How to Live When a Loved One Dies

Editors note
Here are some of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh s most insightful teachings on grief and loss, together with self-care meditations and practices in the Plum Village tradition gathered by the editors. We hope that you will find them helpful for connecting with your loved one and all of life.

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Listen to Yourself
When you are suffering greatly, if you have suffered a profound loss, you need people who are able to just sit and listen to you with compassion. But what is even more important is that we can listen to ourselves with compassion. To do this, we need to learn the art of deep listening. We stop whatever we re doing and come home to ourselves. We look deeply to recognize and name our suffering and embrace it tenderly. Listening deeply to our own suffering is an act of self-compassion.

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Like a Tree in a Storm
When a painful emotion comes up, stop whatever you are doing and take care of it right away. Bring your attention home to what is happening in your body. The practice is simple.
Put your hand on your belly and feel the movement of your breathing. Bring all your awareness down from your head to your navel and stop thinking about what has upset you. In a storm, the leaves and branches at the top of the tree thrash about wildly. The tree looks so fragile and vulnerable, as though it could break at any moment. But when you bring your attention down to the trunk of the tree, you see the trunk is very calm and still. You are no longer afraid because you realize that the tree is strong and stable, that it is deeply rooted in the soil and can withstand the storm.

Self-Care: Belly Breathing
A strong emotion is like a storm, but if we know how to practice, we can survive the storm. When we are caught in a storm of strong emotions, we need to identify what is causing our emotional response immediately and disengage ourselves gently from it. Whether it is a thought, an image, a sound, a smell, a

Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and peace activist. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching, he published more than 100 books, which have sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. Exiled from Vietnam in 1966 for promoting peace, his teachings on Buddhism as a path to social and political transformation are responsible for bringing the mindfulness movement to Western culture. He established the international Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism in France, now the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and the heart of a growing community of mindfulness practice centers around the world. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95 at his root temple, Tu Hieu, in Hue, Vietnam.

The monk who taught the world mindfulness.
TIME
 
Thich Nhat Hanh shows us the connection between personal inner peace and peace on earth.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Thich Nhat Hanh is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Thich Nhat Hanh s work, on and off the page, has proven to be the antidote to our modern pain and sorrows. His books help me be more human, more me than I was before.
Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous