Hiking Zen with Brother Phap Luu

0:28I have a busy brain. meditation retreats. Founded in 2000 by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Deer Park is a rare kind of space. Quiet but close to the city, rooted in nature, community, and simple practices like walking meditation, gardening meditation, and even eating meditation. One of the monks who lives there is Brother Phap Liu. He recently co-authored a book called Hiking Zen, which explores how something as simple as walking and hiking can become a powerful practice for reconnecting with ourselves and the natural world around us. It teaches us to slow down and live more in the present moment.

1:10I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:24I was lucky to sit down with Brother Faplew at my home in San Diego, which was the perfect setting for an in-person conversation about the present moment.

1:39Brother Fapalu, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Thank you. I actually think I met you in 2006, the very first time I went to Deer Park Monastery. I was the novice monk in 2006. So if you're listening, it's a really cool scene right now. You know, I'm talking to Brother Fapalu and he sounds like you know anybody I'm talking to on Wild Ideas Worth Living but he's wearing a brown robe he doesn't have hair and he's a monk you've dedicated your life as a monk and you know the team knows that Deer Park Monastery and Buddhism was very special to me and we were trying to figure out a way to have you guys on the podcast for quite a long time because nature is such a big part of your lives and when you came out with a book about hiking zen I was really excited.

2:29I'm just curious before I get into your background as a monk tell me a little bit about your background in nature and the outdoors. Yeah well I think it has a lot to do with my dad especially he loves nature my grandpa was a hunter and um my dad grew up loving being out with my grandpa everything got ruined when they would shoot a deer but the part leading up to that he loved so then he became a lifelong hiker and kind of wild wilderness enthusiast so i was always outside when i was young and also my dad was a kind of amateur almost professional water ski my grandpa had a boat shop so he grew up water skiing when that was really getting big in the 60s and he used to do like you know the pyramids where you know people would all be yeah that's so cool yeah or do you know the clown show they'd have water ski shows like the circus clown shows with yeah he'd be the clown on the skis or you know going over the jump and then falling and things like that so but he was also he was a slalom expert in water skiing so anyway i yeah i kind of grew up in that space where it's just it's just natural to be outside all the time and and i think especially when there was difficulty in the family if my parents are arguing and i I mean, eventually they got separated.

4:01The forest was always there as a refuge place for me. And I was a cross-country runner, too. So it's just, and I was right next to a kind of state forest. So I go out with my dog, you know, running, trail running, basically. And I didn't see it as a meditation at that time. but now I see clearly that you go into a kind of deeper state where you forget about any idea like I am this person. I am anything. You just kind of empty yourself in the woods. I always had the feeling also that there's some kind of presence in the forest, behind the trees. You always feel like it can be tough in the forest, but somehow there's some benevolent spirit that's looking out for me.

4:55I had that feeling, that feeling of presence when I'd be in the forest. And I just learned to love also walking in the forest at night, you know, this sense of being with other senses than just my eyes, with my ears, my nose, you know, smelling the contact my feet make with the earth. it's always seemed something very sacred to me.

5:25Along with skiing and hiking near his childhood home in Connecticut, Faplew especially loved running. The rhythmic nature of the sport helped him to clear his mind. After high school, Faplew went on to run cross-country at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

5:45What did running do for you? Hiking is one thing, water skiing is something else, but running is a whole other discipline. Yeah, I think running was really the sport that I got most deeply into. Because on those long runs, as you know, when you're getting 11, 12 miles and you're out, then you get in a space where your body is making this motion, but it feels like there's no effort. and you know it's people call it runner's high whatever it is but there's something that happens that's uh very um yeah it's beyond what you can put into words and it just feels so effortless and so there's something i discovered now later in my life deeper in human evolution about running and the structure of our feet and the Achilles tendon and even just the fact that our head can stay relatively steady while we're running.

6:50That's all what we evolved on the African savanna. So somehow there's something deep in our humanity that we touch when you're running. I mean, I didn't know any of that when I was younger. I just knew that this feels incredible. and there's something you know you're trail running um through the forest and it's how does my how do my feet know where to put themselves you know if you watch your feet moving it's like what's going on like how does it adjust you know and it's just a beautiful kind of flow that happens adjusting to roots and you know stones and whatever comes your way so quickly i mean we We used to, I remember when I, you know, up in around Hanover in Hampshire, we'd be sprinting down the hillside.

7:39And you think this is completely reckless. How can nobody get hurt? And yet somehow our bodies know it's just super fast. How do you adjust to it? So that kind of beauty of the architecture of the human body, I thought it's something beyond what can be described in just words that goes on here. So that was kind of meditation for me. So many people say running is meditation, but you're a monk, so you really actually do think running can be meditation. Of course. After graduating from Dartmouth, Fablu headed to Europe to teach English. While he was there, he met a man in Madrid that would change the course of his life.

8:20A spiritual mentor who inspired him to walk away from a traditional career and begin experimenting with a much simpler way of living. I met this kind of spiritual teacher in Madrid. He's the first one who kind of like looked at me and said, you shouldn't like, don't be a Buddhist, be the Buddha. Because I mentioned something about Buddhism, but he had spent a lot of time in India. And he's the first person I thought who could read my mind. He knows exactly what I'm thinking. And he was living with no money for more than 25 years. And I was very surprised. Like, how did somebody do that? So that got me, his way of life really got me interested.

9:01And I said, okay, I'm going to try to live with no money and see what that means in the world. And so partly it's his example of just meeting him that set me on the spiritual path. But he wasn't teaching meditation. So I was kind of struggling to figure out how to get what he's got.

9:29As he explored alternatives to a conventional way of living, Faplu spent time with an activist community in Spain. The group initially lived together in abandoned buildings before relocating to a quiet rural village. There, they focused on growing their own food and living with a closer connection to the land. But like many experimental communities, differences in perspective emerged, and the resulting tension deeply affected Faplu. I didn't know what to do, but somehow I just decided to stop eating. And I fasted for three days, which is a relatively short fast. But for me at that time, I had never fasted, even for a day.

10:11And I remember sitting in the town square because I felt the violence in this village I was living in. Because we didn't have precepts. We didn't have an ethical framework. we were a bunch of like anarchists living in this village and trying to figure out how to live in harmony but we never talked about living in harmony right so then i i just decided okay i'm just gonna stop eating and fast it was kind of like a protest so the the the violence that i felt coming up in the village and so i just sat in the town center and made like clover tea every day and didn't eat for three days. So that was a kind of meditation practice.

10:54You know, I kind of went in myself and I was aware of my body and I thought there's something really interesting here. I had this intuition, I need to learn to go inside myself.

11:08Eight months after his first fast, Phap Lu returned to the United States. His time abroad had sparked a deeper spiritual curiosity. He moved back in with his mother and he began reading everything he could find on Buddhism and meditation. At the same time, he was juggling multiple jobs to pay off his student loans. The pace was demanding, and the lifestyle felt increasingly out of step with his desire to live off the land and build community. Feeling disillusioned, Phap Lu dove even deeper into his Buddhist practice. We have to get to where you decide to become a monk. I was in that moment when I was in this kind of multi-month depression and just suddenly discovering joy again just by mindful breathing, being aware of my body.

11:59And then reading the Buddhist sutras and about monks at that time, I just thought, wow, I want to do this. I don't care if it's 2 ,500 years ago. I want to realize this in my daily life. So I started looking for places, should I go to Thailand and become a monk there? As it turned out, Phap Lu didn't have to travel halfway around the world to deepen his Buddhist practice. A new monastery had opened in New Hampshire, rooted in the teachings of the renowned Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Phap Lu began visiting regularly, immersing himself in the community's traditions and philosophy. mainly it's learning to be present with our breathing in the present moment right here right now and staying with the breath as a way of cultivating mindfulness so all the practices are helping us whether it's walking meditation eating meditation sitting meditation these are all forms of meditation that help us to cultivate the quality of mindfulness which is to be aware of what's going on within and around us and and then we get in touch with mother earth right what's going on beneath our feet the earth that we touch the plants the animals extended out to the whole changing climate of the earth and how we're influencing that so that that's you see the meditation starts from within our body but then it can go outwards and but the basic practices of breathing, walking, sitting, eating, and mindfulness.

13:38It's just the kind of daily way we cultivate a good habit of being present, especially not getting lost in our thinking, right? And thinking about the future, about the past, but just being fully present with what's here and right here, right now.

14:01Fapulu continued practicing Buddhism while working to pay off his student loans. On the day he made his final payment, he packed his bags and moved to Plum Village, the primary monastery founded by Thich Nhat Hanh in France. It was a decisive turning point. Fapulu lived and worked at Plum Village for years, and in 2003, he became ordained as a monk there.

14:36In 2006, Brother Phap Lou moved to Deer Park Monastery, about 40 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. The 400-acre property includes dormitories for monks, nuns, and visitors, along with a communal dining hall, kitchen, and a stunning and serene meditation room. But most of the land remains wild, with trails winding through a coastal desert landscape of rock, sage, oak trees, and succulents. It feels like a glimpse of what San Diego may have looked like a hundred years ago. When you're there, you can hear the wildlife that keeps its distance from the city nearby. Owls hooting, insects chirping, and coyotes howling at night.

15:20During his time at Deer Park, Vap Lu has helped expand both the monastery's programming and its sense of welcome. He played a role in starting the organic farm and even helps lead a mindful music festival. But one of his favorite offerings is the walking and hiking meditations. That practice eventually became the foundation for a book he co-authored this year titled Hiking Zen.

15:47Let's go into hiking. so many of our listeners are hikers. Why did you decide to write a book about hiking zen? We decided to do a seven-week hike on the Appalachian Trail as a retreat. Myself and my Dutch brother, who are doing the same year as me, Brother Phupsa, who's a co-author. And so we didn't plan to write a book. We just wanted to do this. We really wanted to do this retreat. I mean, we really wanted to spend seven weeks on the Appalachian Trail, but we wanted to see how we could do it as a retreat. And so we walked from Blue Cliff Monastery in upstate New York to Washington, D.C. So that's a kind of precipitate cause for the book.

16:30And that's on the Appalachian Trail? Well, the beginning is on this trail called the Schwangunk Ridge Trail behind Blue Cliff, and then the last week is on the Chesapeake and Ohio towpath. Okay, that makes sense. I didn't know the Appalachian went right into D.C. no no okay i was like a little confused there yeah so then uh it's actually the last weekend uh when we just well fabsa remembers it differently than i do i i i seem to remember the last day we were camping just outside of dc and he came up to me and said you know we've been doing this for seven weeks we should write a book about it and so we just high-fived each other and that's how the book got started is is there a difference between hiking and hiking zen yeah so i think the important part is to recognize how athleticized and even competitive hiking has become and that that's not the default right that there's ancestral traditions of pilgrimage and immersion in nature so i think it's a response to to that i mean there's nothing wrong with being competitive and athletic but if it's the only way we are when we're out in the woods then i think it's it's we're missing a key point which is just being present with the the natural habitat which has nurtured us for hundreds of thousands of years and so it helps us when we slow down a bit because it helps to slow down first to practice mindfulness i mean mindfulness is not slowness but it helps at the beginning to to train yourself to retrain yourself how to do walking how to really be present with the contact your foot makes with the earth being aware of your breathing and so forth coming down being with your body instead of in your thinking so those you know i see it as a kind of balm to the kind of aggressive way we can treat going out into nature we are living walking geological phenomena and we forget that when we we think of ourselves as separate from the earth but i think we've gone too far and we've forgotten how to live in community and how to be in community with the earth and that means being in harmony with the very cells and organs and processes in our in our own body and so i think this immersion in nature of course we can practice meditation wherever we are you know here we are we're in we've got synthetic carpet below us television on the wall i mean it's normal it's a normal household right i mean i appreciate the surfboards make We didn't have a TV for like 10 years.

19:17No, no, it's not. We also watch our teacher's dhamma talks on the television in the monastery. It's okay, but I like that you called me out on that. No, no, it's fine. There's nothing wrong. The point is that that's what most of us live in, right? And so I think that that environment can contribute as well. In the monks' monastery, we live in a building. We just built a new monk's residence building. but what we try to do is to be outside as much as possible so that we can remember and so the daily schedule of the monastery includes walking meditation outside and that was really an innovation and so that practice means that for the 22 years i've been a monk i'm going out every day i'm walking meditation with my brothers and sisters in nature walking slowly breathing so this is this is the training ground this is the basis of hiking zen really so we just extended that out into multi-day trips where we instead of you know having people stay in rooms on in a retreat on the monastery we're actually bringing our own tents and hammocks and packing our own food you know from backpacker pantry or whatever you know i mean it's not like we're foraging for food right but you know we do it together as a retreat so it's simplifying one other thing i love which one of the frequent participants in our retreats told me he said i love doing these events because when i come on a hiking zen event nobody's going to talk to me about gear like ask me why i bought this sleeping bag or whatever and nobody's going to talk about past trips and i thought wow it's true you know so many times you go out hiking and it's like people are like oh man i got this backpack and then two hours later like who cares about the backpack sorry and then the other thing you know it's okay it's and then the other thing is like we talk about you you're out in this beautiful nature and you're talking about trips you took 20 years ago so why don't i enjoy this present moment right and that's the discipline that we train in on a hiking zen retreat

21:30While remaining fully present might seem hard or even boring, it can also be deeply revealing. There is no multitasking at Deer Park. If you're gardening and want to talk to someone, you put your gloves and your shovel down so that you can focus on your conversation. When someone is talking, you are only listening. Spending time at the monastery has inspired me to try to bring this practice into my conversations and especially my own adventures.

22:04How does one hike more mindfully? So I think the first is to be aware of two main things is our breathing and our step and coordinating the breathing in the step. So first, it's just where you are. You might like to take a moment and just practice, you know, stand up and bring all your attention back to the breathing. Of course, you hear my voice, but that's just the guidance. You bring your attention to your breathing and then you take a step. So maybe one step on the in-breath or one step on the out-breath. And you're aware of the contact your feet make with the earth. You're aware of your breathing, you're aware of your step.

22:46and then if you notice you get off in your thinking then bring your attention back to the breathing and reconnect with the step and you can start just in out in out that's slow walking meditation we often do inside outside you might take two or three steps on the in breath and then four steps or three or four steps on the out breath usually the out breath can be a little bit longer. We don't try to change the breathing. We just see what number of steps naturally falls with the in-breath and with the out-breath. And so that bear attention to the step and the breathing then keeps our mind directed in the present moment with our body and our breathing and our step.

23:37Another development you might like to try with your mindful walking meditation is practicing what we call I am arrived, I am home. We don't need to be at this place or that place and say that's the place at home, that's where I feel relaxed. Everywhere else outside of that, I have fear. I just want to get back to that place where I'm safe. You train yourself to see that this moment, right where I am, right where my step touches the earth, that is home. You start to learn how to understand your fear and then how to take better care of your fear so this simple practice of arriving at home with each step so you might take on the in-breath arrive arrived arrived a few steps and then on the out breath at home at home at home and so it's not just repeating the words but it's actually realizing it do you feel arrived do you feel at home is there still that rushing towards a future happiness that you imagine and or are you really able to dwell happily right here and right now in the present moment because that is the the hallmark of a awakened person of a buddha it's to dwell happily in the present moment not to have something out there that we're running after you probably are very aware of the tides right in every moment right and it's like oh man okay whatever i mean i'm not a surfer so i but it's like the tides like this i gotta grab my surfboard and go out and so there's a rushing feeling like i gotta get it before it like goes out the sun's going down maybe there's sharks today dolphins i don't know you know those kind of things and we just enjoy sometimes just sitting on the beach we don't have to surf you know just enjoying whatever is going on like wherever we are we try we train ourselves not to get caught in expectations planning and all these kind of tendencies so really learning to be present free from your plans and your expectations which is the training of hiking zen this training that of just being with the step being with the breath is wondrous existence right it's so interesting many adventurers struggle with FOMO.

25:50Yeah. Right. That's what you're describing. And when I hike, I'm often concerned with the view from the top. I just want to get to the top. And I want to see the waterfall and the vista. I was at Deer Park and hiking with some nuns and they like stopped and just sat in the middle of the hike and enjoyed a snack and water. And I was like, what? Why wouldn't you just hustle and get to the top and then go do that? so we we worked with this trekking company in india we did a few hikes with the first one we went to annapurna base camp and you know we we noticed that it was really difficult to do as a meditation retreat because once we got to the base camp as we were coming down it's that everybody forgot everything about their mindfulness practice so i said okay next time we do backpacking retreat or trekking retreat no destination you know because the destination actually makes it more difficult because it's that habit of like okay when you're going there there's the expectation of arriving and then once you're there it's like okay now we just party and actually it's it shows in the evidence most people get hurt coming down right because they lose their awareness after the build-up of this training to get to the top of the mountain or whatever it is so yeah i mean that that's a metaphor for our life right we try to build ourselves up to arrive at certain attainment, right?

27:18And so that's why you read it in the Heart Sutra, famous Mahayana Sutra, there is no attainment with nothing to attain.

27:32Next time you get outside, try not to get hung up on the destination or the accomplishment at the end of your adventure. You don't necessarily need to meditate, but there's so much to gain if you can focus on enjoying every step in the present moment. You can find Brother Faplew's book, Hiking Zen, wherever books are sold. You can also learn more about Deer Park Monastery at deerparkmonastery.org. I highly recommend a multi-day retreat or visiting on a Sunday, which is their day of mindfulness. You can find out more on their website. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Pierce-Knitsberg of Puddle Creative.

28:22Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.