Teri West shares the interwoven nature of the long journey towards helping to found a practice centre in the UK and her path to becoming a Dharma teacher.
On February 27th, 2025, in a church in Holborn, London, at a UK Sangha get-together, I met Ho-ting Fung and Ka-yee Chan, Ho-ting’s mother. We first met over fifteen years earlier on one of those wonderful all-age/family retreats, often led by monks and nuns,
Already a subscriber? Log in
You have read 5 articles this month.
For only $3 per month or $28 per year, you can read as much as you want!
A digital subscription includes unlimited access to current articles–and some exclusive digital content–released throughout each week, over thirty years of articles in our Dharma archive, as well as PDFs of all back issues.
Teri West shares the interwoven nature of the long journey towards helping to found a practice centre in the UK and her path to becoming a Dharma teacher.
On February 27th, 2025, in a church in Holborn, London, at a UK Sangha get-together, I met Ho-ting Fung and Ka-yee Chan, Ho-ting’s mother. We first met over fifteen years earlier on one of those wonderful all-age/family retreats, often led by monks and nuns, that were an annual UK Sangha event. Ho-ting is a couple of years older than my eldest grandson, who was six at the time.
One of the many great joys for me, having found my spiritual family, is to have had the opportunity to spend time with children of all ages, especially that sometimes unpopular group: teenagers. Ho-ting, who is now working for our project to establish a centre for Thầy’s practice in the UK, still remembers a song from the retreat where we met! Holding annual retreats with a children’s programme encourages lasting relationships, nourishes an appreciation of community, and hopefully fosters in young people an aspiration to continue in the practice.
...perhaps the most important learning that people could take away with them and into their daily lives might be the happiness to be found in living and working together as a community.
A while ago, I was thinking about whether I could find just one element of the human psyche/mindset that could be transformed to make living in a peaceful world more likely. Of course there are many factors to take into account in discovering why we are experiencing such suffering in the world at present, but a basic human need that seems to have been missing perhaps since the industrial revolution and compounded by successive governments who are out of touch with their electorate is the sense that community and cooperation—that of individuals, families, societies, and so on through countries and continents—are ways to happiness and therefore the only way to address our impending extinction as a species. If people are happy, then there is no need to want more, take more, or distrust or fear others who are different in some way.
At the time, I was part of a team putting together publicity materials to promote our practice centre project, and we were mostly focussed on the environmental and spiritual teachings that would be offered there. Yes, environmental awareness and spiritual teachings are very important subjects for retreats and other events at the centre, but it dawned on me that perhaps the most important learning that people could take away with them and into their daily lives might be the happiness to be found in living and working together as a community.
Surely human beings are simply not designed to be ‘self-sufficient’ in spiritual, practical, or economic terms? I lived with a bunch of people in the ’70s in a harsh environment in northern UK for almost a year and was astonished that each household was working themselves to the bone trying to do it all. They each kept goats, bees, and chickens, and worked hard in their individual gardens. There was no sharing of maintenance work or tools. This was long before I found the practice, but common sense told me that if one person cared for the goats, another for the chickens, and another took care of keeping tools in good shape, etc., they would all have more time for enjoying life! John Seymour* had a lot to answer for!
Another treasured gift that I know I receive from practising on this path is the opportunity to become friends with so many loving, humorous, and lighthearted practitioners from so many different walks of life. We are such a diverse community—and mysterious enough that the practice offers a lifetime’s work to understand ourselves and others to enable living peacefully together.
We were over eighty community members in the church in Holborn, to celebrate arriving at a point in our work to establish a practice centre in the UK where it is close to becoming a reality—no longer simply the vision that Thầy first shared with the UK Sangha (small, in those days!) during a retreat at an urban boys’ boarding school in 1997.
As I listened to Thầy speaking about a centre in the UK, something woke very strongly in me. The practice and the UK community were new to me, but I decided that I could bring my small amount of experience in fundraising and the practice together by working in the UK community towards establishing a centre, already named by Thầy as ‘Being Peace.’ I didn’t have the means to visit Plum Village, but here was a way to bring Plum Village closer to home.
That was a rare moment for me: I was able to make a decision based in love and hope. I had lived, on leaving home as a teenager, a long, chaotic, and often difficult life, never able to make proper plans based on sensible thinking, but simply, on looking back, bowling along from one crisis to another.
Feelings of guilt, remorse, and sadness began to plague me when, at the age of forty, my children aged sixteen and eighteen, I tried to make sense of everything that had happened to me, especially about what I felt were bad decisions concerning myself, others, and especially my children. I had been a single parent from the age of twenty-four, having given up trying to live with my husband’s addiction to heroin.
By 1997, I had learned to practise compassion and understanding for myself, aware that choices we make appear to be the right ones at the time, and are often a reaction to our experiences. I was already aware of how cultivating compassion for myself was allowing me to be kinder, warmer, and friendlier to others.
In that somewhat grim school dining room that we were also using as a meditation hall, my heart lifted. Here was a practical way of putting the practice to good use: I made a vow to Thầy in my heart there and then that I would dedicate my time and energy towards helping his vision become a reality, even if it didn’t happen in my lifetime, which at that time looked possible, as our community was still small.
There was also the comforting knowledge that working towards what could become a refuge of peace, healing, and transformation for all who came in the future would go some way towards making amends for any of my past actions that had been damaging for others.
Working for something that might not happen in my lifetime was a great practice in letting go of ideas on where a centre might be, how to raise the necessary funds, or how it would operate. When I shared my disappointment that we had not managed to establish a centre after several years of the project stopping and starting (though always inching forward), I felt only relief when Sister Annabel said, “Well, you know, it might take a hundred years!”
Being part of a team and offering ‘work’ as service to the community are ways in which to truly deepen practice. It’s easy in cosy silence on a cushion in a meditation hall or sangha gathering surrounded by others doing the same. Not so easy while working with others on organising retreats and other activities.
At that retreat long ago, just after Thầy made his request for a UK practice centre, a group of Order of Interbeing members stood up and announced that they would work on its establishment. I asked to join the group. The response was, “You had better join the Order then, so that the community knows that you are committed.” I applied without any forethought or preparation, other than a couple of sentences describing my aspiration in doing so, and received The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings in 2000.
At the time of the gathering at the church in London in 2025, I have at least another year or so before I can become a real Dharma teacher, having received the Lamp Transmission in 2016 (I once heard Thầy say that after receiving the Lamp Transmission it then takes at least ten years to become a real Dharma teacher). I often marvel at how a simple twist of fate (an invitation from a friend with whom I was camping in France in the summer of 1988) led to our visiting Plum Village, and my becoming caught by Thầy’s teaching and the book Breathe, You are Alive! and an ongoing thirty-five-year journey of self-discovery, with the Being Peace Practice Centre almost a reality, and what that might mean for my role as a Dharma teacher.
We hope to open the Being Peace Practice Centre, the first national centre for Thầy’s teachings and Plum Village practice in the UK, with the support and blessing of the Plum Village monastic sangha, in September 2025. My hope is that family retreats are an integral part of the annual programme. Children are our future. Retreats at our centre can show them the joy of living and working alongside others in peace and harmony.
How wonderful that Ho-ting is now working for the Being Peace Practice Centre! One of Ho-ting’s roles is supporting the fundraising campaign, which is at a pivotal moment. We are closer than ever to acquiring a wonderful property—the Abenhall Estate—set in a peaceful valley in southwestern England that has been a sacred site for millennia. Abenhall will begin as a retreat and practice centre and may someday become part of the international family of Plum Village monasteries.
The owners of Abenhall have a deep aspiration for us to be the next owners, and have dramatically reduced the asking price and taken it off the market to allow us a little more time to raise another £1 million. (If interested, you can view a video of the property on our website.)
We would be deeply grateful if you would consider making a donation, offering a friendly loan, or leaving us a legacy, to help us realise Thầy’s vision. Now is a wonderful time to donate, as a long-standing member of the UK Sangha is currently offering to match every donation made towards our £1 million target.
You might also like to join our Being Peace Practice Centre Sangha; we meet on a monthly basis for practice and discussion.
I am looking forward to our reconnecting. If you would like to stay updated, please visit the website: beingpeace.uk.
*Author’s Note: John Seymour wrote a book about self-sufficiency published in the ’70s.
Photos by Wayne Price, wpricephotography.co.uk
