The practice and Vo Thi Saui

The most difficult thing  when you meditate is often to get to the cushion.
At least if you haven't get a schedule for it.

Here at Con Dao, I have neither a cushion nor a schedule.
So it's difficult for me too. But a chair will do.

The next thing to handle is the monkey mind; all the thoughts, regrets, failures, plans and desires that stops your concentration.
But that's the exercise - to go back to the breath - again and again...

You might label the thoughts as "planning, planning" and then go back to the breath.

After a time you will get to know yourself a bit more, often specific thoughts tend to come  back.

Sometimes even good ideas or things you had forgot will come to you. I then use to write them down and then go back to the breath. Sometimes I even count the breath to ten and then start again...

It's often impossible to find a totally quite place, so if sounds disturb you it might be good to label them too.

This day it's a bit more difficult to find solitude on the Island. This day 1952 Vo Thi Saui was executed as the first women in one of the French prisons on the Island. She was only 14 when she joined the recistense movement and with a granate killed one and wounded 12 French soldiers.
Before she was killed she sat many years in prison.
Many people come to honour her memory. Especially at midnight many people come to her grave and offer combs, mirrors, fruit, incense and so on. Already at 20.00, when I was there, many people stod with there with incense sticks in their hands.
In this Vm film you even can see the "tiger cages" that France us as prisoncells.
She is reminder of the hard times this country has had. The French colonization followed by the American war.
Vo Thi Saui was only nighteen years old when she was executed and is now looked upon  as a martyr, even as ancestral spirit.Th
The cult od the ancesters are still very living here. In nearly every house there is an altar where you can burn inscence for the ancestors.

Maybe not so surprising that Thich Nath Hanh means that our father and mother is within ourselves, when we meditate we can sometimes hear their voices. Maybe they had wounds that they couldn't handle. And now we carry their wounds.

But if we can heal those wounds we do it also for our parents.
Maybe we anyway can be aware of them. That's a good start.

T

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