A young girl named, Thanh Thuy, asked the Monk for something to drink. When Thuy first received the cup of apple juice, she refused the Monk’s offer because she did not like the pulp. She later came back, and took the old apple juice and noticed something different about the juice. The Monk explained to the girl, that the juice had settled in the thirty minutes that she had been gone, and it was nice and clear now. Thuy questioned the Monk, “Was it meditating like you, Uncle Monk?”(Hanh, 4). Thich Nhat Hanh, the monk, uses this analogy of the diluted apple juice to say, as he mediates and relaxes, he becomes clear like the juice. Hanh, the author of The Sun My Heart, writes this book as a sequel to his the first in the series, Miracle of Mindfulness.…show more content… New meditators, believe if they try as hard as they can to relax, it will work. They put aside their emotions, and focus on things like inhaling and exhaling, or something as simple as one object. He compares this to sleeping, when a person tries to sleep, the more they try the more restless they become and do everything but sleep. Although he understands why people do such a thing, he argues, “If we try to stop the flow of a river, you will be the resistance of the water… we must not attempt to halt it” (Hahn, 7). Meaning, rather than forcing it or fighting it, let it happen and that is when you can truly meditate. However, he reminds us to not simply push aside our feelings, because that is not what meditation is. It is keeping in mind all feelings, maintaining peace, while also living your everyday life. Maintaining peace is acknowledging one’s feelings, but not letting these emotions take over. Some people can be tangled in their web of emotions, like stress and sadness, but it is not necessarily about these feelings. It is thinking about the present time, what is happening in the moment you are living right now, and appreciating it. As Hanh says, “The past in the present and future, the future in the present and past” (Hahn,
