A Rose for Your Pocket by Thich Nhat Hanh

Author:Thich Nhat Hanh [Hanh, Thich Nhat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-935209-24-9
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2009-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Reconciliation

Our feelings of love for our mother can also be mixed with feelings of anger and disappointment. The energy of mindfulness helps us to recognize our pain about our parents and embrace it tenderly like a mother whose baby is crying. When you were a baby, most likely the minute you cried, your mother stopped what she was doing and picked you up and held you tenderly in her arms. If your mother was not there to do this, someone else did. When we recognize and embrace the pain and sorrow within us, it calms down like the baby in her mother’s arms.

Any rift with our parents is the same as a rift within ourselves, because we are not separate from them. When we are calm, we recognize that there is always the chance for reconciliation, whether or not our parents are still living. Using deep listening and loving speech, we can heal any rift and at the same time heal ourselves.

The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation. I have witnessed many couples practice deep listening and loving speech to heal difficult or broken relationships. Many fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and husbands and wives have brought peace and happiness back to their families through this practice. With the practice of deep, compassionate listening and loving speech, they have reconciled.

During a retreat in Oldenberg, Germany, in the late nineties, after I gave instructions on deep listening and loving speech, four people left the lecture hall and immediately called their fathers. They practiced loving speech and listening deeply over the telephone. They had been estranged from their fathers for a long time with no communication, and they knew they could not let this continue any longer. They didn’t need to go back home in order to do the work of reconciliation. They just called their fathers right away. The next day they told us they had been able to reconcile with their fathers using deep listening and loving speech. Listening to someone with compassion can turn him into a friend. It may be that no one else has been able to listen to that person; perhaps you are the first one capable of listening to him and giving him the relief he needs. You become a bodhisattva, a being who ends suffering. You lose an enemy and win a friend.

A young man came from America to visit us in Plum Village. One day he was asked to write down his mother’s beautiful qualities. Other people were also given the assignment. Richard did not believe that he could write more than three lines. He said, “My father has many good qualities, but not my mother.” However, he practiced like the others and, to his surprise, discovered after a few days that the list had grown quite long.

I think his mother had, at one time, made Richard suffer, and that suffering prevented him from seeing her other wonderful qualities.

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