The Ten Gates - Lessons from the Book, "Nothing to It" with Brother Phap Hai

Today we are pleased to bring you part one of the transcription from The Ten Gates - Lessons from the book, Nothing to It with Brother Phap Hai.  This is a twelve week course to help lead you on the road to spiritual and mental health.

Whether we're walking, whether we're sitting, whether we're standing, whether we're together with others. To really choose to be there, in that moment with that practice a hundred percent, and to look at the places that we hold back, [and] the situations that we hold back, that we're not as open as we could be. For me, that's really the essence of the winter retreat. To choose to be there, in every moment a hundred percent. So that might be a very welcome and timely invitation for us.

Very often we struggle against where we are. In this moment, we want to be somewhere else. With someone else. Doing something else. So [Tee]'s teaching in the last week really hit home. And it reminded me a little bit of a teaching he gave back in 1998. He was sharing about the [Plum] Village style of practice. And he shared that in the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies, which is another name for [Plum] Village, and the [Plum] Village tradition, one hour of study should equal seven hours of practice. That for every hour of study that we do, every hour of book learning, we need to have seven hours of putting that into practice. Many of us are very, very good at learning a lot of Buddhist terminologies and concepts, and reading a lot of common-tries and things but, we're not so good at actually taking those concepts and ideas and applying them to our daily life. For me, this winter retreat in this course, it's an invitation for us to look deeply and to see how we can apply the things that we're learning into every moment of our life as an active transformation.

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