This talk by one of our most senior dharma teachers, Sister Thoại Nghiêm, is the second in our Autumn Rains Retreat. Whether we are part of a couple, a family, or a lay or monastic community, Sister Thoại Nghiêm asks, "How can we live happily and enjoy being together?"

In more than 25 years as a nun, Sister Thoại Nghiêm has found that the key lies in our own inner peace and in patient, skillful and loving communication. With warmth and memorable stories, she paints a vivid picture of happiness in community, and shares the pitfalls to avoid and skills to develop to realize this happiness in our own life.

Sister Thoại Nghiêm begins by describing what bonds us together in a spiritual community or a spiritual friendship: our ideal, our devotion, our deepest wish. Yet sometimes even with such a firm foundation, relationships and communities often begin with a lot of joy and happiness, but don’t end as happily. In those cases, she asks, what goes wrong? And what can we do to ensure instead a path of enduring and deepening happiness?

According to Sister Thoại Nghiêm, if we wish to truly see “peace everywhere around us”, then first “we must have peace within us”. When our spiritual practice is not yet mature, however, it is natural and beneficial for us to take refuge in the peaceful energy of a community. Indeed, she regards this as vitally important, especially when there is turmoil and instability in our society and our immediate environment. We all need to be understood, to be loved, to belong, and to be supported by the strength of a community. Everyone who comes to a retreat in Plum Village is encourage to join or start a community when they return home. But living together is not easy, she says, and as we develop in our practice of peace and harmony, we must pay special attention to the way we relate to our own ideas, and what we regard as most important.

When we live in community, Sr. Thoại Nghiêm says, we often agree on the big things, but we may disagree on the little things. We often differ in our desires, our likes and dislikes. But if we are sure our own idea or perspective is correct, what room does that leave for other people’s ideas? In a monastic community, we train to share our idea, and then let it go if needed to support the broader consensus of the community. Our elder sister reminds us that this is a training! “It takes time”.

Sr. Thoại Nghiêm shared the wisdom that an elder sister once passed along to her: “Even if your idea is the best, the community is not at the same place [right now].” Sometimes our community is simply not able to understand or support a particular aspiration we have, but that doesn't mean things won't change in the future— and Sr. Thoại Nghiêm tells us not to worry. That has happened often to our teacher Thầy (zen master Thích Nhất Hạnh).

Our sister reminds us that the most important thing is that we are happy in our community, and that becomes possible when we remember and reconnect to our love for the community. When we love someone, she says, we have the energy to overcome obstacles and to protect that person. We have the energy to accept and look past shortcomings, and to make that person happy. She tells us that the same is true of our relationship to a community, and it is the key to long-lasting happiness in that relationship.

Sr. Thoại Nghiêm tells two memorable stories to illustrate the importance of double-checking our perceptions. When we feel that there is someone who doesn’t like us, who gives us trouble, we must look more deeply to understand them and their suffering— or else, as in one of the stories, we may magnify the misunderstanding and its suffering many times over. Once we have looked deeply, we will be able to accept the other person; to remove the label we have placed on them; to live in harmony with them. Yet first we must understand ourselves. Otherwise, we will project our desires and insecurities on them, and ask the other person to change. In fact, the only person we truly have the power to change is ourselves. By understanding ourselves and the other, and by being willing to change in order to love better, we will be able to offer true help to the relationship, to our dear ones and to the wider world.

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