WALK WITH ME narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch (Fragrant Palm Leaves by Thich Nhat Hanh)

Book: Fragrant Palm Leaves by Thich Nhat Hanh Movie: WALK WITH ME As Benedict Cumberbatch’s meditative voice reads extracts from Thich Nhat Hanh’s early journals. 👌 I know what it is to get angry, and I know the pleasure of being praised. I’m often on the verge of tears or laughter. But beneath all these emotions, what else is there? How can I touch it? If there isn’t anything why would I be so certain that there is? 👌 When icy winter comes, it is unforgiving to all things young, tender and insecure. One must grow beyond youthful uncertainty to survive. Maturity and determination are necessary. Seeing the courageous, solid way that trees prepare for winter helps me appreciate the lessons I’ve learned. 👌 At first, it seemed like a passing cloud. But after several hours, I begin to feel my body turning to smoke and floating away. I became a faint wisp of a cloud. I had always thought of myself as a solid entity. And suddenly I saw that I am not solid at all. I saw that the entity I had taken to be me was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could ever have imagined. 👌 Friends want you to appear in the familiar form they know. But that is impossible. How could we continue to live if we were changeless? To live we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible. 👌 I became a battlefield, and I couldn’t know until the storm was over if I would survive. Not in the sense of my physical life, but in the deeper sense of my core self. I experienced destruction upon destruction and felt a tremendous longing for the presence of those I love. Even though I knew that if they were present, I would have to chase them away or run away myself. 👌 When the storm finally passed, layers of inner mortar lay crumbled. On the now-deserted battlefield, a few sunbeams peeked through the horizon, too weak to offer any warmth to my weary soul. I was full of wounds, yet experienced an almost thrilling sense of aloneness. No one would recognize me in my new manifestation. No one close to me would know it was I. 👌 Mountains and rivers, Earth and sun all lie within the heart of consciousness. When that realization arises, time and space dissolve. Cause and effect, birth and death all vanish. Though I dwell a hundred thousand light-years from a star, I can cross that distance in a flash. 👌 I knew early on that finding truth is not the same as finding happiness. You aspire to see the truth. But once you have seen it, you cannot avoid suffering. Otherwise, you have seen nothing at all. 👌 At that moment, I felt perfectly at peace. Not one sad or anxious thought entered my mind. Ideas of past, present and future dissolved. And I was standing at the luminous threshold of a reality that transcends time, space and action. I arose and sat in meditation the rest of the night. All that remained was a deeply rooted peace. I sat like a mountain and I smiled. #ThichNhatHanh #walkwithme #zenmeditation