Sometimes These Things Happen & Other Lessons From Plum Village

Hey, come with me to Costa Rica in April.

Whatever you do, when you go on retreat, you come back to yourself and things become more clear for you about how you want to use your energy, about where you're off track, where you're out of alignment.

And that is why I go to Plum Village every year with my family.

This is no small feat, getting two teenagers to southern France.

Financially, no small feat.

Work-wise, no small feat.

It's just hard to get into Plum Village.

It's like a lottery now.

It's kind of hard to get a spot.

And it's probably the most important week of our year as a family.

So I've done other episodes on Plum Village.

You can go back and listen to them in the archives, some really good ones.

This year, I want to talk to you about five lessons that I learned that I think you could apply to your life to help you with that shift in energy, in energy use, in clarity of your energy use.

And the first lesson is let yourself cry.

All right.

So the second day of retreat, every year, the entire community, so there's these different hamlets at Plum Village.

We're separated out by the language that we speak.

Some of us are staying with the nuns.

Some of us are staying with the monks.

But the second day of the Plum Village retreat, we all gather together.

in Lower Hamlet, which is the home of the nuns.

It's the best hamlet because the nuns run it.

It's like beautiful with the most beautiful lotus pond and the prettiest of everything, of course.

But we all gather, probably almost a thousand of us in this meditation hall.

And the nuns enter in on one side, bald, brown robed, beautiful.