Thich Nhat Hanh on Healing the Wounds of the Past

The past likes to pop into our heads. Maybe we did something embarrassing ten years ago, or we pine for a certain time or place. Maybe there’s something we wish we’d said to a person to whom we no longer talk. Maybe someone hurt us, or we hurt them…

Often we can shrug it off, after a moment of reflection, and carry on with our days. But occasionally we might get stuck. The same memories come back to haunt us. We retread the same ground, over and over again. The past becomes a stick with which we beat ourselves.

It’s tempting to respond with escape. We pick up our phones, turn on the TV, open a book. We run from the past into distraction.

Or perhaps we try to think it out once and for all. Okay. This happened. Let’s replay the memory again. Let’s look at it from this new (perhaps invented) angle. Let’s analyze every nook and cranny.

But we soon discover there isn’t much our rational intellect can really do: it runs up against the immutable mass of what we have done and what’s been done to us. The past cannot be changed. So shrug it off: back to escape…

In his 2009 book You Are Here, late Vietnamese Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that if we find ourselves in such circumstances, we shouldn’t be surprised that escape and overintellectualization only invite the past to continually appear.

Running from uncomfortable memories is a form of repression. And trying to face them with only our rational intellects can be counterproductive: the intellect can be like a sheet of plastic covering the ground, preventing the rain from nourishing the earth.

While our intellects are right to conclude that the past cannot be changed, the wounds caused by the past are here in the present, Nhat Hanh observes — and it’s these wounds that need our attention. If we only rerun, unpick, reevaluate past events, we ignore the very problem we are trying to solve: how the past makes us feel in the here and now.

If we want to truly move on from our pasts, we need to stop running, give our intellects a break, and actively engage with our experience of the present moment.

The philosophy we need here is not pontification but presence, which we attain through mindful practice. When we connect deeply to what is happening right here, right now, we can reflect on the past without getting lost there. We can heal rather than ignore our wounds: we can cease perpetual preoccupation and show up fully for life.

But this won’t be a quick or easy process. Habits built up over a lifetime encourage us to flee from the present moment, and view efforts to stay there as a waste of time. Mindfulness or meditation practice could even be seen as indulgent or as forms of escape themselves: we might feel like we’re neglecting all the urgent worries we should be thinking about instead.

This is understandable, Nhat Hanh tells us, but wrong. Mindfulness is not escape but vigorous interaction with life.

When we are engaged in a deep way with our lived experience, we are far more ‘alive’ than when we are ruminating, lost in our thoughts, on autopilot, not really there. As Nhat Hanh puts it:

We move about life in our own corpse because we are not touching life in depth. We live a kind of artificial life, with lots of plans, lots of worries and anger. Never are we able to establish ourselves in the here and now and live our lives deeply. We have to wake up! We have to make it possible for the moment of awareness to manifest. This is the practice that will save us — this is the revolution.

So how do we attain mindfulness, and the liberation it promises? It starts with building our attentive muscle: with practicing our ability to anchor ourselves in the present moment.

The gateway for this in much meditation practice is the breath. Perhaps you’re already a seasoned practitioner of such exercises, perhaps not. Either way, here’s the basic idea.

When we attend to our breathing, we arrive to the present. We don’t change the breath, we don’t try to slow or deepen it; we just observe it, paying close attention to how the air fills and leaves our bodies.

As we breathe in, we might say to ourselves, ‘I know that I am breathing in’; as we breathe out, we might say, ‘I know that I am breathing out’.

If a thought or feeling arises, we simply notice it without judgement, and experience its passing as we refocus on the breath. I know I’m breathing in; I know I’m breathing out.

Finding a few minutes within each day to follow this exercise builds a muscle of attention — a muscle that grows stronger over weeks, months, years of consistent practice.

Cultivating this kind of mindfulness, this ability to really live in and notice the present, enhances our life in all sorts of ways, Nhat Hanh tells us. But let’s first consider how he thinks it can help us heal the past.

How can being mindful of the present help us deal with the past?

If an unpleasant memory rears its head, typically we flee from it, or begin an intense intellectual cross-examination — justifying this, evaluating that, swept away by thoughts and images of the past.

Nhat Hanh wants us to instead generate the energy of mindfulness to delve deeper. We follow our breathing, return to the present moment, and pay close attention to the sensations and feelings the memory has caused.

Sadness, remorse, fear, resentment, shame: we examine the texture of these emotions, where they manifest physically.

This can be uncomfortable, even overwhelming. If we feel emotion overcoming us, Nhat Hanh recommends we visualize a tree in a storm:

If you look at a tree in a storm, the top of the tree seems fragile, like it might break at any moment. You are afraid the storm might uproot the tree. But if you turn your attention to the trunk of the tree, you realize that its roots are deeply anchored in the ground, and you see that the tree will be able to hold. You too are a tree. During a storm of emotion, you should not stay at the level of the head or the heart, which are like the top of the tree. You have to leave the heart, the eye of the storm, and come back to the trunk of the tree. Your trunk is one centimeter below your navel. Focus there, paying attention only to the movement of your abdomen, and continue to breathe. Then you will survive the storm of strong emotion. It is essential to understand that an emotion is merely something that arises, remains, and then goes away. A storm comes, it stays a while, and then it moves away. At the critical moment, remember that you are much more than your emotions. This is a simple thing that everybody knows, but you may need to be reminded of it: you are much more than your emotions.

Once we make it through the storm, Nhat Hanh recommends we then soothe our sufferings like a parent would soothe a vulnerable child. We say to our anger, our anxiety, our sorrow, “it’s okay, little one, I am here for you. I see you now, and I am going to take good care of you.”

When we tend to ourselves this way, Nhat Hanh says, sometimes we can gain more insight into the nature of our suffering: we go beyond shallow rationalizations to illuminate the darkness beneath.

Regret over a past mistake turns out, when we attend closely, to be a deeper fear that we are an irredeemably bad person. Rather than endlessly revisit the memory of what first caused this fear, Nhat Hanh wants us to embrace the fear itself: to promise it that, from now on, we will notice it and care for it, to assure it that it no longer has reason to be afraid.

Breathing in, breathing out, we make a vow, in the living present, to look after our hurting parts, and to move forward with them with compassion. Mistakes, selfish words, thoughtless acts — these all happen; it is how we respond that matters now. With our full selves, we commit to beginning anew with presence and good intention.

Of course, this is not a ‘one and done’ exercise. Healing is a gradual process. We may need to weather the storm again and again.

In a particularly intense example, Nhat Hanh recalls an American veteran of the Vietnam war who came to him for help. One day during the war the man discovered many of his friends had been killed by guerilla soldiers. Mad with grief, the man sought vengeance by hiding explosives in a village: the explosives ended up killing five children.

The man was tormented by his actions for years after the war, unable to even be in the same room as children. Here is how Nhat Hanh advised him:

I told him that transformation was possible. “You killed five children, that’s a reality,” I said to him. “Each of these children is crying right now in every cell of your body. I know that. That’s why you have had no peace. So you must continue to look more deeply. Children are dying right now, as we speak, because of war. They are dying for lack of food and medicine at this very moment, and you can do something to help those children. Why do you remain immobilized, dwelling on your guilt and pain? You are intelligent. You know that every day forty thousand children die of malnutrition. You can do something. You can save a child, two children, five children, every day. You must find the will to live a new way. You have to make a fresh start.” He made the decision to devote his life to helping children, and the moment he decided to live a new way, the wound in him began to heal.

Even the darkest seeds can produce redemption, Nhat Hanh thus urges. Running from the past will not heal our wounds. On the other hand, constantly reviewing the past, going over the same (unreliable) memories, will only lead to self-flagellation and false perception. We need to instead focus on attending to the wounds that the past has caused.

The energy of mindfulness and deep looking helps us to break through the past rather than constantly rebounding off its immutability. By acknowledging and embracing our suffering with tenderness and self-compassion, by making a commitment to learn and act with good intentions, we can begin to heal and move forward.

Has the most wonderful moment of your life already happened?

Mindfulness is not just important for healing the past; it’s our ticket to fully showing up for and enjoying life right now.

Hanh asks us: has the most wonderful moment of your life already happened? He suspects most people, even older people, would hope it lies some time in the future.

But if we continue to let the reality of the present pass us by, if we continue to live unmindfully and do not work to cultivate the quality of deeply feeling experience, then the sad truth is that the moment is never going to happen; we will continue to be too preoccupied to enjoy it. Nhat Hanh thus challenges us:

The teaching of the Buddha tells you clearly and plainly to make this the most magnificent and wonderful moment of your life. This present moment must become the most wonderful moment in your life… All you need to do is free yourself from your worries and preoccupations about the past [and] the future…

When I read that passage in Nhat Hanh’s book this week, I looked around me. I was sitting back on the sofa, a coffee resting on my abdomen, rising and falling with my breath. Birdsong and sunlight streamed through the open window. I looked and listened. Patterns of gold, green, and mauve danced along the wall, as music filled the room. Breathing in, I knew I was breathing in; breathing out, I knew I was breathing out. The corners of my vision began receding, like a great blanket was being lifted…

Then suddenly the intrusive thought: ‘This would be great for the newsletter! This would be great for the newsletter! This would be great for the newsletter!’

And immediately my brain was back to planning, plotting, fussing. This sofa is so uncomfortable. You’ve got so much work to do. You haven’t even emptied the dishwasher — and you still need to go to the supermarket. Look lively, Jack! Wake up!

Thus the most wonderful moment of my life eluded me. Or rather: I eluded it. It was still lovely, though, and in those few moments of peace I felt truly lucky and grateful to be exactly where I was.

It may seem a tall order to transform any given moment of consciousness into something wondrous, but Nhat Hanh implores us to realize that moments of consciousness are all we have. Peace and happiness do not exist in the past or in the future; they can only exist within our minds, right now.

“Joy and happiness are born of concentration,” Nhat Hanh advises us, and if we practice infusing our minds with this focus and concentration, if we follow our breathing without judgement and allow calmness to fall, if we drop back to notice the wealth of form and color, the depth of sound and texture, the interconnected mystery at the heart of all that encircles us, then even the most everyday activities can prime us for rapture.

Here’s Nhat Hanh eating an orange, for example:

If I am 100 percent there, the orange reveals itself to me 100 percent. As I concentrate on the orange, I get deep insight from it. I can see the sun and the rain that are in it. I can see the flowers of the orange tree. I can see the little sapling sprouting, and then the fruit growing. Then I begin mindfully to peel the fruit. Its presence — its color, its texture, its smell and taste — is a real miracle, and the happiness that comes to me from getting deeply in touch with it can become very, very great. A single orange is enough to give you a great deal of happiness when you are truly there, entirely alive, fully present, getting deeply in touch with one of the miracles of life that surrounds you.

Happiness, love, peace: these are not abstract ideas but concrete realities we can see, hear, and touch as soon as we focus our minds.

The present moment is our ultimate destination, our true home

Throughout his long and fascinating life, Nhat Hanh was a vocal activist on the world stage. Martin Luther King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. But his pacifist efforts also drew ire: he was exiled by his own Vietnamese government, and various powers tried to arrest and silence him.

Early in his practice, Nhat Hanh said this caused him suffering. He was homesick for his temple.

But as he practiced more, he realized that his true home was the present moment. He could be at home whenever he followed his breathing. He had no enemies: those who tried to hurt him had only his compassion, for they were the victims of fear and anger. He wanted to help them, to free them from the sufferings that dominated their lives.

Our true home is the present moment, Nhat Hanh tells us. Returning to the breath is a gateway through which we can walk any time, to arrive home, and greet whatever we find.

We cannot love or help ourselves or others if we are perpetually elsewhere. We can only truly heal the past and prepare for the future by noticing where we are right here, right now, by knowing that we are breathing in, knowing that we are breathing out, and understanding that from every prison we have the keys to release ourselves. As Nhat Hanh puts it:

There is a lot that needs to be done in society — work against war, social injustice, and so on. But first we have to come back to our own territory and make sure that peace and harmony are reigning there. Until we do that, we cannot do anything for society. Let us begin immediately. What I recommend for all of us is to come back to ourselves and take care of the little boy or the little girl who inhabits the depths of our wounded souls. Then we will be calmer, more understanding and loving, and the environment will begin to change. Other people will benefit from our presence, and we will be able to influence them and our society.

What do you make of Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness practice?

• Do you agree that healing from the past requires connecting to the present?
• Are there times where we need to go beyond our intellects in order to gain insight or change behavior?
• Is anchoring ourselves in the present the key to a good life?
• How have meditation or mindfulness enhanced your life, if at all?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• James Baldwin: Suffering Can Become a Force for Good
• Stoicism and Emotion: Don’t Repress Your Feelings, Reframe Them
• ‘Dao’ in Chinese Philosophy: Harmonizing with the Way
• The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: the Cure for Suffering
• Anātman, the Buddhist Doctrine of No-Self: Why ‘You’ Do Not Really Exist
• Nietzsche On Why Suffering is Necessary for Greatness
• Buddhist Philosophy: the Best 7 Books to Read

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