"Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free."
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
Insight: Letting go of physical things can help us to let go of what those things remind us of.
Principle: Avoid physical triggers of negative thoughts and feelings.
"To my mind, the idea that doing dishes is unpleasant can occur only when you aren’t doing them... If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert or a cup of tea, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert or my tea when I finally have them... Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred. In this light, no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: We don't need to change anything to find value in our everyday activities.
"Every person is a world to explore."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: We all bring different levels of self-awareness to our relationships.
Insight: We often overlook what we really need when looking for a partner - like how we want to be cared for, or what makes us feel loved.
"Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person."
- Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love
"If you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and the practice of doing it.
"It has become a habit to reach for the phone or computer and immerse ourselves in another world. We do it to survive. But we want to do more than just survive. We want to live."
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living
Insight: We tend to optimise for the wrong things - busyness, nonstop information, and relevance.
Insight: Unrelenting distraction in the digital world is leaving people unfulfilled.
"We must distinguish happiness from excitement... Many people think of excitement as happiness. They are thinking of something, or expecting something that they consider to be happiness, and for them, that is already happiness. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Being fully in the moment time can feel like it is slowing down, and your world expands.
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that we are all like a wave in water - we can tend to get caught up in the rise and fall with the tide, but we can forget what we actually are - water.
Insight: We are often focused on movement of the wave - optimisation, productivity, efficiency - and if we forget where we come from, the water, we face loneliness and suffering. Without water a wave is nothing.
Insight:Social connections and community are important to our physical and mental health.
"Habit energy is stronger than we are... it is pushing us all the time."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Developing new habits or stopping old ones is difficult.
Insight: We move with routine or social inertia that shapes much of our everyday activities.
Insight: Fighting against "habit energy" can be exhausting.
Principle: Use habit energy to shift toward positive actions - remove obstacles that get in your way.
Principle: Reflect on common behaviours, then set up conditions conducive to the behaviours that you want.
"Before we can make deep changes in our lives, we have to look into our diet, our way of consuming. We have to live in such a way that we stop consuming the things that poison us and intoxicate us. Then we will have the strength to allow the best in us to arise, and we will no longer be victims of anger, of frustration."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Information consumption can impact us in the same way that food impacts our health.
Insight: Garbage in, garbage out - if you want good outputs you have to take care of the inputs.
Insight: One of our most important jobs is knowing what to ignore, what not to do, what not to think about.
"On the surface of the ocean there is stillness...but underneath there are currents."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"After recognising and embracing our inner child, the third function of mindfulness is to soothe and relieve our difficult emotions. Just by holding this child gently, we are soothing our difficult emotions and we can begin to feel at ease. When we embrace our strong emotions with mindfulness and concentration, we’ll be able to see the roots of these mental formations. We’ll know where our suffering has come from. When we see the roots of things, our suffering will lessen. So mindfulness recognises, embraces, and relieves."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Healing our own wounds takes self-patience, self-empathy, and self-love.
"Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life."
- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
Principle: Practice simple tasks mindfully.
"When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?"
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Children need their parents' presence, with less tension and more at ease.
Insight: Being fully present puts children at ease.
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us to imagine holding our difficult feelings in our arms like a baby, and tell the feeling that we are going to take take of them.
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches the Beginning Anew framework for repairing relationships, including with children in three parts: offering appreciation, sharing regrets, expressing hurts and difficulties.
"We don’t need to wait for the complete disintegration of this body in order to begin to see our continuation body, just as a cloud doesn’t need to have been entirely transformed into rain in order to see her
continuation body... If we can see our continuation body while we’re still alive, we’ll know how to cultivate it to ensure a beautiful connection in the future. This is the true art of living."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that if our actions align with our core values, then we live on through the reverberations of these actions.
"No mud, no lotus."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Beautiful things can grow from mud. Suffering is like mud.
Insight: We do not grow, build strength of character without suffering and failure.
"While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Satisfaction does not come from chasing bigger and bigger things, rather by paying attention to smaller and smaller things.
Insight: By thinking about the past or future we are not alive in the present moment.
"Each mindful breath, each mindful step, reminds us that we are alive on this beautiful planet... We don’t need anything else. It is wonderful enough just to be alive, to breathe in, and to make one step."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Life is available only in the present moment. If you abandon the present moment you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Principle: Be mindful of what is important right now.
"Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognise a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: To raise our awareness of the interdependence of all things Thich Nhat Hanh suggests listing our significant achievements and our worst failures and shedding "the light of interdependence on the whole matter to see that the achievement is not really yours but the convergence of various conditions beyond your reach", and that "failures cannot be accounted for by your inabilities but rather by the lack of favourable conditions".
Insight: We should be encouraged to let go of the self-centred belief that our success and failure begins and ends with us.
"Wash the dishes relaxingly, as though each bowl is an object of contemplation. Consider each bowl as sacred. Follow your breath to prevent your mind from straying. Do not try to hurry to get the job over with. Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Mindful awareness can help us notice the wonder in everything around us, not just the beauty of nature.
Principle: Bring mindful attention to everything, even the simplest things such as washing the dishes, or making a cup of tea.
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Scientific studies show that "self-perception theory" - acting "as if" one feels something will result in that feeling - is actually true.
Insight: If you don't feel like being nice, act like a nice person would, you'll become a nicer person and feel better about it.
Principle: Fake it until you feel it.
Thich Nhat Hanh was challenges about his commitment to non violence:
'What if someone had wiped out all the Buddhists in the world and you were the last one left. Would you not try to kill the person who was trying to kill you, and in doing so save Buddhism?’ Thich Nhat Hanh replied: "It would be better to let him kill me. If there is any truth to Buddhism and the dharma, it will not disappear from the face of the Earth, but will reappear when seekers of truth are ready to rediscover it. In killing I would be betraying and abandoning the very teachings I would be seeking to preserve. So it would be better to let him kill me and remain true to the spirit of the dharma."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Smile, breathe and go slowly."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"There is no way to happiness — happiness is the way."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Insight: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us to feel positive energy whenever we breathe in and out.
Principle: When your phone buzzes, imagine it is a temple bell reminding you to breathe and slow down.
"The miracle of mindfulness is, first of all, that you are here."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Key Insights & Principles
Self-awareness
Letting go of physical things can help us let go of what those things remind us of.
We don't need to change anything to find value in our everyday activities.
Mindful awareness can help us notice the wonder in everything around us, not just the beauty of nature.
There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and the practice of doing it.
We tend to optimise for the wrong things - busyness, nonstop information, and relevance.
Unrelenting distraction in the digital world is leaving people unfulfilled.
Being fully in the moment time can feel like it is slowing down, and your world expands.
Developing new habits or stopping old ones is difficult.
Information consumption can impact us in the same way that food impacts our health.
Garbage in, garbage out - if you want good outputs you have to take care of the inputs.
One of our most important jobs is knowing what to ignore, what not to do, what not to think about.
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that if our actions align with our core values, then we live on through the reverberations of these actions.
Beautiful things can grow from mud. Suffering is like mud.
We do not grow, build strength of character without suffering and failure.
Satisfaction does not come from chasing bigger and bigger things, rather by paying attention to smaller and smaller things.
By thinking about the past or future we are not alive in the present moment.
"Acting" as if you feel a particular way will result in that feeling.
We should let go of the self-centred belief that our success and failure begins and ends with us.
Bring mindful attention to everything, even the simplest things such as washing the dishes, or making a cup of tea.
Avoid physical triggers of negative thoughts and feelings.
Use habit energy to shift toward positive actions - remove obstacles that get in your way.
Reflect on common behaviours, then set up conditions conducive to the behaviours that you want.
Healing our own wounds takes self-patience, self-empathy, and self-love.
Feel positive energy when you breathe in and out.
Practice simple tasks mindfully.
Be mindful of what is important right now.
Fake it until you feel it.
Relationships & Parenting
We all bring different levels of self-awareness to our relationships.
We often overlook what we really need when looking for a partner.
Social connections and community are important to our physical and mental health.
Children need their parents' presence, with less tension and more at ease.
Being fully present puts children at ease.
Practice repairing relationships in three parts: offer appreciation, share regrets, express hurts and difficulties.
