How Can I Be More Compassionate and Centered?

Thich Nhat Hahn is an expatriate Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist. He joined a Zen monastery at the age of 16, studied Buddhism as a novice, and was fully ordained as a monk in 1949. In the early 1960s, he founded the School of Youth for Social Services in Saigon, a grassroots relief organization that rebuilt bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, and resettled families left homeless during the Vietnam War.

He traveled to the U.S. a number of times to study at Princeton University and later lecture at Cornell University and teach at Columbia University. His main goal for those trips, however, was to urge the U.S. government to withdraw from Vietnam. He urged Martin Luther King, Jr., to oppose the Vietnam War publicly, and spoke with many people and groups about peace. In a January 25, 1967, letter to the Nobel Institute in Norway, King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nhat Hanh later led the Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks.

Exiled from Vietnam for many years, he was allowed to return for a trip in 2005 and again in 2007. Today his home is Plum Village Monastery in the Dordogne region in the south of France and he travels internationally leading retreats and giving talks as one of the world’s foremost advocates of compassion and peaceful living.

If anyone has an excuse to live life with bitterness, resentment and hatred it is Thich Nhat Hahn. He is intimately familiar with the pain of suffering, rejection and intolerance. Yet everyone who meets him and spends time with him describes him as a man of deep, genuine inner peace, contentment and compassion.

Here is a statement he made recently about what it takes to live a life of compassion and deeper centeredness:

“How can we help our hearts to grow every day, to be able to embrace everything? The Buddha gave a very beautiful example. Suppose you have a bowl of water and someone put a handful of salt in the bowl of water; it would be too salty for you to drink. But suppose someone threw a handful of salt into a clear mountain river. The river is deep and wide enough that you can still drink the water without tasting the salt.

“When your heart is small, you suffer a lot. But when your heart becomes bigger, very big, then the same thing does not make you suffer anymore. So the secret is how to help your heart to grow. If your heart is small, you can’t accept that person, you can’t tolerate him or her with his or her shortcomings. But when your heart is big, you have a lot of understanding and compassion, and then there is no problem, you don’t suffer, and you embrace him or her because your heart is so big.”

Notice the comparison in the above illustration. Your life is like either a small bowl of still water or a wide, deep and flowing river. The truth is, we cannot keep the “salt” from entering our lives—pain, crisis, difficulties, distasteful people and things happen—usually beyond our control. But we do have the ability to absorb the “salt” and make our lives livable by how wide and deep our hearts are. We can grow our hearts bigger to the point of being capable of embracing all of life.

So the question is, what does it take to grow a bigger heart? What are the keys to centering ourselves more and more in compassion and peace? Are there tools we can use to help expand our hearts and minds and spirits?