Thich Nhat Hanh, author of Peace is Every Step, identifies necessary steps such as meditation, breathing, and enlightenment for an individual to maximize peace within themselves and ultimately, among others.
In the first excerpt of Peace is Every Step, Hahn, addresses Non-Surgery and the fact that “if we try to throw away what we don’t want, we may throw away most of ourselves” (52). Often times one sees a flaw or a negative aspect of himself or herself, making it natural for one to seek to fix it or get rid of it. When one identifies an aspect of themselves that they do not favor, they often times build up anger towards it. That anger then creates two negatives: one being the flaw, and the other being the anger toward that flaw. Therefore, leaving one far worse off then initially because one now has two negatives.
Contrary to such anger, Hanh shows us that rather than to be angry about flaws within ourselves, we can transform our feelings into a more wholesome being, ultimately creating peacemaking within ourselves. Hanh states “if we are peaceful in ourselves, we can make peace with our anger ” (53). This way instead of having two negatives, one simply has zero negatives. This is peacemaking.
After reading such an excerpt, it is common for one to wonder how to stimulate understanding and peacemaking as opposed to anger. But luckily, Hanh provides five steps in order to transform those feelings of anger into a sense of understanding. The five steps Hanh proposes is recognizing feeling as they arise, becoming one with such feelings, calming the feelings, releasing the feelings, and lastly, looking deeply into those feeling.
Both of us have experienced difficulty dealing with our own flaws. We have both dealt with them with anger at one point in time, but after reading Peace is Every Step, we have both come to the conclusion that Hahn’s way of dealing with our flaws is ultimately a better choice. Conclusively, we both believe that we were created with distinct forms of uniqueness and if we seek to suppress the aspects of ourselves that make us whole, we will lose ourselves in the process. We must be content with aspects of ourselves that make us unique to everyone else. When one uses meditation and breathing, one will be enlightened to become one with their flaws.
-Chloe and Haley
It was really nice to read your post, and I completely agree with what Nicole said about how addressing our flaws is really hard, and I think that it society we a lot of times are conditioned to hide or avoid our flaws. Whereas we are learning facing our flaws is something that we need to do in order to be “fully human” and embrace who we are. We need to remember that we don’t necessarily need to always get rid of our flaws, because our flaws are what make us unique and like Chloe and Haley mentioned “we were created with distinct forms of uniqueness”.
Chloe and Haley,
I really like your topic choice. Addressing our flaws is really difficult. It is so much easier to get rid of something than to accept it. However, as you said it is important to address every part of ourselves so that we are fully able to know who we are. This requires a very different mindset than many of us are used to but it has promising results!