Ten Foundations for Calm and Positivity in Daily Life

Before a word of teaching is spoken, the room at Blue Cliff Monastery is asked to sit up straight, set down its "meaningless thinking," and follow the breath from the first moment of each inhale to the last of each exhale. Then Sister Thanh Nghiêm steps forward to speak, in English, on an October Sunday in 2026, without a prepared text. She is waiting for a board to be carried in so she can write down her list. She has promised ten foundations for calmness and positivity in life, and she admits, with a laugh, that she gets nervous while waiting but not once she starts speaking. What follows is a teaching built from the ordinary: a tree outside her window, a sharp reply she regrets, a stubborn habit she is still working on. It is a Dharma talk that asks its listeners to treat their own minds as the place where calm either gets built or gets lost.

Why does a Dharma talk begin with breathing instead of ideas?

The talk opens with a guided meditation that is almost musical in its repetition. Participants breathe in and say they know they are breathing in; they breathe out and know they are breathing out. The phrases are simple and deliberately cyclical: "Breathing in, I follow my inbreath from the very beginning to the end." Later the lines shift from mechanics to meaning: "Breathing in, I know that I'm alive. Breathing out, I smile to life." Then: "Breathing in, I dwell in the present moment. Breathing out, this is a wonderful moment."

There is a reason the teaching waits. Calm, as Sister Thanh Nghiêm frames it, is not a belief to be agreed with. It is a state the body and breath can reach before the mind has finished arguing with itself. Her talk assumes that the listener arrives already tangled, and that any foundation laid on a scattered mind will shift under weight. The meditation is the first foundation in practice, even before she names it.

She also opens with a joke that tells you how she teaches. Greeting the room, she says that today is "October 18th, 1926, I mean 2026," and wishes aloud she could go back to a simpler time, "We don't need to do anything. We just be ourselves." She lists what that earlier world lacked: "all this technology, all this AI thing, all this crazy things in the world that we've produced." The laughter in the hall is real, and it does real work. A teacher who can misspeak the year and laugh at herself is modeling the very steadiness she is about to describe.

How do you train the mind to pause before reacting?

The first foundation she names is "train your mind to pause or stop." She is candid about the difficulty: "Sometime I cannot stop my mind. My mind keep on thinking about this, think about that, and then I produce stress in myself." The remedy she gives is specific. You stop the meaningless thinking, and you come back to yourself.

"Sometime when people say something criticizing you, you start act right away... why do I need to react right away when it's nothing?"

— Sister Thanh Nghiêm, Dharma talk, Blue Cliff Monastery Online (October 18, 2026), approx. 17:06 (lightly tidied from auto-generated transcript)

What makes this teaching useful is the sequence she describes. A criticism lands. The mind begins to narrate: is she right, am I wrong. The reaction arrives before the thought has finished forming. Her proposed interruption is a question rather than a rule: "Is there a need to react? Is there a need to panic? You know, we panic over little things."

She illustrates with a personal example from a year before the talk, when she had the chance to fly to Florida for a retreat. Part of her was thrilled, and part of her panicked: "Am I, you know, like doing this well or giving this well?" She asked herself whether she needed that panic. The lesson she draws is compact: "When you stay calm, when your mind is stopped, then everything will be possible in that moment."

What does accepting impermanence look like from a window?

The second foundation is "accepting impermanence," and here Sister Thanh Nghiêm moves from theory to observation. She practices impermanence every day, she says, and her teacher's example is concrete. She recalls a card from an older Dharma sister, written when their teacher was in the hospital, which read: "Life is impermanence. You have to cherish life every moment." The line stayed with her, and she built a daily habit around it.

Her most vivid teaching comes from her own room. Out the window is the new nunnery, which she calls a beautiful sight. But the tree directly in front of her is changing. It was once in full leaf; then, day by day, the leaves fell until "now in front of me is all about branches. I call naked branches because there's no trust to it." The image is plain and exact, and she draws the obvious conclusion without decoration: "I see that life can be changed. Even trees and nature can be changed. And we have to take self impermanence as life as it is."

The point is not gloom. Impermanence, in her account, is what makes acceptance possible at all. Painful feelings and happy ones are both passing, so neither needs to be grasped as a permanent possession. Her wording is careful: "When you accept impermanence, nothing can be changed, right?" The sentence sounds paradoxical until you hear the rest of the thought. Acceptance does not alter the fact of change. It alters how much of yourself you spend resisting it.

Why is letting go harder than understanding it?

Letting go comes next in her sequence, and she is strikingly honest that it is the place where she still struggles. "I have a hard time to let go of things." She describes the things people cling to: the past, worries, "our thinking, our this and that." When you cling too much, she says, "you carry something inside of you."

"When we able to let go of something inside of us, then we'll be light in our body and mind."

— Sister Thanh Nghiêm, Dharma talk, Blue Cliff Monastery Online (October 18, 2026), approx. 25:01 (lightly tidied from auto-generated transcript)

Her method is a question she asks herself: "What weighs me down? Is it necessary for me to hold on into those things or to grasp into the negative things inside of me?" She names the specific obstacle in her own practice, which is stubbornness. She notices that she wraps herself in her own way of doing things, and that the habit leads to the conviction that "That person is wrong." Her corrective is a reframing rather than a verdict: "Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong. It's just that your idea that you're always right, but you can't accept others."

Read alongside the pause, this makes a useful chain. Pausing creates a gap between stimulus and reaction. Impermanence loosens the grip on any single outcome. Letting go releases the particular opinion you were defending inside that gap. Sister Thanh Nghiêm calls letting go "a key to practice of your daily practice," and the phrasing matters: she treats it as something practiced repeatedly, not a single breakthrough she has completed.

How do gratitude and speech fit into a calm life?

As the talk moves toward its later steps, the foundations widen from inner discipline into daily conduct. She turns to mindfulness in daily life and asks the room how many people practice it. Her working definition is about attention: when we practice mindfulness and dwell in the present moment, "it helps us to recognize what is there in the present moment," and to "look deeply in each moment."

Gratitude appears in this stretch of the talk as a daily discipline rather than a sentiment. The transcript records her speaking of gratitude "every day," and it sits alongside her interest in how suffering and small, ordinary objects can teach. The sections of the talk that follow, which are only partially available in the material for this piece, return repeatedly to the idea that difficulty is instruction. She says of a challenge in her own life: "is giving me a lesson," and describes how a hard moment "gives you something" if you are willing to look at it.

Speech is treated with the same practicality. Her question is blunt: "Is this gossip necessary?" It is a question that can be asked at the moment of temptation, before the words leave the mouth, and it is the same instrument she has been describing all along. Pause, look, decide. Calm, in this talk, is not withdrawal from the world. It is the discipline of noticing what you are about to do with your attention and your speech.

Where to go from here

The most useful way to read this talk is to take one foundation and test it for a week. Choose the pause. When a remark stings, delay your reply by a single breath and ask Sister Thanh Nghiêm's question: is there a need to react? Choose impermanence, and find one thing in your own view, a tree or a window or a routine, that is visibly changing, and let it remind you that the feeling you are holding is also passing. Choose letting go, and name one opinion you have been defending. Ask what it weighs, and whether you need to carry it.

The complete recording, published by Blue Cliff Monastery Online on October 19, 2026, runs 58 minutes and 15 seconds. The partial transcript used here captures the opening meditation and the first several foundations; the full talk will show how the remaining steps unfold, including the later sections on gratitude and speech. Watch it with the breathing practice at the start, and consider doing that practice before you press play. The talk itself asks for nothing more difficult than that.