Plum Village

I took my first meditation retreat in March, just under a month ago. Already in Europe for work, I decided to finally take some genuine time away from the work that has defined me through my adult life and sign up for a two week retreat at Plum Village in Western France.

An hour train ride and another 30 minute car ride from Bordeaux, Les Villages des Pruniers was initially founded by Thich Nhat Hanh back 40 years ago. Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay, as he is affectionately called by everyone at the hamlets, both those who met him and those that didn’t have chance to, started the hamlet as an experiment to see if the Eastern philosophy around mindfulness and meditative presence could be adapted for life in the West.

Having been exiled from his own country during the Vietnam War for not picking sides, and having been active in the US Civil Rights movement (he was an activist alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and was even nominated by him for the Nobel Peace Prize), Thay had to wait till he was 79 before he could return to his home country.

And it was, thus, at a monastery conceived and beautifully cultivated by a Vietnamese monk in France that I, as an Indian man, hailing originally from the region that Buddha himself was from and found enlightenment in, found myself taking my first foray into mindfulness.

As I got into the van at the airport to head to the Upper Hamlet, the German guy sitting next to me asked, nonchalantly, how many retreats of this kind I had done in the past. I told him none, adding that I have…