hospital and there's so much going on and your mind becomes so afraid because you're about to be opened. Like they're about to cut you open, right? I even wrote on my right knee, like not this knee because I'm like, don't cut the wrong knee open.

56:26Brother Chan Phap Huu:But your fear is so strong, right? And I can come back to my body. I can come back to my fear. One of the doctors were preparing me and they had to inject some anesthetics to numb my whole leg and they had to go through the back. And the nurse was asking me, do you want an anxiety shot to make sure that you're not so anxious? And I was like, no, I'm actually okay. And the nurse was, because they don't know I'm a monk because I'm not in my robes. I'm in the hospital wares. The nurse was like, are you sure? You're very young. And I said, I'm actually feeling very calm right now. And she's like, you are?

57:02Brother Chan Phap Huu:Like, how are you doing this? And I was like, I'm actually a monk. And I've been a monk for 20 something years. It was thanks to not allowing my fear to take over and I can trust my body. And I was even in that moment of waiting for the doctors to come and to operate. I was having a relationship with my knee and I was saying, dear knee, you're going to have surgery. They're going to take a ligament from your hamstring and to replace the ACL. oh, da-da-da-da. And it was this moment of like just deep relationship to the body. So this is one of the fruits I was able to put into action when I was very afraid of what can happen.

57:45Brother Chan Phap Huu:So the total relaxation is an art of learning to really be there for yourself. And this is something that we all can do. And this is where the list comes full circle, because if the first step is admitting it and the final step is giving yourself permission to rest, well, total relaxation or what sometimes we refer to as a body scan, where you're sweeping through the body mindfully, that boosts your capacity to know when you're too busy or when you're rushing or when you're burned out. And that's crucial because the body is the early warning system. And if you're not listening to it, things can really get out of control.

58:26I do want to say that the first book really dwells on busyness and the countermeasures of rest. Part two is about healthy boundaries. And I'm curious, you could have written a book about busyness and burnout without talking about boundaries, but you decided to. Why?

58:46Brother Chan Phap Huu:So there's many factors. And one of the insight of learning to rest is learning to have boundaries, right? Learning to say the sacred no, right? That has been very enlightening for me. It's almost become a mantra that I would use a lot now. Like I'm sure, Dan, you have a lot of invitation and you get a lot of requests. And if you don't have boundaries, if you don't know where your limits are, and you don't know how to care and protect yourself, you can be eaten up by the world, by the demands of the world, by the needs of the world. Even sometimes it is the noblest request, but we have to also honor our limits and our capacity.

59:32So the boundary I have discovered from my own journey of burnout is learning to say no, learning to know my limits, learning to be with people, loved

59:47Brother Chan Phap Huu:ones, and even environments when I'm not strong enough to be in a position of facilitating because I'm limited right now. And these are boundaries that if I can be clear to myself, that's like one of my good friends, my soulmate, she was a nun with me and she's not a nun anymore, but we're still very close. And she says that clarity is kindness. When you can be clear, that can be an act of kindness. When somebody asks you to do something and I have a habit of people pleasing and I'm still working with this. I want to be there for everyone. I want to show up for everything. and there's so many times that I had to show up, but I couldn't even give my full presence.

1:00:30Brother Chan Phap Huu:I couldn't even give my full joy and love and I wasn't really in service for anyone. I was almost like just feeding my ego or feeding my inferiority complex of like, if I don't show up, what would they think of me? Learning to have clarity for oneself and the clarity of limits and capacity and not to see that the limit is there and it's always going to be like that. But no, in this present moment, this is my limit. But the future, tomorrow, the week after, the year after, I may have more strength to show up. I may be more flexible in offering my time and space. So these are the boundaries that I feel it can be very enlightening for oneself to see ourself, to know our limits and our capacity.

1:01:20How do you set these boundaries? How do you issue a sacred no without pissing people off?

1:01:27Brother Chan Phap Huu:I think that we're always going to piss somebody off. That's the truth. Recently, okay, this just happened a few days ago, so I can, it's still so alive for me. So there was a request for our community to do something. And it was a very beautiful request. It was even very noble from a lot of generosity. And in the meeting, the brothers, the monks, we felt we're out of our capacity right now. we're limited in strength in numbers and we're doing so much already in 2025. And so I wrote, I think one of the kindest no I can say, I offered that replied. And then the reply back I got a day after was, thank you so much for looking into our request.

1:02:13Brother Chan Phap Huu:But I have to say I'm very sad and I'm very disappointed. And maybe we can talk about it. But thank you. I was taken aback. I was feeling sad too. When we have to say no, there's a sadness that I feel. But the word disappointed kind of left a thorn in me. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's a request. Of course we can say no. But you're disappointed because we can't take on your offering. I felt, huh, somebody's not happy, right? But my practice now is not to water more of that seed. So I replied back and I said, thank you so much for sharing your feelings. And honestly, I also feel very sad.

1:02:54Brother Chan Phap Huu:But my practice is I take refuge in my community. I'm just one member, even if I'm the abbot. I was very enthusiastic about the requests. And I said, well, I did prepare them, like be prepared to receive a know also. But who knows? But then I can always turn back and take care of my inner feelings and my inner judgment. At that time, I was being very judgmental too. My mind was like on year five. I'm like, why are you disappointed? You don't have a right to be disappointed at that. And then that's out of my control, right? So the boundary is like, there are some things that are just out of your control.

1:03:30Brother Chan Phap Huu:And what you can do is to acknowledge what is your inner podcast, your inner radio station, which is your mind, what is it producing in that moment? And that's going to be a leakage of energy. So how do you plug that leak right away? You have a chapter called Don't Let Boundaries Become Barriers. What does that mean? So it speaks about our potentials. Maybe as a novice, I had a lot of boundaries. We are instructed to be very mindful of our surroundings. Like, I would barely go into the cities in the early days because the stimulation from the cities can make my mind so busy. So my boundaries was to stay in the property of our monastery because it's very protective to my beginner's mind, to my training, to my young sprout of aspiration.

1:04:23Brother Chan Phap Huu:But as I continued to develop my stability and my faith to the path became stronger so I can open my boundaries wider and not allowing it to be an obstacle for me to engage. And now as a monk, I travel so much more where I am now in my monastic life as a Dharma teacher and as an abbot. Sometimes I have to go to conferences. I have to go to places that are not the environment of a monastic. But my inner clarity is very firm. So that doesn't become an obstacle for me to engage anymore. So our boundaries at the beginning can be a safe haven that we curate to protect ourselves, to nurture, to develop the strength we need to.

1:05:11Brother Chan Phap Huu:But when that strength is there, we can start to keep opening our path of service, of engagement, of being present for. And that is where we have to have non-duality in our practice, right? There are moments that the boundaries are guards, but then there are moments when we have to be open. I give an example. Whenever I go home, TV is turned on every night. You know, in the monastery, we don't have that. But I'm not going to go home and tell my parents, a monk is here, turn off the TV. No, no, no. I see that that's very rude. So my boundaries have to be more embracive, have to be very open. And I have learned that no matter who we become in life, a podcaster, a speaker, a monk, when you go home, you're still a child.

1:05:59Brother Chan Phap Huu:You're still your mom's son and your mom is still your mom. Your dad is still your father, your sister is your elder sister. At home, I'm not a monk. I'm a son. And that was a new opening for me because I would go home in my early years and I would try to be very mindful and try to get everybody. engaged with like eating in silence. And then it became so awkward for me. And how he's like, okay, this is so not productive in my family time. And then when I was opening myself up more, like my mother loves the NBA. She loves watching basketball. Like our team is the Toronto Raptors, right? My mother would know all the players of the Raptors team.

1:06:40Brother Chan Phap Huu:And my way to connect to her was when we were watching together the NBA every night when I was home. And my mom is a hard worker. And I would find a way to connect to her because my mom is also a very shy person, maybe introvert by nature. And it's very hard, especially in the older generation, to open up, right, to have a conversation heart to heart. Besides the how are you, have you eaten? That's the love language of our mother. But I remember I just started to massage the shoulder of my mom. And I said, mom, would you like me to massage your shoulder? She was like, oh yeah, I have so much tension.

1:07:21Brother Chan Phap Huu:And as we're watching TV and I'm massaging my mother's shoulder, I had some of the best conversations because I can ask her how her day was, like when she was young, what was her joy? And she's a refugee and she had to leave Vietnam after the war. And I was like, what was the job career that you had to change, coming to Canada, not having an education, not being able to speak English, the early days working two jobs a day. And suddenly I can enter into a very intimate space with my mother. So our boundaries don't allow them to be the defenses, the barrier for deeper connection. So the boundaries can be used to care and to hold, but then you can keep opening them up.

1:08:08Yes, I like that a lot. Because creating boundaries can be healthy. And if you take it too far, it can be armor, self protection in a sometimes not the best way. Let me go back to boundaries, though, because in our remaining moments, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about protecting ourselves from toxicity in the environment. You've got some chapters on transforming toxic feedback and protecting yourself against toxicity and abuse. I'd be curious to hear if you have any practical advice on how we can do some of that.

1:08:44Brother Chan Phap Huu:Wonderful question. And I'm just reflecting on my practice right now. So yeah, to let everyone know in the monastery, we also have moment of toxicity manifesting when people are just not kind, even in our deepest aspiration of learning to be kinder. There are moments people's inner demons come out, even my inner demon come out. Those moments can be, it can disrupt and it can divide the whole community and how do we handle it is the biggest offering. And what comes to my mind right now is I do a lot of facilitating of meetings and from time to time we would have a very large body of monks and nuns meeting.

1:09:29Brother Chan Phap Huu:And there is from the eldest to the youngest in it. And there was a topic that we were discussing and a monastic offered a view. And this monastic was quite senior in our community. And the view was in a way very narrow and can even be seen as toxic. And I was facilitating and I can feel the whole room, the energy getting suffocating. It was suffocating. Like the breathing was heavy because everybody is going inwards to take care of their emotions that are coming up. And after the sharing, nobody spoke. So when nobody speaks, that means, you know, there's a lot going on. Like this senior monastic has shared something and there is fear of offering back a response.

1:10:20Brother Chan Phap Huu:and my practice was as a member of the community, I'm still going to see that monastic as a human being, as a member of my community. So I'm equipping myself that this is still a member of my community. I'm not going to label this person as an enemy. I'm not going to give this person a label. And we all practice giving people labels all the time, right? And we cut them off from our life. We cut them off from our inner circle. And when I was able to equip myself with that insight that this person, even though this person have shared this view, but this person is still somebody who has potential for understanding.

1:11:03Brother Chan Phap Huu:Whether that's true or not, I have to practice to see that in them. And then when I was able to see that, I was able to share and I acknowledged the person sharing. And I said, thank you for offering your view. And I would like to offer my view to the community. And I was very proud of myself because in that moment of speaking, I was still able to smile, not a smile of like, I'm better than you, but a smile of just recognizing that I'm living in a very diverse community and we all have the rights to have views. And I was able to take care of that toxic fear. I think for me, it's more the fear when I see toxicity because I have more fear towards that because in toxic environment, there's a power dynamic that goes on and I become very afraid of that.

1:11:53Brother Chan Phap Huu:And when I was able to acknowledge and embrace and to see that that person still has the potential to be a Buddha, that person still has the potential to be a compassionate person, I can speak to them to the heart and speak to the community to the heart beyond what was just shared. And that is a practice that I continue to do. So when there is toxic people, and there are numerous toxic people in this world, as a practitioner, I still have to see the potential of love and understanding in them. And our teacher has a poem and it's in the book. It's called Recommendation. And Thay wrote it during the war of Vietnam, the American war or the Vietnam war.

1:12:37Brother Chan Phap Huu:Thay said in that poem is that man is not our enemy. Our enemy or what we are facing is the ignorance, is the wrong view. It is the discriminative view. It is the anger, the frustration. It is the misunderstanding. That is what we are facing. It is not the man. It is not the human. So that is a practice that I still apply today to toxic environment. I still have to see the lotus in the mud. This is quote in our tradition, no mud, no lotus, meaning the lotus can only manifest from the thickness of mud. And so even in a toxic environment, you can still see some gems there. And I know it sounds idealistic, but if you give yourself the chance and the ability to see the potential in people, you may be able to touch something quite deep in them.

1:13:37Brother Chan Phap Huu:We talk about peace a lot, but peace is not so present or not never enough. But have we given peace an opportunity? Have we ever given the toxicity an opportunity to transform? And I have to believe in transformation. So that is my, in a way, my resilience that I build. In our times, we have to develop that resilience. You said it sounded idealistic, but I just want to back you up and say that it's actually very practical in my view for a number of reasons. One, as you stated, if you're approaching problems, not from a standpoint of hate and otherizing and violence, but from a standpoint of to be super gooey here, love, compassion, warmth, seeing that everybody has innate goodness, even if there's a lot of mud preventing the lotus from reaching the light of day.

1:14:37Well, actually, it gives you a resource because operating out of that stance as opposed to anger, it's a much cleaner burning fuel. When you're in that mode, it boosts the odds that you're going to be able to reach the other person. Because if they sense that you're approaching them with openness and warmth as opposed to hatred or violence or whatever, they're going to be more receptive to your ideas. Because I'll stop there, but just a long way of saying I really agree with you and it could be dismissed as idealistic, but in my view, it's actually anything but.

1:15:13Brother Chan Phap Huu:Thank you. Thank you for confirming that. Before I let you go, let me just ask the two questions I ask at the end of every interview. One is, is there something you were hoping to get to that we haven't gotten to? No, I think we went deeper than I thought we would go. I'm glad to hear that. And the final question is just, can you remind everybody of the name of your new book and anything else, like your podcast, anything else that we should know about that you're making that we can go check out? Thank you, Dan. The book is called Being With Busyness, Zen Ways to Transform Overwhelm and Burnout.

1:15:48Brother Chan Phap Huu:And it's co-author with myself and my podcast partner, Joe Confino. Me and Joe Confino, we also offer a Plum Village podcast called The Way Out is In. So if you are interested in a zen approach to daily concerns and daily topics, please feel free to check it out. And I talked about total relaxation and some of the practices that can help ground yourself. We also have a Plum Village app and everything is free. There's no advertisement. Feel free to explore. It's called the Plum Village app. And there's a lot offered there and some from myself, but there is a multitude of monks and nuns as well as lay practitioners that offer meditations, conversations, and so on.

1:16:36Brother Chan Phap Huu:And a lot from our teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, which you may not have heard of or you may have heard of. He is the founder of our tradition and my podcast partner would call him the famous Zen master you never heard about if you haven't heard about him. But please feel free to explore. And Dan, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, as well as all of my other brothers and sisters that I also get to hear from their conversation with you, which is such a delight. And thank you for bringing the monastic into this space, allowing us to show up. It's a pleasure. I love the Plum Village tradition.

1:17:12So more. I'll take more. And from time to time, I may have to say no. That's fine. I will not be disappointed in you. Thank you.

1:17:25Thank you again to Brother Fapu. Always great to talk to him. Don't forget that there is a bespoke, custom, guided meditation to go with this episode designed to help you experience some relaxation in a chaotic world. That meditation is from Don Mauricio. You can get it over on danharris.com. As I mentioned at the top, we're now doing this thing where every full-length episode, every Monday and Wednesday episode will come with a guided meditation from the Teacher of the month and the teacher of the month this month is Don Mauricio. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show.

1:17:58Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great people over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:18:48We'll be right back. See mudflapink.com. The Mudflap's lead card is issued by Celtic Bank or Community Federal Savings Bank. Pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc.