The Practice of Mindfulness

　　by Thich Nhat Hanh

　　Dharma Talk given on July 23, 1998 in Plum Village, France.

　　Good morning my dear friends. Today is the twenty-third of July, 1998 and we are in the Upper Hamlet. I will speak in English today.

　　Thank you, young people, for having performed opinion lines. You did very well, but I have to confess that some of you spoke too quickly, and I could not get all of the words. I don”t know how much time each of you spends sitting in front of your television sets. I hear that there are children who spend up to three hours a day sitting in front of the TV screen, but I don”t know whether that is true or not. Three hours, or four hours, that is a little bit too much. Some grownup people use television as a kind of baby-sitter. They don”t have the time to take care of their children, so they ask the television to be a baby-sitter for them. I remember, about ten years ago, I organized a retreat just for young people in Santa Barbara. Many hundreds of children came, because that retreat was for children alone. I have conducted a number of retreats like that in North America and in Europe; a lot of children came, and their parents also came to support them. Dharma talks, Dharma discussions, lemonade meditation, everything was created just for young people. Among these children there were those who had been in retreats, that is why they knew the practice, they enjoyed the practice, and they helped the other children to join the practice, so it was a wonderful retreat. I think I had two retreats like that in a row, in Santa Barbara.

　　I remember that during one of the retreats, a little girl about eight years old came up to me with a sheet of paper on which she had very carefully written the sentence: "I vow not to watch television on weekdays." That statement was made after a Dharma discussion by the children, who discussed how we should deal with television, how much time we should spend for television, and what kind of programs we should watch and what kind of programs we should refrain from watching. That is why that young lady came up to me with a sheet of paper with that sentence: "No television on weekdays." She wrote that sentence several times on that sheet of paper—just one sentence, and when I turned it to the other side, the same thing was written again. It means that she had really made up her mind not to watch television on weekdays. And when I asked her why, she said, "Because I want to have more time for my studies, to have more time to be with my Mommy, my Daddy, my brother, my sister; that is why is promise with you, Thay, and the Sangha, that I will not watch television a lot like before. I decided that I will watch television only on weekends. I asked what were the other reasons, and she said, "On television there is bad stuff, and that is one of the reasons why I will watch the TV less." I was pleased with her practice, and I told the story to other children in the retreat, and I asked whether there was anyone in the retreat who would like to join that young lady in practicing the same kind of thing, meaning to watch television less, specially on weekdays. To my surprise, more than twenty children came up and made the same kind of commitment, not to watch television on weekdays. All of them promised that they would go back to their rooms and write the same kind of sentence on both sides of a sheet of paper. I took all these sheets of paper. I believe that all of these children were very sincere when they made the commitment, and that also made me happy.

　　You know, television is sometimes wonderful, and there are very beautiful programs. You can learn a lot from watching television. You can learn about the lives of animals and of flowers, and about the lives of people in ot…

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