‘When you embrace your truth, suffering is inevitable’
Marc J. Francis shares how making Walk With Me turned his life on its head, leaving him changed forever.
When I started making Walk With Me, I thought that it would be for about 18 months. It ended up taking about 4 or 5 years. I have a habit of underestimating these things. When I got a call from a very dear close friend of mine in 2011 and he said ’are you interested in helping me make a film about this monastery?’ I had no idea what I could be getting myself into.
Thich Nhat Hanh, one of the World’s most prominent zen monks is credited with bringing mindfulness to the mainstream of Western society. My friend Max Pugh’s brother had, seven years earlier, made a radical life changing decision to give up all his material possessions, and commit to a life of celibacy to become a Zen Buddhist monk in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition.
He had reached out to Max to capture the legacy of Thich Nhat Hanh before he passed as the monastics were becoming increasingly aware that their 84-year-old master was entering his final chapter. Because he had avoided the media spotlight for most of his life, there was hardly any documentary film material in existence.
When I got the call, at that point in my life I was a very successful filmmaker, I felt like I had arrived at where I wanted to go against all odds, but there was something inside me that was unsettling..
I felt unfulfilled and I didn’t know why. That worried me.
I was also soon to become a father for the second time. During the pregnancy these questions kept coming up for me, ‘Do I have the qualifications to be a Dad?’ and, ‘How do I educate my children?’
When I got this opportunity to essentially spend a little time with one of the greatest Zen masters of all time I thought, ‘I could do with a little bit of that’. So, I said yes.
300 steps to truth
I got invited to their monastery in the Chaparral mountains in San Diego, California and I arrived in the middle of a retreat, where people come to the monastery and spend a week or two in meditation. I arrived at midnight, jet-lagged at the top of this mountain and they had no dormitory available. They let me in through the back door and ushered me into the monastic library, handed me some meditation cushions and a sleeping bag and said ‘Sleep here for the night, we’ll see you in the morning’.
I woke up at 10am the next day. I’d missed breakfast and I suddenly remembered that Thich Nhat Hanh’s talk started at 9. I was already an hour late, and I started to panic. Disorientated, I hurried in what I hoped was the right direction. Signs soon confirmed my route down the 300 stone steps on a hillside was correct. I could feel the rocks in the mountains vibrating an energy of solidity and presence. It felt ancient - and it started to ground me, and I then noticed the humidity, and the pungent smell of white sage wafting in the air.
I climbed all the way down to this big meditation hall, carefully opened up the back door of the hall and was confronted by a sea of several hundred people sitting on meditation cushions. I took my shoes off, stepped into the hall and weaved my way through the small gaps between the silent members of the audience, until I reached an empty space on the other side of the hall - near a wall where virtually no one could see me.
And there he was. I watched Thich Nhat Hanh glide effortlessly across the front of the hall. He walks so calmly and softly it almost looks like he’s hovering an inch above the floor. When he reached the other side, he turned around and faced the audience. It appeared like he was looking straight in my direction, and in a softly spoken and slow manner he said:
‘The best education you can give your children is to know yourself.’
It was like a bolt of lightning went through my entire being. Like he was speaking those words only to me. What he was saying had never occurred to me. When I was thinking about educating my children I was always thinking what school they should go to, what kind of curriculum they should have, not what influence my self-awareness might be having on them.
And then he said, “And the best tool you can use to educate yourself is mindfulness.”
“If you ever find you’re with your children but you’re thinking about what’s on your to-do list or distracted by your mobile phone, your body is there but your presence is not there,” he went on. “And when your presence isn’t there, they know it, you’re actually absent. True love is total presence.”
When he said that to me I went ‘Holy shit, I want to get to know this man, I NEED this in my life.’ This is my ticket to finding the fulfilment that I thought I was missing.
I spent two weeks in that monastery, discovering and learning to embody the principles of mindfulness and I spent many more in monasteries throughout the making of Walk With Me.
Unravelling and suffering
When I came back home from that first visit, I had changed. Everything felt very, very different. Something was moving in me, something was shifting. And I unravelled a whole load of questions that I had about myself: Who am I? What kind of life am I living? Is this the life that I want?
It began a journey of me becoming more conscious and aware of my conditioning and what had shaped decisions that I had made and whether or not these new insights that were starting to land in me were really reflective of what I actually want or who I really am. And there began a journey of unravelling and suffering.
There’s a line in the Soundscape that Benedict Cumberbatch reads out which is from his journal called Fragrant Palm Leaves. And the line says:
‘You aspire to see the truth, but once you have seen it, you cannot avoid suffering. Otherwise, you've seen nothing at all.’
For me, the suffering took the form of a massive relationship breakdown, divorce.
I was lucky to have the tools of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings. He talks a lot about relationships, with yourself and with others. So I felt more able to negotiate that trauma in as peaceful and harmonious a way as possible, without slipping into a kind of blame/victim dynamic.
Coming through it I definitely feel like I live a more fulfilled life and I have much greater consciousness about decisions that I want to make. I feel more alive, there’s a vibrancy in my life now because of that.
Life is art and art is life
When we started this project, I didn’t have any idea what I was looking for, I just had an inkling that something wasn’t quite right for me and a curiosity to find out what that could be. But life is art and art is life, so really the movie became a representation of the journey that I was going on and that my creative partner and co-director Max was going on at that time, parallel.
It was essentially us trying to transmit this direct experience to the audience that we were having in real life as we were making the film. We were both having our different journeys, he was dealing with his stuff I was dealing with mine, but we both could clearly resonate and connect with each other about what was happening on a personal level.
It’s the most personal film I’ve made.
Subscribe to discover more about Walk With Me and my other projects, including Walk With Me In Sound, due to release in 2021.