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Magazine In Brief, TeachingsTeachings

Suffering Is Fertile Soil

By Sister Dang Nghiem

Fall 2021

Everyone who undergoes severe trauma faces similar choices: to try to pick up the pieces of our lives and continue as before; or to stop and turn more intentionally toward healing, however that may appear in our lives. While we may not recognize it at the time of a traumatic event, life-changing suffering has a way of being an opening to a greater understanding of life.

The “mud” and mess of our most painful experiences can become the fertile ground for the blossoming of our understanding and self-compassion. This is a hard truth to accept if we are resolved to seeing a good life as consisting only of positive events. It is true that the cool waters of happiness are sweet and precious, but it is suffering that carves our cup.

♦

From Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness by Sister Dang Nghiem © 2021. Reprinted with permission of Parallax Press.

Sister Dang Nghiem was born in 1968 in Vietnam, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier. She lost her mother at the age of twelve and immigrated to the US at the age of seventeen. Living in various foster homes, she went on to earn a medical degree from the University of California–San Francisco. She eventually quit her practice as a doctor to live at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, where she was ordained a nun in 2000. She is the author of a memoir, Healing: A Woman’s Journey from Doctor to Nun (2010), and Mindfulness as Medicine: A Story of Healing and Spirit (2015). Her latest book is Flowers in the Dark, a guidebook to healing trauma with mindfulness practice.