Order of Interbeing member Reverend Eileen Mahoney deepens her experience of home while on tour with Blue Cliff monastics.

By Eileen Mahoney on July 31, 2025

“Peace is every step,” one of Thích Nhất Hạnh’s calligraphies, became, for me, a spiritual pilgrimage and a blessing.

It was chosen as the theme for the northeast United States tour of the Blue Cliff Monastery monastics, which I helped organize. So why this particular calligraphy? 

The tour’s purpose was to strengthen the relationships among the monastics, regional practice centers, and sanghas, which are especially important in these challenging times.

Peace was not something I experienced much growing up. My mother was pill addicted and depressed, and my father was a busy, absent attorney/politician. There were often familial disagreements causing tension for days and always a political enemy to complain about at the dinner table. I didn’t live in a war zone, never experienced gun violence, and so at the time did not consider my family situation to be lacking peace. Peace just wasn’t in our vocabulary. So, as an adult, I found peace to be rather elusive. It did not seem to apply to me.

When I met the practice, I had already spent years healing from past wounding, yet peace remained elusive. Thầy’s teachings answered a deep need I didn’t know I had: the longing for home, belonging, safety. I kept my need a well-hidden secret, especially from myself.

... home was not a physical location but home in oneself.

What was peace for me? I was afraid to really arrive home in my heart. I supported others to do so but somehow resisted it for myself. Thầy’s tenderness and his teaching that peace in oneself is essential before you can help another: I knew that in my bones. The teachings on arriving home to oneself, Buddha nature, and transforming difficult feelings taught that peace was deeply connected to a sense of a loving home. And that home was not a physical location but home in oneself. During walking meditation, I often repeated, “I have arrived, I am home” to accompany my steps, but I never felt I had fully arrived.

This tour changed that.

Stop. Breathe. Feel. Allow. That became my practice for the tour as I unwittingly walked (strode, stepped) deeper into peace.

On this tour I was absorbed into the monastic sangha. Little did I know that, in a way, I had worked my whole life to be in this experience/experiment of belonging.

We flowed as a river. Even though I was the only layperson, I was accepted for just who I was. I could be myself. I was full of love, laughter, and delight at the many lovely, quirky things that occurred: two bald monks in brown robes standing in the street near a curb waving off cars to save me a parking place; a brother proudly showing us his extracted tooth; a sister going into the field to feed apples to the horses; warm greetings at every visit, every sangha, every “step.”

What happened to me on this tour? I was embraced by the sangha, and my heart opened and was transformed. I came home, home to myself, able to let go of my habit energy of withholding myself.

I realized this only in retrospect. Even as I enjoyed the flow of the overall experience, I was unaware of its profound growing impact on me.

I felt such love for each person, each so different and yet sharing with me, each other, and all whom we met, their common river of being and commitment to alleviating suffering in the world.

One morning in Vermont (at what used to be Maple Forest Monastery), we arrived at a Japanese tea house, built for Thầy years ago.

It sat angled on a lovely, irregularly shaped pond, silhouetted by sugar maples with green, yellow, and orange leaves dancing in the autumn breeze. I removed my shoes and approached several monastics who were already seated on the dock, sipping tea.

One brother always had his tea with him. He had a very simple, easy way to carry it, with a thermos of hot water and four tea cups, ready to create a mini tea ceremony at any moment. He was also always ready to offer a cup to a new arrival, always room for one more. Generosity was part of his spirit.

On one walk, I thought I wanted to be alone, but discovered this way of being held with and by others felt different, safe and good. Was something shifting in me?

Everything seemed more alive, especially me! I noticed the subtle colors, shapes, and lines of stone walls, the brilliant colors of leaves shimmering in the breeze. I marveled at the beauty of it all, filled with gratitude to be present.

How did I get here? We had an idea and I said yes. I began this project as a service to the sangha but for me, the tour had evolved into a spiritual pilgrimage. Isn’t that often the case? In service, don’t we grow more, transform more than what we offer?

As I became more and more attuned to my openness, I trusted a growing sense of solidity and rootedness, not only in the earth but also in my heart, my being. Concurrently, I experienced a spaciousness that blended into the clouds and the blue sky. I was grounded and happy. I felt confident. I felt loved. I felt peace, real peace.

Peace is, in part, the experience of allowing yourself to risk. Had I not said yes, I would not have had the opportunity to transform these old energies. After years of practice, I am finally appreciating the extraordinary experience of being carried by a sangha, going as a river, allowing myself to relax, to belong, to allow. Wow. To finally, after all this time, allow myself to belong and come truly home.

So what is peace for me? I am still living into that question. I know that it is trusting yourself, trusting sangha, feeling as though you belong. The tour allowed me to finally know it deeply for the first time.

Before, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

It’s been some weeks since the end of the tour and while the “glow” has worn off a bit, I still experience a deepened sense of self (and non-self) and peaceful moments. My practice has deepened. I am breathing more easily, openly, and peacefully; relaxing into myself and life more and enjoying sangha more than ever.

Peace is every step. My ongoing practice is to remember it. And share it.