Dang Nghiem > Quotes

“When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, “Where are you?” A quiet voice immediately responded, “I am here. I have never left you.” I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a “normal life,” which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind.”
― Dang Nghiem, Healing: A Woman's Journey from Doctor to Nun

“As a doctor, I worked with many patients in their dying hours. They would scream or cry, drenched in despair. All their untended relationships and unresolved pain would surge and become uncontrollable. In their last moments, deep-seated complexes would manifest in their mind with no mercy. To die peacefully, we need to live peacefully. But how? We need to take care of our mental formations while we still have time, long before the moment of death.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not,” the Buddha taught. All the conditions have come together in such a way that we are where we are, and we are what we are. To hold on to feelings of regret is to lose the present moment.”
― Dang Nghiem, Healing: A Woman's Journey from Doctor to Nun

“In Buddhist psychology, we often talk about the Five Faculties, which with practice develop into the Five Strengths—trust, energy or diligence, mindfulness, concentration, and insight or wisdom. Of these factors, mindfulness is the foundation.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“Interbeing “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. —THICH NHAT HANH”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“Mindfulness practice rests on key teachings from Buddhist psychology about the mind, as well as the interconnectedness of experience and time. Everyone who undergoes severe trauma faces similar choices: to try to pick up the pieces of our lives and continue as before; or to stop and turn more intentionally toward healing, however that may appear in our lives. While we may not recognize it at the time of a traumatic event, life-changing suffering has a way of being an opening to a greater understanding of life. The “mud” and mess of our most painful experiences can become the fertile ground for the blossoming of our understanding and self-compassion. This is a hard truth to accept if we are resolved to seeing a good life as consisting only of positive events. It is true that the cool waters of happiness are sweet and precious, but it is suffering that carves our cup. The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths acknowledge that life contains suffering within it—but it is exactly this suffering that causes us to seek a way out.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“The Five Strengths work in sequence: trusting in ourselves and the healing process empowers us to take action, which in turn makes it possible to be mindful. Mindfulness leads to deep concentration, which gives rise to profound insight or wisdom, which frees us from the past. Wisdom is the greatest power of all. It guides and sustains us through even the most difficult times by giving us the right view and the skill to work through challenging circumstances in a way that fosters joy and freedom. The Five Strengths are powerful friends on the path because they are the antidotes to their opposites. Trust heals doubt; diligence or energy transforms depression and apathy; mindfulness subdues impulsiveness and recklessness; concentration dispels distraction and avoidance; and insight or wisdom removes fear and hatred. As you develop the Five Strengths, even moderately, your mind begins to be freed from negative energies, and compassion and understanding can flourish. You find more peace in your life, and you learn to avoid chaos and drama. The Five Strengths are one of several sets of qualities that Buddhist psychology offers as a holistic system for awakening, which we can intentionally cultivate to free ourselves from suffering. As an invitation to explore further, we’ll look at how the five main Buddhist precepts support healing from trauma, as expressed in the Plum Village tradition’s Five Mindfulness Trainings—Reverence for Life, True Happiness, True Love, Loving Speech and Deep Listening, and Nourishment and Healing. You do not have to become a Buddhist to benefit from these trainings.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“It is true that the cool waters of happiness are sweet and precious, but it is suffering that carves our cup.”
― Sister Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“When there is trauma involving another person, we may try to cut off the pain by breaking off contact with them. This may be difficult if they are a family member, but it is possible. What is not possible is to separate ourselves from the perpetrator within us. We may change our outer circumstances and try to forget the people and situations that caused us to suffer, but they continue to live within us and disturb us, sometimes relentlessly. Changing our perspective on our suffering helps us respond to it differently. Change is hard to put into practice, however. We are creatures of habit, after all. Meditation is a process of waking up from living on autopilot, so that we can choose a different approach to how we look at our world, and how we react to our perceptions. Changing our mind isn’t only an intellectual or metaphysical exercise. Changing our mind about our trauma affects every aspect of ourselves, because as we now know, the mind and body inter-are. What happens to one affects the other. By meditating and following the path of mindfulness, we will experience moments of insight that open up space in our lives for healing. Similarly, because we are social beings, we find that what happens to one person in our community affects us all, in one way or another.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“For those of us who have been a victim of sexual abuse, there is a teaching that we have learned—that the mud and the lotus inter-are. It is possible to transform the mud into the lotus. Everything is impermanent; everything changes. —THICH NHAT HANH, IN A DHARMA TALK AT PLUM VILLAGE, FRANCE, JUNE 16, 2009”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“The insight of interbeing also taught me that the traumatic experiences I went through are not mine alone. We do not have to curl up in a corner with our pain. The revelations of interbeing can inspire us and empower us to heal ourselves, because we know that when one person heals, that person helps many others in society to heal as well. We are fractal structures of our society. We do not heal in isolation; our healing is collective. When we learn to work skillfully with our suffering, we are not only helping ourselves, we are also showing others that there is a way out of their own hurt. This principle of interbeing applies inside of us too. The wounds of both the victims and perpetrators within us will benefit from our practice and we become stronger and more resilient.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“That was the first time I recognized that the way out of suffering was to turn my attention inward. “The way out is in,” Thay liked to say.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“Thich Nhat Hanh has taught, “The only way for you to transform the pain as a victim of sexual abuse is to become a bodhisattva. You take a vow to aspire to protect individuals, couples, families, and children from sexual abuse. In this way, you become a bodhisattva. And when the bodhisattva energy is in you, the suffering of being a victim of sexual abuse will begin to dissolve.” A bodhisattva is an ideal of a person who not only becomes enlightened for themselves, but also for others; they are an embodiment of compassion. Of course, not everyone who was abused will aspire to become a bodhisattva or even a spiritually oriented person, but this teaching can help anyone to take a step on a path of compassion, starting with self-compassion toward their inner child and radiating outward in their speech, thoughts, and actions toward others. Thich Nhat Hanh’s words gave me the strength and inspiration to live my life as a healer.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“harboring hateful thoughts, they lead to more hate and violence. In the article “From Hate to Love: An Ex-Neo-Nazi’s Journey to Buddhism,” Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist, shared that he had been ruthlessly violent to people of color. After his conversion to Buddhism, when asked how people could inflict pain on others and even murder them, he replied, “Practice. When you practice hate and violence, it makes your life so miserable that nothing but homicide followed by suicide seems to make sense. Things like love and compassion and forgiveness and kindness and all the most beautiful aspects of our human experience not only become unfamiliar but repulsive to you.”*”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness

“My teacher often said, “The way out is in.” What did he mean by “the way out”? He was referring to the exit from suffering, despair, jealousy, anxiety, depression, superstition, and all the mental states that haunt us day and night, giving us no rest. But what did he mean by going in? First of all, “the way in” means to gather mindfulness, concentration, and insight into our own body and mind, or more specifically, into what we call the five “aggregates” or skandhas of our being: our body, feelings, mental formations, perceptions, and consciousness. Instead of looking only at the outward causes of our suffering, we look inward. When we learn to look inwardly at ourselves—with love, but also with a degree of equanimity, to observe how our mental states derive from a sense of our identity as a separate self—we can find a path out of suffering.”
― Dang Nghiem, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness