..续本文上一页topping to be realized. You stop running because you are really there. You stop being carried by your habit energy, by your forgetfulness. And when you touch something beautiful, with mindfulness, that something becomes a refreshing and healing element for you. With mindfulness we can touch the positive things, and we can also touch the negative things. If there is joy, mindfulness allows us to recognize it as joy, and mindfulness helps us to profit from that joy and allows it to grow, and to help us in the work of transformation and healing.

　　There are elements within us that have not gone wrong. There are elements around us that have not gone wrong. And the first task of meditators is to be able to touch and to recognize these positive elements, because they have the power of nourishing and healing. If you are a psychotherapist, you might like to try this with your clients: instead of talking about what goes wrong, you begin to invite him or her about what does not go wrong with you and around you. Sometimes we are too weak and too sick to embrace only our negative elements. Before a surgery is done, a doctor will examine the patient to see whether that person has enough strength to withstand the surgery. If the person is too weak, the doctor will try, through nutrition and other means, to help the patient”s body to strengthen before the operation is done. We so the same thing here. If that person suffers so much, we should not begin by talking about what is wrong.

　　Our body and our consciousness is like a garden: there may be a number of trees dying in that garden, but that does not mean that the whole garden is dead. Maybe the majority of the trees are still vigorous, beautiful. That is why you should not allow the negative to overwhelm us, because there are still many things that work well within our bodies and our consciousness. The therapist should help his or her client to develop the ability to identify these positive elements within him or her, and around him or her. And the therapist, of course, has to be able to do that for himself or herself, and become a co-practitioner. The therapist can invite his client for a walking meditation session, and during that session, he will try to put his client in touch with the positive elements within him or around him. In the Buddhist practice this is very important. Mindfulness is the energy we generate, and first of all we want that energy to help us get in touch with the positive things—joy and happiness.

　　Last week we studied the discourse on the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing, the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing, and we saw very clearly that the Buddha was very compassionate. Among the sixteen exercises of mindful breathing, six of them have the purpose of helping us to contact the positive aspects of life within and around us. That is why meditation can be described as food, nourishment for us. Mindfulness is the kind of energy you cultivate with the practice of walking, breathing, sitting, eating, cooking, and so on. We should not waste a minute in our daily lives. We can use every moment of our daily lives to generate more energy of mindfulness.

　　In Plum Village, when you go to the kitchen, you will see that people in the kitchen are practicing. That group of people knows that today is their turn to cook for the community, and they know that it is possible to make the cooking for the community into a practice, and the motivation is love, the motivation is the willingness to practice. We can begin before starting the work of cooking, they always offer incense, and they do some chanting, so that they will remember that the whole process of cooking is a practice. They don”t talk. From time to time they have to communicate in order to coordinate the work, b…

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