Rains Retreat Teaching: Transforming the Discriminating Mind

Every autumn, the Plum Village community in southwestern France enters the Rains Retreat, a three-month season of living, sitting, and studying together in one place. The first Dharma talk of the 2026–2027 retreat, given by Sister Hoi Nghiem at New Hamlet on October 18, 2026, begins with a simple invitation: come back to the body, the breath, and the present moment. From there the talk moves through the five aggregates, the practice of right diligence, and a close look at what the teacher calls the mind of discrimination, the habit of sorting people and experiences into what is good for us and what is not. It ends with a reading of "Recommendation," a poem Thich Nhat Hanh wrote for young people, and a reminder that the teacher is present in every moment of practice.

What does a three-month retreat at Plum Village actually feel like?

Sister Hoi Nghiem starts with the word itself. In Vietnamese, the retreat is called an cư, where "an" means peace or stillness and "cư" means to stay or dwell. She describes it as a still season, an opportunity "to go back to ourselves and to take good care of ourselves." She counts around 70 long-term lay friends in the hall, joined by short-term visitors, practicing side by side, and she frames the three months as a kind of new year.

The image she returns to is the monkey mind. "Our mind is like the monkey always jumping jumping from this branch to another branch," she says, and the remedy she offers is almost embarrassingly basic: follow the breath. She admits that at first the mind may only manage a second of concentration, then two seconds, then a minute, then an hour, and that training matters most when strong emotion pulls us away. Her summary is one of the clearest lines in the talk: "Non-thinking is the essence of meditation."

The other idea is newness. She describes new room assignments, new responsibilities, a freshly tidied study corner, and a sense that her heart and mind have also been renewed. Then she names the risk: "We don't take for granted the practice. If we lose the newness, we lose the practice. We lose the inspiration and practice become boring." The practice of sitting, walking, breathing, and eating mindfully is the same every day, she says, and the art lies in doing it in a fresh spirit so that each practice stays alive.

— Sister Hoi Nghiem, first Rains Retreat talk, 0:00 (opening remarks on the meaning of the retreat)

Why begin with the body and the five aggregates?

The talk's structure rests on the five aggregates, the classic Buddhist map of how a person is built: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Sister Hoi Nghiem uses them as a sequence of places where we can practice care. She takes them in order, beginning with form.

"So the first aggregate is form. Form is body," she says at around the 11-minute mark of the transcript, and then she brings the abstract down to the kitchen table: do we drink enough water, exercise, eat in moderation, eat proper food? Her point is that these ordinary habits are the first layer of mental clarity. If the body is unwell, "it's really difficult to enjoy life." And if the body is out of balance, she says, we should look deeply at why: stress, no time for self-care, a lifestyle that has drifted.

Her honesty about habit is what makes this section useful. Drinking enough water "seems easy but it's not easy for someone." Exercise is easy for others but not for her. She describes choosing two kinds of commitment: one thing to do for the body, and one thing to stop doing, such as a food she enjoys but knows does not nourish her. The method is the vow.

How does a vow actually change habits?

The teacher's reasoning is that a vow gives the mind one object to hold. "When we concentrate in one thing, in one object, slowly slowly we can break through it," she says. A vow is a narrowing of attention, and narrowing is how insight arrives.

She tells a story from her own year. On New Year's Eve she wrote a vow on paper: to walk peacefully and gently, not hurrying, no matter what happened. She burned the paper. The next day a friend needed a ride to the train station after a taxi miscommunication, and the timing was tight: missing that train would mean missing a connecting train and a flight. Sister Hoi Nghiem volunteered, took the car key, and went looking in the large parking lot, found no car, hurried to the small lot, found none there either, and wondered whether she had been mindful when she checked. The excerpt of the talk ends mid-search, with her walking back to look again. The story is not a neat parable. It is useful precisely because the vow was tested immediately, in a hurry, and the practice was the willingness to keep looking gently.

— Sister Hoi Nghiem, on form and on making a vow, roughly 12:30 onward in the talk's chapter structure

What do feelings, perceptions, and mental formations have to do with discrimination?

The talk's chapter list moves next to feelings and perceptions (26:10), then to mental formations and consciousness (31:10). The transcript available for this article does not carry those passages in full, so it would be inaccurate to paraphrase them closely. What the structure makes clear is the logic: the body is the first base of care, and the later aggregates are where the mind starts shaping experience into judgments. That shaping is the bridge to the teaching's central subject.

What is the mind of discrimination, and why does it need transforming?

The chapter titled "Transforming the mind of discrimination" begins at 41:40, and the talk later connects it to manas consciousness at 1:08:45, which the chapter list calls the source of discrimination. The transcript that is visible is fragmentary, but its key phrases point in one direction: the mind divides. It separates what is good for "me" from what is good for "them," and what is pleasant from what carries danger.

Sister Hoi Nghiem's approach is not to banish judgment, which would be another form of resistance. The aim is to transform it at its base, which means seeing the sorting habit itself. Discrimination is often where ignorance lives. When we only want pleasure and refuse suffering, we lose the chance to learn from difficulty. As she puts it in the fragments available, when we do experience suffering, we can recognize what it is teaching us. The practice is to notice the reflex to divide, and then to return to the breath and the body where the reflex loses its grip.

This is where right diligence enters. At 48:20 the talk turns to it, and the visible passage describes the work of letting negative seeds come up and manifest, rather than pushing them down or running from them. The discipline is patience with what arises, not a war against it. Read against the rest of the talk, right diligence is the energy that keeps the other practices alive, the daily return that prevents the mind from hardening into its old categories.

What does a poem for young people teach about the Sangha?

At 1:01:40 the teacher reads "Recommendation," a poem Thich Nhat Hanh wrote for young people. The visible transcript catches fragments of its refrain, "Promise me this day. Promise me now," and the poem's address is clearly to the next generation: to protect the young from violence and to hand down a practice that is not taken for granted. Because the transcript is partial here, this article does not attempt to reconstruct the poem's lines. Readers who want the full text should hear it in the talk itself or in the Plum Village teaching collections.

The poem sits inside a larger theme the teacher returns to: the Sangha, the community, is "made of Dharma" and also "made of people." She is candid about it. "Our sangha is not perfect but it's enough for me to take refuge in," she says, recalling a letter a teacher wrote to the monastic brothers and sisters. "I felt shocked when I read this because sometimes I blame the sangha." Her conclusion is humility. We bring good qualities into community, and we also bring habit energy, and we learn to embrace both to grow understanding and compassion.

— Sister Hoi Nghiem, on the Sangha and the letter about refuge, early in the talk

How does the talk end, and what is it pointing toward?

The final section, "In touch with Thay in every moment" (1:20:37), returns the listener to the present. The fragments visible near the end describe being in touch with the Buddha and seeing Thay in you and around you. The arc is consistent. The talk begins with stillness, moves through the body and the aggregates, names the discriminating mind as the place to work, and finally widens to the community of teachers and friends who make the practice possible.

Where to go from here

This talk is the opening of a longer sequence. The full 2026–2027 Rains Retreat playlist on the Plum Village YouTube channel carries the rest of the season, and listening in order gives the teachings their intended build from body to mind to community. For readers who want to practice rather than only listen, the Plum Village App is offered free, with guided meditations and deep relaxations drawn from Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastic community. The Plum Village website lists retreats, and its gems collection gathers a large body of Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings. The most direct first step is the one Sister Hoi Nghiem gives: take one breath, notice where the mind wants to divide, and come back.