Being a Soul Mate to Ourselves

Excerpt from Sister Dang Nghiem’s new book, Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal from Trauma with Mindfulness.

In Vietnamese families, by tradition people do not usually say they love each other, believing that actions should speak louder than words. As a result, I cannot remember that my grandmother or my mother ever told me that they loved me. Still, the need to be told “I love you” was alive in me throughout my life, and I constantly searched for it in acknowledgement, attention, and affection from friends and boyfriends.

In my monastic life one day, while I was learning some Chinese characters, I discovered that the characters for “soul mate” literally mean to “to remember, to know, and to master oneself”! This has been one of my most propitious enlightenments: directing my acknowledgement, attention, and affection toward myself and not waiting or expecting anyone else to tell me I am loved. I have learned to tell myself “I love you” numerous times a day.

Self-love, to me, is every moment that we are mindful of our body, of our thoughts, of our feelings, breathing with what is arising without grasping or aversion. It is self-acceptance in practice. In fact, every moment that we are mindful of ourselves and of what is going on in us, we are meeting with ourselves as a soul mate. Every mindfulness practice discussed in this book enables us to realize this unconditional self-love.

Practice: Make a Time and Place for Healing

Whether or not we have sympathetic supporters for our healing, we always have ourselves. We can be our own soul mate.

Choose a place and time to be with yourself and reflect on healing for just fifteen minutes daily. … Sometimes it is helpful to reserve time for reflection at the beginning or the end of each day, on waking or when going to bed. Think of it as an appointment with your soul mate.

Sister Dang Nghiem, MD, (“Sister D”) was born in 1968 in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, the daughter of a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier. She lost her mother at the age of twelve and immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen with her brother. Living in various foster homes, she learned English and went on to earn a medical degree from the University of California – San Francisco. After suffering further tragedy and loss, she quit her practice as a doctor to travel to Plum Village monastery in France founded by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, where she was ordained a nun in 2000, and given the name Dang Nghiem, which means adornment with nondiscrimination. 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).

To get your copy of Sister Dang Nghiem’s books, please visit Parallax Press at parallax.org.