Not a Choice, a Current

One of our newest Dharma teachers, Meena
Srinivasan, shares her journey of practice that has
led to moving into a lay community and helping to
found the Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing.
The air in Simplicity Hamlet feels softer, as if
carrying a quiet blessing. From our back windows I see the foothills cradling Deer Park
Monastery, afternoon light shimmering all
around. Solidity Hamlet is home to the brothers, Clarity Hamlet to the sisters, and now
our family has arrived in Simplicity Hamlet,
a lay community forming in the monastery’s
embrace under the gentle, steady leadership
of Thầy Pháp Dung and Thầy Pháp Lưu.
We haven’t come here to run from anything; we’ve come to move closer to what
matters most. This moment—boxes still
unopened, my seven-year-old son’s soccer
ball skimming across the dirt backyard (soil
I already imagine becoming a meditation
garden beside a little play field for children),
the kitchen filling with birdsong—feels like
a threshold. A space between the life we’ve
known and the one we’re cocreating: a village where children, parents, and monastics
live in rhythm with the land, nourished by
practice, presence, and belonging.
As the mother of a young boy, Kailash,
I feel the rare gift of raising him in a place
where compassionate, mindful masculinity is
alive in daily life. In a world that often asks
boys to harden, he’s surrounded by monks
who embody another way, strength grounded
in gentleness, leadership rooted in listening,
and care held with equanimity. The men of
Deer Park model a solidity that has nothing
to do with domination, and everything to do
with presence, playfulness, and joy. 
As a tenderness researcher, I see how
culture trains boys to armor up. Here, we’re
writing a different story: tenderness as the
truest strength, compassion as real courage.
I return often to an insight attributed to Ilya
Prigogine: When a complex system is far from
equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea
of chaos can shift the whole to a higher order.
Deer Park, with monastics and lay friends
tending gardens and hearts with equal care,
is such an island. In this field, our family is
learning that gentleness and strength belong
together, seeds that can travel outward into a
culture longing for balance.
This threshold didn’t appear overnight. In
2020, in the midst of the pandemic, my husband, Chihiro, and I moved from the San
Francisco Bay Area to San Diego with our
two-year-old, not for a job, but because of a
quiet, insistent intuition. It felt like stepping
into the dark with trust as our lamp. Senior
Dharma teachers Peggy Ward and her husband Larry, now a beloved ancestor, were in
San Diego then; their presence helped us say
yes.
We didn’t fully know why we were being
guided south, only that the felt sense was
unmistakable. Looking back, it’s clear the
universe had plans wiser than our own.
That intuitive move became part of a karmic
unfolding: we would become the first family
to live in Simplicity Hamlet, and our son will

be among the first students at the Thích Nhất
Hạnh School of Interbeing. It is a story of
taking refuge in the mahasangha and discovering that when we step toward community,
community steps toward us.
NOT A SCHOOL WITH A MISSION,
Our move is intertwined with the birth of the
Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing, a K–8
learning village opening in August 2026, just
across from Happy Farm at the entrance to
Deer Park Monastery, nestled in Escondido’s
“Great Hidden Mountain.” The seed was
planted decades ago and germinated anew
as Thầy Pháp Dung and Thầy Pháp Lưu invited a small circle of educators to radically
imagine a school not as a program, but as a
living expression of mindful education and
interbeing.
This school isn’t separate from Deer
Park; it is the monastery’s heart shaped for
children. Learning moves with the land and
seasons, in relationship with monastics who
anchor our Plum Village practice, within a
community that cultivates wisdom and compassion as living relationships with people,
place, and all beings. Its touchstone is The
Five Mindfulness Trainings, a shared ethical
root orienting us toward reverence for life,
true happiness, loving speech and deep listening, mindful consumption, and collective
flourishing.
For me, the school feels like the flowering
of a path that began twenty-one years ago
in Oakland, when I first touched the Plum
Village tradition as a young teacher attending
an educators’ sangha led by Dharma teacher
Lyn Fine.
Learning moves with the land and seasons,
in relationship with monastics who
anchor our Plum Village practice, within
a community that cultivates wisdom and
compassion as living relationships with
people, place, and all beings.

FIRST SEEDS:
I grew up the daughter of Indian immigrants,
my childhood shaped by both Hindu ritual and the quiet urgency of the immigrant
dream. As an adult I was given a glimpse of
something beyond myself: the thin film of
separation dissolved, and the world shimmered with aliveness.
At the time, my path seemed set: I had
a position at ABC News and professional
experiences at Reuters, NBC, UNESCO, and
the Woodrow Wilson Center behind me. Yet
the glimpse of the ultimate dimension called
me elsewhere. I deferred my start date at
ABC and accepted a teaching position in São
Paulo, Brazil. There, Parker Palmer’s words in
The Courage to Teach, “we teach who we are,”
struck me deeply. I began to see teaching as
a way to align my inner life with my outer
work and to keep touching that wholeness I
had briefly glimpsed.
While pursuing graduate studies in education at UC Berkeley, I studied with a
spiritual teacher who often spoke of Thích
Nhất Hạnh as one of the only living enlightened masters. Then came the call to move to
India, less a choice than a current carrying
me forward. My parents were bewildered;
they had left India, but I was choosing to
return. Yet something in me knew this move
was karmic. At my interview for a position
at the American Embassy School in New
Delhi, I spoke of teaching as a sacred task;
the superintendent mentioned an educators’ sangha founded by Dharma teacher
Shantum Seth.
Soon after arriving in India, the ground
kept preparing itself. I was blessed to study
with Professor Ramchandra Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and student of
Ramana Maharshi; his quiet gaze carried
the stillness of the sky. “Your breath is your
best friend,” he told me. “It is always with you,
the last to leave you. You cannot breathe in
the future or the past, only now.” Then I met
Satish Kumar, who modeled sacred activism
and simplicity. These encounters prepared
the ground for the moment I met Thầy and
the mahasangha at Gandhi Darshan.
To step into Thầy’s presence was to be
washed over by boundless love. When he
invited Shantum to sing one of my beloved
bhajans, it felt like a blessing weaving my
Hindu bhakti roots with Plum Village Zen.
At an educators’ retreat in Dehradun, I took
refuge in The Five Mindfulness Trainings and
received the Dharma name Pure Confidence
of the Heart. Soon after, under the Bodhi tree
in Bodhgaya, I touched the magnitude of my
vow to dedicate my life to this path.
In the years that followed, I shared mindfulness with children and educators across
South Asia. In 2010, I was ordained into the
Order of Interbeing in Delhi, receiving the
name True Seal of Peace.
In 2011, my mother became gravely ill and
needed a double lung transplant. I returned
to the US, practicing seeing my breath as her
breath, each in-breath a quiet offering for her
healing. She survived, a walking miracle of
medicine, and I emerged with a deeper intimacy with impermanence.
Back in Oakland, I taught at Park Day
School where Mindful Schools was founded.
What I shared with students became my first
book, Teach, Breathe, Learn. 
Even as Social and Emotional Learning
(SEL) transformed classrooms, I saw how
often leaders, those carrying the heaviest
burdens, were running on empty. That realization became the seed for Transformative
Educational Leadership (TEL), a fellowship
where diverse leaders integrate mindfulness,
SEL, and equity. TEL lives the truth that
transformation begins within but must ripple
outward into Beloved Community.

THE LAMP BEFORE THE MOVE:
Just months before our move to Deer Park, I
returned to Plum Village. Sixteen years earlier I had come as a young educator, learning
to bridge inner life and outer work. This time I
returned older, tenderized by life—a mother, a
wife, a daughter caring for aging parents, and
a leader in heavy times.
I was invited to receive the Lamp
Transmission, a sacred ceremony honoring commitment to mindfulness, service,
and transformation. During the ceremony I
received a transmission gatha, and one line
in particular, a nod to Gandhi’s teachings,
pierced straight through: “Your everyday life
becomes your message.” As I received the
Lamp Transmission, a radiant beam of light
poured through the stained glass Buddha
above Thầy Pháp Dung and me, and the
small oil lamp I received burned for over
thirty hours before quietly dimming. A teaching: tend, release, begin again.
Afterward I wept surrenderful tears
of gratitude as I prostrated before Thầy’s
picture. I’ve never really made big decisions;
they’ve made me. India called me at twentysix. Now, at forty-five, Deer Park is calling
with the same clarity. There is no deliberation,
only surrender.

Over several months, and many cups of tea, in
early 2025, Chihiro and I sat with Thầy Pháp
Dung and Thầy Pháp Lưu to make our family’s move concrete: listening for their vision of
Simplicity Hamlet and reflecting on how we
might serve the sangha. I wrote after one of
our many meetings, “Dearest Brothers, there
are no words to express what I feel.” I thanked
them for seeing me—my spirit, gifts, and challenges—with such tenderness, and I shared
our longing to live differently: not inside the
isolating grind of nuclear-family striving, but
inside a village shaped by practice.
In one meeting, tears came, not from
fear, but recognition. I said I knew this move
was also about my own evolution and the
polishing of my practice and path as a lay
leader in the mahasangha. I confessed the
quiet question that sometimes visits me: Am
I worthy of this? Thầy Pháp Dung smiled and,
with so much love, shut that story down: You
are worthy by nature of who you are. Come
back to the wisdom of your ancestors. Don’t
get caught in the American paradigm of feeling you need to prove your worth. Ground
returned beneath my feet along with a deep
sense of belonging.
Together we named our family’s role as
an anchor family for Simplicity Hamlet, here
to do whatever is necessary to help the Thích
Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing manifest and
to midwife a healthy lay community of families
and children in harmony with the monastic
rhythm. In my Hindu ancestral tradition, there
is a word for how we hold this: seva, selfless
service given from the heart, measured not
by logged hours but by love and presence.
Underneath is another word I cherish: svadharma, one’s sacred calling. My mentor Linda
Lantieri’s teaching echoes here: “Talents are
things others can do. Gifts are assignments
from the universe. If you don’t say yes, they
may not happen in the world.”
When our family offered a firm yes,
something in the field shifted. Momentum
gathered like a tide, as if the school project
had been waiting for a family to jump in with
both feet. In any beginning, someone often
has to go first, not for credit, but to spark the
catalyst energy that helps the unseen organize into form.
A SUMMER OF CONTRAST:
The summer before our move, we joined an
overseas program hoping for spaciousness,
rest, and reflection as a family, so we could
arrive more attuned to the monastery’s frequency. The people were warm and sincerely
aiming to give their children a cross-cultural
experience. The cohort leaned largely USbased tech founders, thoughtful parents
comparing notes on screen time, networking,
and “scaling impact.” I noticed I was the only
dark-skinned person, and we were the only
vegetarian family; seemingly small details,
but they revealed the center of gravity. With
our son in a Waldorf school (until the School
of Interbeing opens) and our family’s device
values already clear, we realized we’d arrived
with a different baseline. No one was unkind;
the frequency was simply tuned to a channel
our hearts no longer recognized.
The experience became a mirror: while
the wider current moved toward “wellness”
and “optimization,” we longed for deeper
waters, conversations about power and
privilege, the unseen labor that sustains
certain lifestyles, and the Earth that holds it
all. What we touched was a friendly togetherness organized around individual families
maximizing opportunities, beautiful in many
ways, and less oriented toward examining
dominant-culture patterns and equity. It’s
a version of surface community many of us
know, carried by a broader current of individualized striving.
What our spirits were craving, and what
Deer Park embodies, is deep community:

not just proximity or affinity, but values alignment held by explicit vows. In our tradition,
those vows are The Five (and for many, The
Fourteen) Mindfulness Trainings. They aren’t
rules to perform; they’re living commitments
that shape how we spend money and time,
what we eat and consume, how we speak
and listen, how we relate to power, and how
we care for the Earth. In deep community,
the unspoken questions shift from “Are you
worth my time?” or “What can I get from
this?” to “How can I be of service?” “What
can we steward together?” “Who is missing,
and how do we make room?”
ENOUGH, TOGETHER
Sixteen years ago, on my first visit to Plum
Village, I bought the only piece of Thầy’s calligraphy I have: Samtusta, You have enough.
My friend, psychologist Daniel Cordaro, calls
contentment “the knowledge of enough,” and
Lynne Twist speaks of sufficiency as releasing the drive for more of what we don’t need
so our energy can serve life. This move, this
school, and this community are not about
chasing happiness; they’re about listening to
what is quietly, clearly true, becoming a small
island of coherence together, a sangha for
children and adults in a burning world.
I see it already. When I watch Kailash play
ping-pong with the monks and basketball
with lay friends, I see a boy learning to listen
to the land, to people, to himself. I think of
monastics whose footsteps serve as mindfulness bells. I think of lay friends choosing this
with us, imperfect and practicing, all wanting
something deeper than what we left behind.
Community isn’t the absence of friction.
It’s the willingness to be present through the
small rubs and big storms, to stay, repair, and
recommit. TEL taught me that leaders need
communities of practice to sustain courage.
Deer Park is teaching me that families do,
too. The school reminds me that the seeds of
community live in all of us, waiting to be nurtured. And the Lamp keeps whispering that
a life’s message is written in ordinary hours:
the point isn’t to shine endlessly, but to tend
the flame, noticing when it flares too hot or
dims too low, asking for help, and sheltering it
so it can keep giving light. In the end, we are
the ones we’ve been waiting for.
What our spirits were craving, and what
Deer Park embodies, is deep community:
not just proximity or affinity, but values
alignment held by explicit vows.

An expanded version of this article is available at
mindfulnessbell.org.
by Rob Walsh
Page 60: photo by Samuel Lu
Meena Srinivasan/True Seal of Peace (she/her) is a lay Dharma teacher in the Plum Village
tradition of Engaged Buddhism. She serves on the Board of the Thích Nhất Hạnh Foundation, is a
founding Board member of the Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing, and is a resident of Simplicity
Hamlet at Deer Park Monastery. Meena is the author of Teach, Breathe, Learn: Mindfulness In and
Out of the Classroom and SEL Every Day: Integrating Social and Emotional Learning with Instruction
in Secondary Classrooms. Learn more at meenasrinivasan.com.

The Thích Nhất Hạnh School of Interbeing
is launching a one-million-dollar Planting
Seeds campaign to support the school’s
founding (giving.tnhf.org/page/schoolofinterbeing). Whether you offer $50, $500, or
more, every gift matters. Money, given to
make a difference, does. It is blessed money.
Your  generosity will help build classrooms
that feel like living rooms, gardens that feel
like teachers, and a daily schedule that flows
like a song we love to keep singing together.
It will honor the labor that makes a village
possible.
Thank you for walking with us, for
believing in slowness, simplicity, and shared
belonging, and for holding the truth that we
have enough: enough to tend a flame, to be
an island of coherence, to begin again. May
we keep choosing community and tenderness, letting our lives be our message, and
trust that the lamp we carry, lit by many
hands, will shine brighter with your support.

Even though we were supposed to have our eyes closed, I kept mine
open. The sound of the bell was just fading, and a cooling breeze
rustled the leaves of the olive tree overhead, offering comfort. I looked
around, appreciating the people I was with.
We were a group of eleven Wake Up Order of Interbeing (OI)
members from all over North America, along with a few of the young
monastics, sitting in a Dharma sharing circle in Solidity Hamlet of Deer
Park Monastery. We had just spoken about the joys of the practice,
but also shed tears over the burdens of being a minority demographic
within sangha spaces (e.g., sexual, racial, or age minority), being a
sangha organizer, and the overload of juggling adult responsibilities
with sangha building.
From a clearing nearby came the laughter of another Dharma
sharing group—our Wake Up OI aspirants—reminding us of the
larger energy of young practitioners filling the monastery grounds.
Never before had such a diverse group of young adults with shared
aspirations to walk the OI path gathered here. It felt like a moment for
the Plum Village history books.
–Như-Mai
Looking with the
Eyes of Continuation
Elli Weisbaum and Như-Mai Nguyễn
share about nurturing the next generation of
Order of Interbeing members and aspirants.