Produced by award-winning filmmaker Gaetano Kazuo Maida, director of Peace is Every Step. Introduced by legendary writer and activist Joanna Macy. Filmed before a live audience of 3,500.
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My dear friends,
I like to describe my practice, my teaching, as the practice of arriving, of going home. There is a beautiful poem that we use to practice arriving and going home. It is like this.
I have arrived. I am home,
in the here and the now.
I feel solid. I feel free.
In the ultimate I dwell.
And of course, we may practice mindful breathing with that poem. When you breathe in, you practice arriving "I have arrived". And when you breathe out, you practice being at home. "I am home." You may enjoy doing that several times, and then you switch into "in the here and the now". It means, "I have arrived in the here, I am home in the now." "I feel solid." That's when you breathe in. "I feel free." That is while you breathe out. At first you may feel that you are not so solid. But if you continue the practice you get more solid. And you get freer. And then the last line is, "In the ultimate I dwell."
To me, it is very important to go home, to arrive. In order to make peace with ourselves, with our society, and with the people we love. Sometimes we suffer a little bit too much, and we want to go away, to run away from home. We have the impression that at home there is only pain, suffering, deception and we go and take refuge in something else. Maybe in the past or in the future, or in our projects. Even projects for social change. Learning to go home, to arrive, is important. We go home to the present moment. We go home to the here and the now.
Sometime we don't want to go home because we have the impression that it is not pleasant. Back home there is things like violence, fear. Back home there is things like Haiti, Somalia. We ant to forget. Going home, we are afraid of touching our pain of touching the war within. Sometime we find ourselves at war with another person. Maybe with our family, with our society, with our tradition. But we may learn that when we are at war with someone else, there may be war within us. And that is why we don't want to go home. Of course, there is war within and around us. But there is something else. There is also peace and joy. And you we should learn to go home in order to touch the joy and the peace within us and around us. And this is very important. Because all of us need to be nourished to be stable, in order to be able to go further to do something for the people around us.