Heart on Fire

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acres of sprawling woodland, rolling hills,
and sandstone bluffs. The late afternoon sun
ignited the sourwood, sugar maples, and
ginkgo, their canopies a shimmer of crimson,
apricot, and saffron.
“To live in the present moment is a miracle,” Thầy writes in Touching Peace: Practicing
the Art of Mindful Living. “The miracle is
to walk on the green Earth in the present
moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty
that are available now.”
Walking into the main building to register and get my room assignment, I was
self-conscious and shy. As a newcomer, I
knew virtually nothing about the practices
and protocols of Buddhism in general and
the Plum Village tradition specifically. What
if I got something wrong—didn’t bow at the
right times, didn't sit properly, didn't know
where to look or where to place my hands in
meditation?
But I was immediately put at ease by how
casual, welcoming, and familiar everyone
seemed to me. The other retreatants—
Midwesterners like myself—reminded me of
aunts, uncles, and cousins back in Milwaukee
where I grew up: plain-dressed (there were
lots of blue jeans and flannel shirts), softspoken, sincere to a fault.
Whatever I pictured Buddhism to look
like, this wasn’t it. This looked more like the
crowd at a Catholic church potluck, which
made me feel entirely at home.
After a light snack and some social time,
we gathered for orientation in the large room
that would serve as our zendo for the weekend. It had a vaulted timber ceiling, vintage
1970s macrame art, and large windows that
looked out onto forested hills, now dark as
plums against the night sky.
The retreat was co-taught by lay Dharma
teachers Jack Lawlor, a Chicago attorney
from a family of firefighters, and Cheri Maples.
Cheri was a diminutive woman with a closeshaved head and monastic demeanor who,
I was surprised to learn later, was a police
officer in Madison.
Jack, in a brown fleece jacket and brown
pants, shared his thoughts on the weekend’s
topic, “Social Engagement, Transformation
and Healing.” He spoke about Thầy’s development of Engaged Buddhism and said that
in the Mahayana tradition, of which Plum
Village is a part, meditation and mindfulness
practices aren’t solely for our own benefit,
but are for the benefit of all beings.
Whatever we gain from our time in
meditation, that’s only the beginning of
a committed practice; the next step is to
take our mindfulness out into the world to
help ease the suffering of others. Simply by
walking mindfully, speaking thoughtfully,
and listening deeply, we can heal the people
around us.
Then Jack said that those who were
interested in receiving The Five Mindfulness
Trainings that weekend should come forward after the welcome session. I had only
a vague understanding of the precepts, but I
was among the first in line after most everyone else stood and headed to bed in noble
silence.
“You need to write a letter to Cheri and
me expressing your aspiration to receive the
trainings,” Jack instructed our small group.
“On Sunday, we’ll have a short ceremony and
present you with a booklet and a Dharma
named based on that aspiration.”
I didn’t keep a copy of the letter, but I
remember writing about my longtime wish
to live a life of integration and integrity.
Growing up the eldest son in an alcoholic
single-parent home, I’d learned how to be a
chimera, always adapting who I was to suit
the ever-shifting circumstances of home life.
This meant knowing to be quiet and invisible when things became volatile, or funny
and irreverent when my mother was “happy
drunk” so I could garner rare positive attention from her.
As a result, it’s taken me years to figure
out who Stephen actually is apart from my
performances and longing for approval. After
the failure of my own long marriage—the only

THÍCH NHẤT HẠNH FOUNDATION
intact family life I’d experienced up to that
point—I questioned everything: who I was,
how I was living my life, what came next.
There wasn’t a road map for where I
found myself at that moment. All I knew was
that I wanted to be a good person, certainly,
but also a true person: to know, embrace, and
weave fully together all my messy and beautiful parts. I wanted writer Walt Whitman’s
courage to embrace all my contradictions.
(“I am large,” Whitman writes, “I contain
multitudes.”)
Buddhism, as I was learning that weekend, is a big tent, both as a philosophy and
as a community. People are still people, with
all their wild inconsistencies and quirks. But
during our sunrise sits, or walking meditation
to a bluff overlooking a quilted rainbow valley,
or Dharma sharing, I noticed something:
what really matters is showing up.
If you can be fully present to each
moment, everything else will take care of
itself. “There is only one moment for you to be
alive, and that is the present moment,” Thầy
said in a Lion’s Roar article in 2021. “Go back
to the present moment and live this moment
deeply, and you’ll be free.”
At the ceremony Sunday morning, I
received The Five Mindfulness Trainings and
my little booklet with the Dharma name Deep
Integration of the Source. A sense of being
deeply seen, heard, and known washed over
me for the first time in my life.
I left the retreat nearly levitating in my car
on the drive back to Iowa City, Iowa, fired up
with the zeal of the newly converted. I wanted
to keep the momentum of this transformative weekend going. Within weeks, I started
Winding Path Sangha in Iowa City, hoping to
share the “good news” of mindfulness with
whoever came to the small room I’d reserved
at the public library: three people the first
week, eleven the next, and to my astonishment twenty-five soon after.
I signed up for more retreats, including
the next summer retreat at Plum Village
Monastery. I bought lots of books. And just
four months after the Wisconsin retreat, I
emailed Cheri asking how I might join the
Order of Interbeing.
In my hunger for the Dharma, I was falling
into the trap of thinking more was necessarily
better (the notions of grasping and aversion
were still too subtle for my baby Buddha
brain to grasp).
Cheri was kind but clear in her response.
“I think if you read the entire application
carefully, you will see that you are not eligible yet to become a member of the Order of
Interbeing,” she wrote back. “It requires practicing for a couple years after receiving The
Five Mindfulness Trainings. It’s important not
to be in too much of a hurry and I think you
should practice for a while before deciding.”
I took a breath. I was disappointed but
also grateful for the invitation to slow down
and savor the journey. A year later, I submitted my OI aspirancy application, and Jack
agreed to serve as my mentor.
“Mindfulness has helped me recognize
the importance of living a life that permeates
the boundaries and breaks out of the boxes
I had previously used to define different
aspects of my life: work, home, community,
etc.,” I wrote in my OI application. “And it’s
helped tremendously with past issues around
anger and reactivity, calming and cooling
and creating space for me to reflect before
responding.”
This time, as I began the OI journey in
earnest, there was no hurrying; in fact, there
were times over the next six years when
I almost forgot I was an aspirant with an
objective. Instead, I just showed up: with my
mentor, with my sangha, in my home practice, for myself, and in my relationships.
In 2023, I received The Fourteen
Mindfulness Trainings at an OI retreat at
Magnolia Grove Monastery, along with my OI
Dharma name: True Earth of Joy.
First integration, then joy. Both because I
took a chance ten years ago and walked into

Stephen Pradarelli/True Earth of Joy (he/him)
is the communications director for the Thích
Nhất Hạnh Foundation and a member of the
Order of Interbeing who loves communing with
nature, reading, flying, and writing haiku. Stephen
founded and co-facilitates the Winding Path
Sangha where he lives in Iowa City, Iowa, US.
THÍCH NHẤT HẠNH FOUNDATION
a retreat with a broken heart and beginner’s
mind.
“The present moment is filled with joy
and happiness,” Thầy reminds us in Peace
Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in
Everyday Life. “If you are attentive, you will
see it.”

I’d like to begin with the EMBRACE Land Acknowledgment:
In acknowledgment of the land and the land ancestors. I welcome each of us
to bring our awareness to the storiedness of the earth under our bodies. May
we listen deeply to understand the stories, the causes, and the conditions
that got us here.
In reverence and with wholehearted gratitude, we honor the ancestral
stream, our known and unknown land ancestors, our spiritual and familial
ancestors. May we contemplate the challenges, the gifts, and the responsibilities that have been transmitted to us by all the land ancestors, the spiritual and the familial. May our learnings together on this path grow our ability
to be mindfully present, to support our curiosity, and to feel truth so that we
may transform what needs to be transformed for a just and equitable future.
Embodying
Mindfulness-Based
Resilience
Dharma teacher Jo-ann Rosen guides us through exercises
to help us regulate through unrelenting stresses and shares
teachings from her engaging book, Unshakeable: TraumaInformed Mindfulness for Collective Awakening