In his book Happiness, Thay writes about how we can create a room or corner in our home where we can sit, breathe, and meditate. Read the passage below and try […]
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In his book Happiness, Thay writes about how we can create a room or corner in our home where we can sit, breathe, and meditate. Read the passage below and try it for yourself.
Every house should have a room called the Breathing Room, or at least a corner of a room reserved for this purpose. In this place we can put a low table with a flower, a little bell, and enough cushions for everyone in the family to sit on. When we feel uneasy, sad, or angry, we can go into this room, close the door, sit down, invite a sound of the bell, and practice breathing mindfully. When we have breathed like this for ten or fifteen minutes, we begin to feel better. If we do not practice like this, we can lose our temper. Then we may shout and pick a fight with the other person, creating a huge storm in our family.
On one summer retreat at Plum Village, I asked a young boy, “My child, when your father speaks in anger, do you have any way to help your father?” The child shook his head: “I do not know what to do. I become very scared and try to run away.” When children come to Plum Village they can learn about the Breathing Room, so they can help their parents when they become angry. I told the young boy, “You can invite your parents into your Breathing Room to breathe with you.”
Practice
A Breathing Room or Breathing Corner is something a family must agree about in advance. When everyone is feeling happy, this is a good occasion to ask family members to sign an agreement with each other. You could say: “Sometimes we are angry, and we say hurtful things to you or to each other. This makes you afraid. Next time this happens, we will go into the Breathing Room and invite the sound of the bell to remind us all to breathe.” If you live with just one child, you can still ask them to sign this agreement with you, so that when you are feeling angry, she has something she can do to help both of you.
If, at that particular moment, the child that you take care of is feeling happy, she will be very eager to agree. As a young child, she is still very fresh. She can use her freshness to help her parents. She can say to either one of her parents: “Follow me into the Breathing Room, and let’s breathe together instead of arguing. What do you think?”
If only one parent agrees with her, then when the other says something unkind, she can take the parent that agrees by the hand and say to him: “Let’s go into the Breathing Room.” When the other parent sees this, it may wake her up.
Once you have gone into the Breathing Room, she has the sound of the bell and the Buddha to protect her. Everyone in the family can sign an agreement that states: “When we hear the sound of the bell in the Breathing Room, it is the sound of the Buddha calling us, and everyone in the house will stop and breathe. No one will continue to shout after that. The whole family can make this commitment to stop and breathe at the sound of the bell. This is called “The Agreement on Living Together in Peace and Joy.” If you can bring this method of practice home, after about three months you will feel that the atmosphere in the family has become much more pleasant. The wounds in the hearts of the children will be soothed, and gradually they will heal.
With the practices offered in Happiness Thich Nhat Hanh encourages the reader to learn to do all the things they do in daily life with mindfulness; to walk, sit, work, eat, and drive, with full awareness of what they are doing. It can bring about a shift towards one of the principles of engaged Buddhism, a shift towards practicing mindfulness in every moment of the day and not just while ‘formally’ meditating.
From time to time we offer multi-week courses related to mindfulness, the teachings and life of Thich Nhat Hanh, and a variety of similar subjects. Please see our schedule of upcoming courses.
Take the Deer Park Monastery and Plum Village community with you wherever you go. The Plum Village app is designed to cultivate mindfulness, compassion, and joy through guided meditations, deep relaxations, practice poems, bells of mindfulness, and other practices — all through a mobile device.
