The Being Peace Practice Centre

On February 27, 2025, in a church in Holborn,
London, at a UK Sangha get-together, I met Hoting Fung and Ka-yee Chan, Ho-ting’s mother.
We had first met over fifteen years earlier on one
of the wonderful all-age/family retreats, often
led by monks and nuns, that were an annual
UK Sangha event. Ho-ting is a couple of years
older than my eldest grandson, who was six at
the time.1
One of the many great joys for me, having
found my spiritual family, is to have had the
opportunity to spend time with children of all
ages, especially that sometimes unpopular
group: teenagers. Ho-ting, who is now working
for our project to establish a centre for Thầy’s
practice in the UK, still remembers a song
from the retreat where we met! Holding annual
retreats with a children’s programme encourages
lasting relationships, nourishes an appreciation
of community, and hopefully fosters in young
people an aspiration to continue in the practice.
A while ago, I was thinking about whether
I could find just one element of the human
psyche/mindset that could be transformed
to make living in a peaceful world more likely.
There are many factors to take into account in
discovering why we are experiencing such suffering in the world at present. The basic human
need for community and cooperation seems to
have been unmet, perhaps since the industrial
revolution, and this has been compounded by
successive governments that are out of touch
with their electorate. Nourishing community and
cooperation—between individuals, families, and
societies, across countries and continents—is a
way to happiness and the only way to address
our impending extinction as a species. If people
are happy, then there is no need to want more,
take more, or distrust or fear others who are different in some way.
The
Being Peace
Practice Centre
Teri West shares the interwoven
nature of the long journey towards
helping to found a practice centre in
the UK and her path to becoming
a Dharma teacher.

At the time, I was part of a team putting
together publicity materials to promote our
practice centre project, and we were mostly
focussed on the environmental and spiritual
teachings that would be offered there. Yes,
environmental awareness and spiritual teachings
are very important subjects for retreats and other
events at the centre, but it dawned on me that
perhaps the most important learning that people
could take away with them and into their daily
lives might be the happiness to be found in living
and working together as a community.
Surely human beings are simply not designed
to be ‘self-sufficient’ in spiritual, practical, or
economic terms? For almost a year in the 1970s,
I lived with a bunch of people in a harsh environment in northern UK, and I was astonished
that the people in each household were working
themselves to the bone trying to do it all. They
each kept goats, bees, and chickens, and worked
hard in their individual gardens. There was no
sharing of maintenance work or tools. This was
long before I found the practice, but common
sense told me that if one person cared for the
goats, another for the chickens, and another
took care of keeping tools in good shape, etc.,
they would all have more time for enjoying life!
John Seymour had a lot to answer for!2
Another treasured gift that I know I receive
from practising on this path is the opportunity to
become friends with so many loving, humorous,
and lighthearted practitioners from so many
different walks of life. We are such a diverse
community—and mysterious enough that the
practice offers a lifetime’s work to understand
ourselves and others to enable living peacefully
together.
We were over eighty community members
in the church in Holborn, to celebrate that our
work to establish a practice centre in the UK was

close to becoming a reality—no longer simply
the vision that Thầy first shared with the UK
Sangha (small, in those days!) during a retreat at
an urban boys’ boarding school in 1997.3
When I had listened to Thầy speaking about
a centre in the UK, something had awoken
very strongly in me. The practice and the UK
community were new to me, but I decided that
I could bring my small amount of experience in
fundraising and the practice together by working
towards establishing a centre, already named by
Thầy as Being Peace. I didn’t have the means to
visit Plum Village, but here was a way to bring
Plum Village closer to home.
That was a rare moment for me: I was able
to make a decision based in love and hope. I had
lived, on leaving home as a teenager, a long, chaotic, and often difficult life, never able to make
proper plans based on sensible thinking, but
simply bowling along from one crisis to another.
Feelings of guilt, remorse, and sadness
began to plague me when, at the age of forty,
my children aged sixteen and eighteen, I tried
to make sense of everything that had happened
to me, about what I felt were bad decisions
concerning myself, others, and especially my
children. I had been a single parent from the age
of twenty-four, having given up trying to live with
my husband’s addiction to heroin.
By 1997, I had learned to practise compassion and understanding for myself, aware that
choices we make appear to be the right ones at
the time, and are often a reaction to our experiences. I was already aware of how cultivating
compassion for myself was allowing me to be
kinder, warmer, and friendlier to others.
In that somewhat grim school dining room
that we were using as a meditation hall, my heart
lifted. Here was a practical way of putting the
practice to good use: I made a vow to Thầy in
my heart there and then that I would dedicate
my time and energy towards helping his vision
become a reality, even if it didn’t happen in my
lifetime, which at that time looked possible, as
our community was still small.
There was also the comforting knowledge
that working towards what could become a
refuge of peace, healing, and transformation
for all who came in the future would go some
way towards making amends for any of my past
actions that had been damaging for others.
Working for something that might not
happen in my lifetime was a great practice in letting go of ideas on where a centre might be, how
to raise the necessary funds, or how it would
operate. When I shared my disappointment that
we had not managed to establish a centre after
several years of the project stopping and starting (though always inching forward), I felt only
relief when Sister Annabel said, “Well, you know,
it might take a hundred years!”
Being part of a team and offering ‘work’ as
service to the community are ways in which to
truly deepen practice. It’s easy in cosy silence on
a cushion in a meditation hall or sangha gathering surrounded by others doing the same. It's not
so easy while working with others on organising
retreats and other activities.
At that retreat long ago, just after Thầy
made his request for a UK practice centre, a
group of Order of Interbeing members stood
up and announced that they would work on its
establishment. I asked to join the group. The
response was, ‘You had better join the Order
then, so that the community knows that you are
committed.’ I applied without any forethought or
preparation, other than a couple of sentences
describing my aspiration in doing so, and
received The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings in
2000.
At the time of the gathering at the church in
London in 2025, I had at least another year or
so before I could become a real Dharma teacher,
having received Lamp Transmission in 2016. (I
once heard Thầy say that after receiving Lamp
Transmission, it then takes at least ten years to
become a real Dharma teacher.) I often marvel
at how a simple twist of fate (an invitation from a
friend with whom I was camping in France in the
summer of 1988) led to our visiting Plum Village,
and my becoming caught by Thầy’s teaching
and the book Breathe, You Are Alive! and an

Teri West/True Door of Virtue (she/her) was ordained
as a Dharma teacher at Plum Village, France, in 2016.
Teri has led a long and varied life and pursued many
ways to bring home the veggie burgers as a single
parent. In later years she has found great joy working as
a storyteller, singer, and clown—she enjoys offering the
Dharma in unlikely situations, such as from the cabaret
stage and once even in a supermarket queue!
ongoing thirty-five-year journey of self-discovery,
with the Being Peace Practice Centre almost a reality,
and what that might mean for my role as a Dharma
teacher.
We hope to open the Being Peace Practice Centre,
the first national centre for Thầy’s teachings and Plum
Village practice in the UK, with the support and blessing of the Plum Village monastic sangha, in early 2026.
My hope is that family retreats will be an integral part
of the annual programme. Children are our future.
Retreats at our centre can show them the joy of living
and working alongside others in peace and harmony.
You might like to join our Being Peace Practice
Centre Sangha; we meet on a monthly basis for practice and discussion.4
I am looking forward to connecting or reconnecting with you. If you would like to stay updated, please
visit the website: beingpeace.uk.
1 TheTJFool, 2012, “6-yr old Zen Student and the Art of Whiteboard
Writing” YouTube, https://youtu.be/QCFSdZukK1Y.
2 John Seymour wrote a book about self-sufficiency published in the
1970s.
3 “Thay Calls for UK Dharma Centre,” The Mindfulness Bell 19 (1997):
12, https://www.parallax.org/mindfulnessbell/article/thay-calls-for-ukdharma-centre.
4 “The Being Peace Practice Centre Sangha,” Plum Village UK,
accessed May 22, 2025, https://plumvillage.uk/event/the-beingpeace-practice-centre-sangha-2/2025-05-25.
You can read an earlier version of this article at
mindfulnessbell.org.