What does it really mean to hold the ultimate dimension alongside the relative, at the same time, in the same body, in the same moment?

In the Plum Village tradition, we’re taught that in the ultimate dimension there is no separate self, no hierarchy, no inside or outside. There is only interbeing. At the same time, we’re invited not to turn away from the relative (historical) dimension, the world we wake up into each morning, where history, power, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, class, and lived experience shape our daily reality. These conditions influence who feels safe, who is believed, who is welcomed with ease, and who must work harder simply to belong.

Holding both dimensions together is not an abstract teaching for me right now. It is the heart of my life’s aspiration and daily practice, as a lay Dharma teacher, as the Founding Executive Director of Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL), and as a cofounder and parent helping to birth the Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing.

Being a Bridge

I experience my role as being a bridge. A bridge between monasteries that anchor the depth and integrity of our practice and the wider world where children are educated, leaders are formed, and systems either reproduce harm or help interrupt it. A bridge between contemplative wisdom and the real, complex conditions educators, families, and communities are navigating every day.

Bridges are meant to hold tension. They are not meant to collapse too quickly.

Recently, I’ve been feeling that tension in a very real way. I’ve had experiences that left me reflective and tender, moments where it became clear that sincere practitioners and leaders had not yet been invited into deep, embodied looking at how identity, power, and privilege shape perception and practice. Not out of ill intent, but because blind spots often accompany comfort, familiarity, and proximity to power.

This has brought up grief, honesty, and a kind of weariness I’ve carried for a long time and am learning to name without judgment. It has also clarified my commitment.

Johari’s Window: Seeing Without Shame

One frame I often return to, especially in our work with school leaders, is Johari's Window I love it because it helps us notice blind spots without blame.

There is:

what we know and see about ourselves

what others may see that we do not

what remains unseen or unnamed, our blind spots

what is still waiting to be discovered

As a contemplative reflection, I often offer lines from this poem, shared by one of my mentors, Dr. Janet Patti, and the team at Star Factor Coaching where I also coach school leaders:

There is something I don’t know
that I am supposed to know.
I don’t know what it is I don’t know…
Therefore, I pretend I know everything.

This poem isn’t an accusation. It’s a mirror. It reminds us how easy it is, especially for those of us in leadership roles, to confuse familiarity with awareness. And how often what we don’t know we don’t know is where misunderstanding or harm quietly lives. I still have so much to learn but I am committed to keep staying open.

From Thinking to Feeling

In Transformative Educational Leadership (TEL), we don’t stop at ideas. We invite embodied noticing.

What happens in the body when we reflect on power, difference, or responsibility? What tightens? What softens? What becomes visible when we slow down enough to feel, not just analyze?

Over time, this practice has taught me something simple and challenging:

• Those with the most privilege often see, know and feel the least about how power operates.
• Those with the least privilege often see, know and feel the most.

This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a structural reality. It’s a call to center the voices and experiences of those who have the least privilege in every space we are in. 

Staying in Love with the Practice

What I am devoted to is truthful, embodied practice, practice that can hold spiritual depth alongside real-world responsibility, that can move at a human pace inside fast, demanding systems, and that meets this moment with tenderness rather than avoidance.

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem Call Me By My True Names, every figure lived inside him. That is interbeing made real. That is the practice I am committed to.

Thank you for being on this journey with me, for your curiosity, your care, and your willingness to stay with both dimensions.

With love,